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Alexander Anichkin, who comments here as Sashura, is my go-to guy for the realia of Soviet life, and I wrote him as follows (I’ve excised most of the Russian quote):

I’m reading Nikolai Klimontovich’s Дорога в Рим [The Road to Rome, published in 1994] and I’ve gotten to a part where he’s reminiscing about the early ’60s (he was my age, born in 1951):

Бог мой, как много было хорошего: а напиток «Чудесница», а летка-енка, […] и отцовские норвежки, и дача на Сходне […]…

[My God, how many good things there were: the beverage “Chudesnitsa,” the letka-jenkka [a Finnish dance: see this LH comment from nine years ago], […] and my father’s norvezhki, and the dacha at Skhodnya […]…

I know or can google most of this, but I can’t find anything for норвежки but ‘Norwegian women.’ Do you know what he’s talking about? (Skis?)

His response was so enlightening I couldn’t resist sharing it here:

oh, this brings back so many memories!
Norvezhki were a type of skates. The point here is that they were more expensive and rare, only for grown-ups. Children hardly ever got a chance to have them or even to try skating on them.
In my memory, they are the ones with long straight thinnish blades, designed for speed skating on good clear ice. As opposed to ‘kanadki’ (Canadian skates) with shorter wider blades curved and angled at tips, designed for quick turning and dribbling when playing hockey. There were also ‘figurki’ for figure skating with serrated tips and, for smaller children, ‘snegurki’ (Snowmaidens) with still wider blades and straps to attach to valenki. I had a pair of skates that I sometimes used to go to school. There was one road to cross on tiptoes, and the rest of the way were alleys with packed snow and ice. […] And, for Languagehat purposes, also note the etymology of the word коньки [‘skates’] – little horses! (cf. sea horse – морской конёк) […] And here’s an image for you. Look at this painting from 1952: the skates in the boy’s school bag are probably those very norvezhki –

PS. Skis are near enough. We had Soviet-made long narrow skis made in Estonia. They were called estonki [‘female Estonians’].

It’s really hard to find that kind of information without the help of knowledgeable people, and I’m grateful for them.

Éanna Ó Caollaí reports for the Irish Times:

In what is believed to be a first in modern British political discourse, a Welsh member of parliament addressed the House of Commons in Irish on Wednesday. During a debate on decision-making powers of civil-servants at Stormont, Plaid Cymru MP Liz Saville-Roberts called on the British government to introduce legislation protecting the rights of Irish speakers.

Parliamentarians heard the Member of Parliament for Dwyfor Meirionnydd say in Irish that language rights are human rights and that the Irish-speaking community is entitled to equality of treatment: “Is cearta daonna iad cearta teanga agus tá cothrom na féinne tuilte ag lucht labhartha na Gaeilge,” she said.

Continuing in English, she pressed Northern Ireland secretary Karen Bradley to uphold the British government’s commitment to introduce language legislation as outlined under the St Andrew’s Agreement struck between the Irish and British governments and Northern Ireland’s political parties in 2006.

You can see a video of her speech at the link; a tweet from the Department of Welsh & Celtic Studies at Aberystwyth University (@CelticAber) says:

You can do anything with a degree in #CelticStudies! @LSRPlaid is a graduate of @CelticAber, and we are very proud to see her use Irish in @HouseofCommons

I know too little about the legislation to have an opinion on it, but I’m all for speaking Irish whenever possible. A note to the story says:

A headline on an earlier version of this story stated that Wednesday was the first time Irish was spoken during a debate in the House of Commons in 100 years. The SDLP press office has informed The Irish Times that Mr Mark Durkan, then MP for Foyle, spoke in Irish during a 2015 debate.

And if you’re wondering about the name Éanna, it’s said to be from the Middle Irish Éan dála, meaning ‘similar to a bird, resembling a bird.’ (Thanks, JC!)

I just learned (or relearned — I had probably run across it before) that the Russian word for ‘fluorine’ is фтор [ftor]; as Russian Wikipedia explains:

The name phthore (from Greek φθόριος ‘destructive’), proposed by André Ampère in 1816, is used in Russian, Greek, and some other languages. Many other countries, on the other hand, use a name derived from the ancient names of the mineral fluorite CaF2, which in their turn originated from its ability to decrease the melting point of the metallurgical slag formed during the reduction of metals from ores and to increase its fluidity (Lat. fluere ‘flow’). Ampère, in his letter to Davy of August 26, 1812, proposed the word fluorine, which thanks to the addressee of the letter got a fixed place in the English language.

I was pleased to find in the OED the entry phthore, n.:

Forms: 1800s phthor, 1800s phthore, 1800s phtor.

Etymology: < French phthore (1819 or earlier as phtore) < ancient Greek ϕθορά destruction < an ablaut variant of the base of ϕθείρειν to destroy, to corrupt: see phthartic adj.), so called on account of the corrosive action of hydrofluoric acid.
French phthore is attributed to A. M. Ampère (1775–1836).

Chemistry. Obsolete. rare.

Fluorine. Cf. phthorine n.
1858 R. G. Mayne Expos. Lexicon Med. Sci. (1860) 951/2 Phthore.
1890 Webster’s Internat. Dict. Eng. Lang.   Phtor,..fluorine. (Written also phthor.) [Also in later dictionaries.]

Phthor would make a good name for a superhero.

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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