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Cyril Connolly talking about his “ideas of mortality, futility, and death” (via Laudator Temporis Acti):

Even when we say “I am happy” we mean “I was” for the moment is past, besides, when we are enjoying ourselves most, when we feel secure of our strength and beloved by our friends, we are intolerable and our punishment—a beating for generality, a yellow ticket, a blackball, or a summons from the Headmaster, is in preparation. All we can do is to walk delicately, to live modestly and obscurely like the Greek chorus and to pay a careful attention to omens—counting our paces, observing all conventions, taking quotations at random from Homer or the Bible, and acting on them while doing our best to “keep in favour”—for misfortunes never come alone.

Does anybody have any idea what is meant here by “generality”? I can find no relevant sense in the OED. And for that matter, what’s a yellow ticket? In Russia it meant you were a prostitute, but that’s hardly likely here.

I’m reading the Strugatskys’ Хромая судьба (recently translated by Maya Vinokour as Lame Fate), which involves rereading their earlier novel Гадкие лебеди (The Ugly Swans; see this 2012 post) and enjoying it all over again — it forms alternating chapters, now repurposed as the hidden writings of the protagonist of the outer story, Feliks Sorokin. It takes place in a city wilting under unending rain and suspicious of a group of strange creatures who need to stay wet to survive; they are called in Russian мокрецы [mokretsy], a straightforward derivative of мокрый [mokry] ‘wet’ (related to Old Irish móin ‘bog, peat-moss’) — they’re called “clammies” in the Vinokour translation. Even though this was clearly a specialized usage, I looked up мокрец and discovered it had three existing meanings, given in my three-volume New Great Russian-English Dictionary as “1 veter malanders; 2 pl zool biting midges (Ceratopogonidae); 3 bot = мокрица [‘common chickweed’].” The last two seemed simple enough, but what was “malanders”? Turns out it’s an unusual spelling of what the OED (entry updated June 2000) has s.v. mallender, defining it as “Veterinary Medicine. Now rare. Originally: †a sore located behind a horse’s knee (obsolete). Later (in plural and †singular): a kind of chronic dermatitis of horses, characterized by the presence of such sores.” The etymology is a bog:

< Middle French malandre a sore behind a horse’s knee (c1393: compare the cognate Anglo-Norman and Old French malan, malant septic wound, ulcer, sore, especially on a horse’s neck), ultimately < classical Latin malandria a kind of pustule or rash (used in post-classical Latin of eruptive skin diseases of both horses and humans; sometimes used as neuter plural rather than as feminine singular), perhaps a popular borrowing of Hellenistic Greek μελάνδρυον heart of the oak, use as noun of neuter of ancient Greek μελάνδρυος, adjective < μελαν-, μέλας dark (see melano- comb. form) + δρυός, genitive of δρῦς oak, tree (see dryad n.). Compare sallender n., malandryn n.
N.E.D. (1904) labels this word ‘Now only pl.’ Cognates vary between plural (e.g. Italian malandre, Portuguese malandres) and singular (e.g. Sardinian malandra, Italian regional (Vicenza) malandro, Italian regional (Piedmont) malandra).

I have several questions. Why would the New Great Russian-English Dictionary (and wherever they got the definition from) render the Russian word with an obsolete English word, and why in that spelling? If the word is obsolete, what do vets call the condition now? Surely not “a kind of chronic dermatitis of horses” — but if there’s a modern term, why wouldn’t the OED use it? And perhaps most annoyingly, how do you get a name for eruptive skin diseases from a word meaning ‘heart of the oak’? How I suffer!

Another interesting etymology I learned as a result of reading the Strugatsky book: the interjection амба [amba], defined in my Oxford Russian-English Dictionary as “kaput!, it’s all up!,” is apparently from Italian ambo ‘both’ (itself straight from Latin), the context being late-18th-century underground gambling houses, where, as a designation of a simultaneous bet on two numbers of a numerical lottery (with a very low probability of winning), it became synonymous with loss, failure, and sometimes death; by the 1870s it appeared in thieves’ jargon, and from there became part of Russian slang.

So says the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in its ruling in No. 19-1408, On Petition for Review of a Final Order of the Board of Immigration Appeals:

The stakes in removal proceedings—whether a noncitizen will be deported—could hardly be higher. But despite the high stakes, the outcomes of these proceedings sometimes turn on minutiae. Small inconsistencies in a noncitizen’s testimony can doom even those cases that might otherwise warrant relief. To ensure testimony is not unfairly characterized as inconsistent, a noncitizen must be able to communicate effectively with the officials deciding his case. Because language barriers can make effective communication impossible, our Court has long recognized the importance of a competent interpreter to ensure the fairness of proceedings to individuals who do not speak English. But what happens if an immigration official does not make a meaningful effort to determine whether a noncitizen has limited proficiency in English?

Our case exemplifies this problem. Petitioner B.C., a native of Cameroon, primarily speaks “Pidgin” English, and reports that he has only limited abilities in the “Standard” English in which we write this opinion. He fled from Cameroon to the United States after allegedly facing persecution at the hands of his government. Soon after his arrival, the United States Department of Homeland Security began removal proceedings against B.C., and he applied for asylum, withholding of removal, and relief under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”). In a series of interviews and hearings, immigration officials either presumed he spoke “Standard” English or gave him an unhelpful, binary choice between “English or Spanish” or “English or French.” And despite persistent clues that he was less than fluent in “Standard” English, he was left to fend for himself in that language without an interpreter. The record shows this resulted in confusion and misunderstanding. Relying on purported “inconsistencies” in the statements B.C. made without the help of an interpreter, the Immigration Judge (“IJ”) denied his applications on the ground that he was not credible, and the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) affirmed. When presented with additional country conditions evidence, expert reports on the linguistic differences between “Standard” and “Pidgin” English, and B.C.’s card showing membership in an allegedly persecuted group, the BIA denied his motion to reopen.

We hold that B.C. was denied due process because the IJ did not conduct an adequate initial evaluation of whether an interpreter was needed and took no action even after the language barrier became apparent. Those failures resulted in a muddled record and appear to have impermissibly colored the agency’s adverse credibility determination. We therefore vacate the BIA’s decisions and remand for a new hearing on the merits of B.C.’s claims. On remand, the agency must also remedy other errors B.C. has identified, which include dealing with the corroborative evidence he submitted.

That introduction is followed by a section “Standard” English vs. “Pidgin” English, which includes this telling passage:

Take, for example, the following sentence in “Standard” English: “[I]f it were me,” “I would not let him come and visit the children.” […] Translated into “Pidgin” English, this sentence would read, “If na mi, a no go gri meik I kam visit dat pikin dem.” […] Setting aside the various ways in which the “Pidgin” English sentence might be unintelligible to the “Standard” English speaker (and vice versa), a listener is likely to misunderstand key phrases without proper translation. Translated into “Pidgin” English, “if it were me” becomes “if na mi,” which a “Standard” English speaker could take to mean “if not me.” […] (emphasis added).

(For those with access, there’s a Law360 report on the case.) I am not a lawyer, but I feel safe in saying this is a correct application of linguistic principles as well as a triumph for justice. Thanks, Arthur!

Another post from the British Library’s Asian and African studies blog (see this LH post from 2019), The Term ‘Shater’ and its Use in the India Office Records:

As part of cataloguing the India Office Records (IOR), we occasionally come across unfamiliar terms that make us question their origin and how they relate to the way they are used in the records. The case under consideration here is the term shater (pl. shaters), used in the IOR to refer to foot messengers. Shaters were employed to travel long distances, usually within Persia [Iran], in short periods of time to deliver letters to and from local governors, merchants, or the East India Company’s representatives. This post traces the possible roots of the term shater, and its development throughout history to bear the meaning of a foot messenger.

Arabic language dictionaries indicate that the term shater (Ar. shāṭir pl. shuṭṭar [sic: should be shuṭṭār — LH] has its origins in the root sh-ta [sic: should be ṭa — LH]-ra, which primarily means to distance oneself from family or tribe; someone who is shrewd at finding ways to do things, or overcoming obstacles. These meanings relate directly to a group known in Pre-Islamic Arabic literature as al-Sa‘alik [sic: should be ṣa‘ālīk — LH] [Brigands]. Members of this group were exiled by their tribes, and sometimes they chose to distance themselves. As they grew up alone, they developed their own life-style, and adopted certain characteristics that distinguished them from others. They were said to be ‘sharp, brave and as agile as horses’ (Dayf, Tarikh al-Adab al-‘Arabi, pp. 375-378). […]

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Benjamin Ivry has a fascinating Forward interview with Hillel Halkin that includes the following tidbits of LH interest:

In a 2011 interview, you said that as a young reader, you strongly identified with the character of Stephen Dedalus the conflicted Catholic protagonist of James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and “Ulysses.” Where are the affinities?

I still have that identification with Stephen, including the Stephen in “Ulysses.” I think “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is perhaps the most beautiful English novel. I’ve read it and read it many times. My own experience of Judaism was very similar to Stephen’s growing up and rebelling against Catholicism. Stephen never gives up on being a Catholic, but in being a believing Catholic. He still thinks like a Catholic and I think that’s true of me too [for Judaism]. […]

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This is one of those posts that will hardly be of interest to anyone but myself, but I’ve spent all morning untangling this knot of names, and by gad I’m going to set it down for posterity (meaning primarily me in the future, when I will have forgotten it all). Those not interested in obscure dialect forms of bygone village harvest festivals with Orthodox religious overtones can skip it with no FOMO.

When I first learned of the existence of Vasily Ivanovich Aksyonov, I was intensely irritated. If he was going to be named Vasily Aksyonov, couldn’t he have gone into some other line of work than writing? And if he insisted on being a writer, couldn’t he have taken a pseudonym, say Vasily Yalansky (since he was born in the Siberian town of Yalan and often writes about it)? As it is, he’s easily confused with the famous Vasily Aksyonov, and I had to go through my Chronology of Russian Prose Literature and change all the Aksyonovs to “V.P. Aksyonov” and add a set of “V.I. Aksyonov” entries. But eventually I got used to it; after all, there’s A.K. Tolstoy and A.N. Tolstoy (not to mention the famous Leo) and A.P. Tsvetkov and A.V. Tsvetkov and all sorts of Ivanovs and Leonovs and Kazakovs and Rybakovs, so why not two Vasily Aksyonovs? And he sounded interesting, not to mention the complete opposite of his famous namesake: Siberian and village-prose and religious and traditional where V.P. was Petersburg and city-prose and irreligious and experimental. So I started looking into him.

And looking at his story Таха (Takha, the name of a Siberian river) I saw it started with the one-line paragraph “Аспожинки,” followed by a Pushkin quote about autumn (“Унылая пора! Очей очарованье!“). Naturally, I wondered about the unknown word aspozhinki: what did it mean, and where was the stress? So I fell down a rabbit hole. I quickly discovered that Aksyonov has also written a book Оспожинки [Ospozhinki], which had to be another spelling of the same word. Google quickly told me it was the name of a harvest festival; the Russian Wikipedia article has an impressive list of names:

Осенние оспожинки, Осенины, Богородицкая, Поднесеньев день, Праздник рожаниц, Спожа, Богáч, Праздник урожая, День благословения хлебов, Матушка-осенина, Огородичен день, Малая Пречистая, «Друга Пречиста» (укр.), «Мати Пречиста» (укр.), «Засідкi» (белорус.), Вторая встреча осени, Луков день (Яросл., Вологод.), Пасиков день (Пенз., Сарат.), Пасеков день, Аспосов день, Спосов день (Рязан.), Рождество Богородицы.

At the end of the article there’s a “See also” section which refers you to Обжинки [Obzhinki], another name for the harvest festival, which has an even longer list of names:
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I had known that Queen Elizabeth I was among the more literate of monarchs, but I hadn’t realized the extent of it; John-Mark Philo writes about it for the TLS:

Among the manuscripts preserved at Lambeth Palace Library is a translation of Tacitus completed in the late sixteenth century (MS 683). It focuses on the first book of the Annales, which sees the death of Augustus and the rise of the emperor Tiberius, tracing the steady centralization of governmental powers in a single individual. The translation has been copied by an amanuensis in an exquisite italic hand, with subsequent corrections made by the author. It is on a very specific kind of paper stock, which gained prominence among the Elizabethan secretariat in the 1590s. There was, however, only one translator at the Tudor court to whom a translation of Tacitus was attributed by a contemporary, and who was using the same paper in her translations and private correspondence: the queen herself. Above all, the corrections made to the Lambeth Tacitus are a compelling match for Elizabeth’s later handwriting, which was, to put it mildly, idiosyncratic.

As well as composing an impressive range of original works in verse and prose, Elizabeth I was an enthusiastic translator. Whether engaging foreign visitors in multilingual conversation or delivering withering ripostes in Latin to impertinent ambassadors, Elizabeth was celebrated for her linguistic abilities even in her own lifetime. Particularly strong in French, Italian, and Latin, she was also proficient in Spanish and Greek, whose alphabet would eventually pepper her everyday handwriting (in later years, she used “φ” for “ph”). She undertook translations of Jean Calvin, Cicero, Plutarch, Seneca, Horace and Boethius, all of which survive today. Elizabeth’s perennial favourite, Henry Savile, produced a translation of Tacitus in 1591, which he dedicated to the queen, drawing particular attention to her “most rare and excellent translations of Histories”. John Clapham, another of Elizabeth’s contemporaries, refers to her translation of “some part of Tacitus’ Annals” in his history of the queen’s reign, which he composed with the help of the courtier Robert Cecil. Clapham mentions Elizabeth’s Tacitus first and foremost among the queen’s translations, which “she herself turned into English for her private exercise”. Though the other translations which Clapham mentions have since been accounted for, the Tacitus translation has thus far remained elusive. […]

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I have been neglecting the headgear-related portion of the remit of Languagehat, so without further ado, I present Richard in a Hat: “I have many hats and regularly post a new picture of me in a different hat, cap or other headgear with a few facts about what I’m wearing.” The most recent post is Börk hat (“Börk is a type of Turkish man’s cap or headdress”). He wears hats well, and I am pleased to note that he sports the same style of facial hair as your humble servant. (Via MeFi, where of course a commenter feels “slightly weird about pictures of this white dude in traditional hats from other cultures.”)

Another passage from Luc Sante’s The Other Paris (see this post):

It was Lutèce, or Lutetia, under the Romans, and became Paris around 300 C.E. François Villon called it Parouart in his fifteenth-century thieves’ cant; Rimbaud called it Parmerde in a letter written in 1872. Sometime in the early nineteenth century, people started referring to it as Pantin — ironically, since Pantin was then a rustic village on the plain northeast of the city (the word also means “puppet,” which may have had something to do with its use) — and then around 1849 the name acquired an argot suffix and became Pantruche; the -truche may have derived from autruche, “ostrich.” The moniker survived well into the twentieth century, although somewhere near that age’s beginning it was overtaken in popular speech by Paname. Was that name inspired by the 1892 government swindle concerning the faltering Panama Canal project, described as the largest corruption scandal of the nineteenth century? That seems a likelier source than the Panama hat, cited by some, the object of a vogue after adorning the heads of workers returned from the isthmus. Paname stuck because it was sort of perfect: raffish, satirical, swaggering, and pointed all at once. Paname, like argot itself, has come to be most enduringly associated with chanson réaliste singers, midcentury crime fiction writers (Albert Simonin, Auguste le Breton, San-Antonio), and movie gangsters from Jean Gabin to Lino Ventura. Today it enjoys another life in hip-hop, employed by rappers as the local equivalent to the Rastafarians’ Babylon: the root of all corruption, racism, and malice.

The inhabitants, for somewhat more than a century, have been Parigots, with another pejorative suffix. (Parisien, meanwhile, was the slang term for an old horse about to be put down; it is also a loaf of bread.) Now and then you still hear the term titi, which comes from a word for street urchin (and ultimately from tirailleur, “sharpshooter”) and denotes a working-class Parisian of old stock, someone whose family had lived in the neighborhood for a century or more. There aren’t many of those left. The titi was a creature of the city when it was composed of so many villages — quartiers with functional autonomy, ad hoc institutions, and unspoken codes; where everyone of a given age had been kids together and knew one another’s virtues and foibles intimately. The quartier was for centuries the basic local entity. When the city was a world, the quartiers were nations, and they correspondingly drew all the fervent loyalty and instinctual identification that cities or countries usually inspire — the larger entities generally went without saying, except maybe in times of war. In 1943, A. J. Liebling encountered a tattooed casualty, with a tricolor wrapped around his waist, in a field hospital on the North African front. “When I asked him where he came from, he didn’t bother saying ‘Paris’ — just ‘Nineteenth Arrondissement.’ […]”

What a wonderful book!

Alexander Jabbari at Newslines writes about Yiddish and Arabic:

Through modern Hebrew, Yiddish words occasionally find their way into Arabic. A notable example in Palestinian Arabic is balagan, meaning “chaos,” borrowed from Hebrew. […] While balagan came to Palestinian Arabic through Hebrew, the source of the Hebrew word was likely Yiddish. The word is ultimately from Persian bālākhāna, meaning “upper room” or “chamber.” It passed from Persian into Tatar or another Turkic language and from there entered Russian as balagan, where it came to refer to a temporary wooden structure for circus performances. Because of the circus context, the Russian word also acquired connotations of buffoonery. When borrowed from Russian and put into Yiddish (and Polish), the chaos of the circus setting gave the word the sense of a mess, bedlam or chaos. It’s hard to say with certainty whether the Hebrew word balagan came from Yiddish, Russian or Polish, as all three are common lexical sources for modern Hebrew. In any case, there have been other, more direct encounters between Yiddish and Arabic.

In Ottoman Palestine, and especially in Jerusalem before 1948, it was common for Yiddish-speaking Jews and Arabs to understand each other’s languages, particularly in neighborhoods where the two communities abutted each other. Among Jews, it was more often women engaged in business or neighborly relations with Arabs who learned Arabic, whereas men were more often secluded in yeshivas, engrossed in the study of Hebrew and Aramaic texts. Arabic was taught alongside German in the “modern” Sephardic schools established after 1850, and while there were attempts to integrate Arabic into the Ashkenazic institutes of learning, in order to provide graduates with practical job skills, these were usually resisted by the religious authorities. Nevertheless, in the 19th century there were groups of Ashkenazic men in Jerusalem who learned Arabic, both spoken and literary. Arabic words became part of the everyday Yiddish spoken in Palestine — even for terms specific to Judaism, like khalake, a boy’s ritual first haircut, from the Arabic for haircut, ḥalāqa. These were documented by Mordecai Kosover in his lengthy dissertation on the Arabic elements of the Yiddish spoken by the Ashkenazic (central and eastern European origin) Jewish community in Palestine.

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