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The tweeter known as Incunabula has an enjoyable thread on the history of books:

Cheese meant female sheep & cows were usually more valuable than male ones which were accordingly slaughtered young as they were not worth feeding through the winter. The skins of these young animals was used to make vellum, giving us the basic material of the European book. Vellum tends to buckle & ripple, it doesn’t lie absolutely flat like paper. So it was bound between heavy wooden boards to keep it flat – this is the origin of the hardback book, a book format – expensive, hard to make, & prone to damage – almost never seen outside Europe. Ultimately, the hardback book exists because of cheese.

Cheese 🧀 is one of the 5 things the Western book as we know it depends on. The other four are snails 🐌, Jesus ✝️, underwear 🩲 and spectacles 👓. If even one of these things was absent, the book you hold in your hand today would look completely different. I’ll explain why.

Don’t expect a scholarly history, but I learned some stuff. I got it via MeFi, where maxwelton said “Yes, interesting, but seems a bit too much a ‘just so’ story”; the poster responded: “Agree – called it ‘fun’ because it’s like one of those Adam Curtis documentaries that completely overstretches to try to piece together a narrative, but is still entertaining to watch.” Quite so.

I was just reading a book by Vladimir Tendryakov when I was taken aback by the word энеолит [eneolit]. My first thought was that it might be a typo for неолит ‘Neolithic,’ but the book is well copyedited and proofread (the Soviets knew how to do these things, comrade), so that seemed unlikely. I looked it up and discovered in English it’s Eneolithic or Aeneolithic (from Latin aeneus ‘of copper’), and it’s a synonym of Chalcolithic. Is anyone familiar with this term? Who uses it?

This website has a cute concept; the About text says:

A visualization of placename patterns, using data pulled from OpenStreetMap (places), Natural Earth (borders, rivers) and SRTM (elevation).

Originally created to visualize the distribution of places in France ending in -ac, and then the link between German placenames and altitude.

Built at first using SVG, but since this proved too much for Firefox, the visualization now uses canvas (at the expense of nice animations).

Patterns are Javascript-flavour regular expressions, most importantly ‘^’ and ‘$’ represent name beginning and end, respectively, so ‘^ll’ matches all placenames which begin with two L’s (many towns in Wales) and ‘a$’ all placenames which end in A.

Via MetaFilter, where there are further examples (e.g. Poland and Silesia). Enjoy!

John Herrman has a NY Times piece [archived] on a couple of linguistic tics that have spread in recent years; there’s padding about Mark Zuckerberg and the like, but what struck me is that he consulted with actual linguists on the history of the usages:

Linguistic observers have noted for years the apparent rise of “so” in connection with the popularization of certain subjects and modes of speech. In 2010, in The New York Times, Anand Giridharadas announced the arrival of a new species of the unassuming word.

“‘So’ may be the new ‘well,’ ‘um,’ ‘oh’ and ‘like.’ No longer content to lurk in the middle of sentences, it has jumped to the beginning,” he wrote, crediting the journalist Michael Lewis with documenting its use among programmers at Microsoft more than a decade earlier.

In 2015, in a story for “Fresh Air” on NPR, Geoff Nunberg, the program’s longtime linguist, explained this use of “so” as a cue used by “people who can’t answer a question without first bringing you up to speed on the back story,” he said. Hence his name for it: back story “so.”

Syelle Graves, a linguist and the assistant director of the Institute for Language Education in Transcultural Context at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, wrote her dissertation on the rise and uses of this particular “so.” Analyzing a sampling of spontaneous, unwritten American speech from 1990 to 2011, she concluded that this usage of “so” had indeed increased significantly, often as a stand-in for “well.”

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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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