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Hilary Sargent wrote for the Boston Globe back in 2015:

If you were asked who cleans Boston streets, chances are you’d say a street sweeper. You would only be partly right. Cleaning up the mess left behind by sanitation trucks and street sweepers is the job of ‘hokeys,’ employed by Boston’s Department of Public Works.

“A hokey is someone that takes a dustpan and broom and sweeps the street,’’ says Joanne Sullivan. Sullivan was featured in a video by the city to highlight the relatively unknown role.

The video is only three minutes long and immensely charming (I love her accent), but of course what drew my attention is the word. It’s not in the OED or any of my other dictionaries, even Webster’s Third; it’s not in HDAS; Green’s has hokey n.² “a hobo, a tramp; a fool; nonsense,” but if that’s the source one would want to see documentation of the change in meaning. It’s not limited to Boston; see Kalani Gordon’s “From White Wings to hokey men: City street sweeping through the years” for the Baltimore Sun‘s The Darkroom:

At the turn of the century, Baltimore’s street sweepers were called White Wings because of the fancy white uniforms they wore, complete with coats and ties and matching pith helmets. In 1985, they were called hokey men — don’t ask why; no one seems to remember how or when they got the name — and they wore whatever they wanted, usually under a bright yellow sweatshirt emblazoned with the logo of the city Bureau of Solid Waste.

These municipal employees are the folks who keep the city streets and alleys clean the hard way: gathering up the trash, bit by bit, a piece at a time.

So, anybody know anything about this mysterious term?

Alice Gregory’s “How Did a Self-Taught Linguist Come to Own an Indigenous Language?” (cached) is a classic New Yorker article — well written, thoroughly researched, alternating an account of facts and events with the stories of the people involved. And yet it annoyed me and made me feel (once again) painfully out of step with the times I find myself living in. I’ll summarize it for you.

Carol Dana is trying to revive the Penobscot language; she “learned most of what she knows of Penobscot not from her tribal elders but from Frank Siebert, a self-taught linguist who hired her, in 1982, as a research assistant.” Siebert started studying the language as a twenty-year-old college student in 1932; he was obsessed with Native Americans and (even while training as a doctor) studied with Boas and Sapir. He was also pretty nuts: “In Vermont, Siebert became neurotically frugal, eating food out of the trash and not allowing Marion to buy formula for the babies. As Marion nursed and cooked and cleaned, Siebert thought aloud, in a booming voice, about Custer’s Last Stand. […] He wandered around in stained shirts and suits shiny with wear. He monitored his bank account obsessively and subsisted on canned tuna and beans.” After his divorce, he moved to Maine and started working with the few remaining Penobscot speakers, eventually getting a grant to produce a dictionary. Unfortunately, he was a prescriptivist in a language that wasn’t even his own:

“Frank was so interested in Penobscot, but he also had a certain view of it,” she said. “He couldn’t stand that certain people spoke the language differently.” Once, Dana recalled, Siebert corrected the pronunciation of an elder speaker in front of a large group.

Finally, he completed his dictionary:
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My wife pointed me toward this PhysOrg report on a study by Dr. Dhriti Sengupta and Dr. Ananyo Choudhury in the Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience (SBIMB) at Wits University:

A new study challenges the presumption that all South-Eastern-Bantu speaking groups are a single genetic entity. The South-Eastern-Bantu (SEB) language family includes isiZulu, isiXhosa, siSwati, Xitsonga, Tshivenda, Sepedi, Sesotho and Setswana. Almost 80% of South Africans speak one of the SEB family languages as their first language. Their origins can be traced to farmers of West-Central Africa whose descendants over the past two millennia spread south of the equator and finally into Southern Africa.

Since then, varying degrees of sedentism [the practice of living in one place for a long time], population movements and interaction with Khoe and San communities, as well as people speaking other SEB languages, ultimately generated what are today distinct Southern African languages such as isiZulu, isiXhosa and Sesotho. Despite these linguistic differences, these groups are treated mostly as a single group in genetic studies. […]

“South Eastern Bantu-speakers have a clear linguistic division—they speak more than nine distinct languages—and their geography is clear: some of the groups are found more frequently in the north, some in central, and some in southern Africa. Yet despite these characteristics, the SEB groups have so far been treated as a single genetic entity,” says Choudhury. The study found that SEB speaking groups are too different to be treated as a single genetic unit. “So if you are treating say, Tsonga and Xhosa, as the same population—as was often done until now—you might get a completely wrong gene implicated for a disease,” says Sengupta.

More at the link, of course; I’m curious what the Hattic genetics experts make of this.

Back in 2008 I wrote about how Fyodor Teternikov changed his name to the aristocratic Sollogub when he became a writer, “but one of the ls was removed in an attempt (unavailing, as it turned out) to avoid confusion with Count Vladimir Sollogub.” Now that I’m reading Curzio Malaparte’s The Kremlin Ball, translated for NYR Books by Jenny McPhee, I’ve run across a glaring example of such confusion. On p. 28 we find:

“He is the devil,” said Madame Budyonny, wife of Marshal Budyonny, but her meaning of the word devil was not the same as Sollogub’s, the author of Wayward Devil, nor was it that of Ilyusha in The Brothers Karamozov.

Not to cavil, but there are four errors in this single sentence. Karamozov for Karamazov is presumably a typo, but whether it went wrong in the English version or already in the Italian is anybody’s guess (though of course a copyeditor should have caught it in either case). Ilyusha for Ivan Alyosha is probably Malaparte’s mental slip (he never finished the book, and some characters occur with more than one name) a foolish error in the translation [see Biscia’s comment quoting the Italian original] — the only Ilyusha in Karamazov is the little boy who bit Alyosha’s finger and whose funeral ends the book. Wayward Devil for The Petty Demon (the standard English rendering of «Мелкий бес») is bizarre, and I can only guess it’s an artifact of translation from Italian, where the title is Il demone meschino. (Incidentally, the Italian Wikipedia article on Sologub is an absurdly brief stub.) Finally, of course, the author’s name is spelled Sollogub rather than Sologub; to add insult to injury, the footnote reads:

Sollogub’s: Count Vladimir Alexandrovich Sollogub (1813–1882) was a minor Russian writer of novellas and plays who hosted a well-known literary and musical salon in St. Petersburg.

This is on a par with the errors in annotation I complained about here (Karakhan confused with Kamenev, Rostov the Great with Rostov-na-Donu), and I’d dearly love to know who to blame for it. (I’m ignoring the pointless “minor” slur.) Does anyone have access to Ballo al Kremlino? Apart from that, however, I’m greatly enjoying the book — Malaparte is a close observer and a pleasingly cynical writer.

Unrelated, but this Laudator Temporis Acti post has a joke by Aristophanes that would have been hilarious to his original audience, and links to a typically energetic and offensive Fugs song. Also, I’ll be getting my second vaccination (Moderna, if you’re curious) in a couple of hours; I’m hoping I won’t be as knocked out as some people are (*knock wood*), but if I am, there might not be a post tomorrow. You will, I am sure, consider that an acceptable tradeoff for my not getting Covid.

Mridula Nath Chakraborty of Monash University writes for The Conversation about the lately vexed issue of translation, taking off from the unfortunate situation of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld feeling obliged to withdraw as translator of Amanda Gorman’s forthcoming collection because of controversies around cultural appropriation:

Usually invisible and taken-for-granted, acts of translation take place around us all the time. But in the field of literary translation, questions of authorial voice and speaking position matter. […]

The task of literary translation entails grappling with profound difference, in terms of language, imagination, context, traditions, worldviews.

None of this would enter our quotidian consciousness but for the translators who step into uncharted waters because they have fallen in love with another tongue, another world.

Her essay will be annoying to people who do not thrill to terms like “resistance,” “domination,” and “post-colonial sensitivity,” but, as Bathrobe (who sent me the link) says, some of the links are interesting: “Familiar topics like the Graeco-Arabic translation movement, the Indo-Persian translation movement, the deliberate mistranslation of the Treaty of Waitangi, to name just a couple.” And I like the conclusion:

The act and the art of translation requires the permission to transcend borders, the permission to make mistakes, and the permission to be repeated, by anyone who feels the tempestuous tug, and the clarion call, of the unfamiliar.

To rein in such liberty through categories and compartments that imprison our creativity is a disservice to the human imagination.

So let a thousand translations bloom: that would be a start and not an end to translation as we know it now.

Kevin Riordan posts at M/m about the history of that signal of modernity, the Kodak camera, with many glorious illustrations, mostly ads. The post begins:

In 1888, the George Eastman Company put the first film-roll camera on the market. The new “Kodak” put photographic practice into the hands of many amateurs and hobbyists for the first time. This camera had immediate cultural effect, shaping how people saw and recorded things—even when they didn’t have a Kodak with them. In 1890, for example, the American journalist Nellie Bly had few regrets about her record-breaking trip around the world, except that in her “hasty departure [she] forgot to take a Kodak.” Five years later, when H. G. Wells’s Time Traveller reached an astonishing future, he echoed the sentiment: “If only I had thought of a Kodak!” Despite advertising campaigns urging travelers to not forget their cameras, many didn’t learn the lesson. In Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915), St. John Hirst reproaches himself in South America: “What an ass I was not to bring my Kodak!” Portable cameras and personal photography became ubiquitous, but everyone kept forgetting their Kodaks (figs. 1–2).

Fig. 2, a 1923 Parisian example, has N’oubliez pas votre “Kodak.” The whole story is worth reading, and of course don’t miss the ads, but I’m posting it mainly for the linguistic bits:

Eastman squabbled with other pioneers over terminology. When a competitor sought to patent the “combination” camera, Eastman protested that, if one could trademark “combination,” one may as well “prevent your fellow citizens from using the English language.” He realized that words, like cameras, do things, and a new photographic world required a new vocabulary. So in the 1888 patent Eastman coined “Kodak,” a peculiar word, the ks affording near-palindromic symmetry (fig. 6). Eastman believed Kodak could be easily pronounced across languages, and he particularly liked its consonants, which he called “strong and incisive . . . firm and unyielding” (cited in Brayer, George Eastman, 63). Kodak soon became not just a product name but a portable idea, an imagined accessory, and a perceptual prosthesis. In the marketing and in colloquial parlance, the name became an adjective (the “Kodak girl”), a verb (“Let the children Kodak”), and a component for other nouns (“Kodakery”) (figs. 7–8).

I just recently read the Russian equivalent in Dombrovsky’s Факультет ненужных вещей (post): “А скоро у него появился ещё фотоаппарат «кодак» и пистолет «монтекристо»” [Soon he also displayed his Kodak camera and Montecristo pistol]; the first example in the corpus is from 1901 (earlier hits are for Kodak Fortress): “В магазине фотографических принадлежностей фирмы Кодак некий Девисон похитил несколько тысяч фотографических карточек и скрылся” [A certain Davison stole several thousand photographic cards from the Kodak camera store and disappeared]. (Hat tip to Jonathan Morse for the link.)

Back in 2011 I posted about “an enjoyable and useful vocabulary test that gives you a bunch of words, asks you to check whether you know them, and extrapolates your total vocabulary size” that attracted quite a bit of interest (results here); now Ghent University has put online a similar test, introducing it thus:

In this test you get 100 letter sequences, some of which are existing English words (American spelling) and some of which are made-up nonwords. Indicate for each letter sequence whether it is a word you know or not by pressing the F or J key. […] The test takes about 4 minutes and you can repeat the test as often as you want (you will get new letter sequences each time).

If you take part, you consent to your data being used for scientific analysis of word knowledge.

Advice! Do not say yes to words you do not know, because yes-responses to nonwords are penalized heavily!

Advice! The test works best in Firefox, Chrome or Safari.

My results:

You said yes to 83% of the existing words.

You said yes to 0% of the nonwords.

This gives you a corrected score of 83% – 0% = 83%.

You are at the top level!

Theoretically, I could have done better, since I said “no” to a number of items that I thought could very well be words and turned out to be, but I didn’t want to risk yes-responses to nonwords (“penalized heavily!”), and the words were so obscure (“a rare name for the hyrax”) that I don’t feel bad about not knowing them. Enjoy! (A tip of the Languagehat hat to Trevor Joyce, who sent me the link — and who got 96% with no false positives, the bum.)

Update (Sept. 2024). The original test has vanished from the online world, but this AskMeFi question (“What happened to the U Ghent’s online vocabulary test?”) led me to the Randomized Checklist Vocabulary Size Test and Test Your Vocab. The latter wants you to know definitions and doesn’t have fake words; you stop whenever you get bored, and when I got “Right now we think you know about 210,000 words (between 84,000 and 200,000)” I figured I’d quit while I was ahead.

In the Facebook Historical Linguistics & Etymology group, Gary Rawding asks:·

Kulthum… as in Um Kulthum (ام كلثوم) ??
Wikipedia gives ‘from elephant’ but no source.
I don’t find kulthum in Lane or Wehr. Maybe it is Persian or Turkish ? Can somebody help me ?

I’ve long been familiar with Umm Kulthum and had wondered about her name, so I read the thread eagerly. After some unsourced speculation (“Kulthum means cheek in Arabic. So a woman who is an ‘um Kulthum’ is a woman with a face that has a big fleshy cheek”), Nane Limon Dada wrote:

It is unlikely that the name Kulthum would be Arabic in origin because of its rare morphological stem and because it is untraceable to any Proto-Semitic root. Another meaning to add what the respondents suggested above is “elephant”. This is suggestive to a Indo-Iranian root as the animal fauna indicates a potential geographical candidate. However, I couldn’t locate any cognate in the comprehensive dictionary of Indo-Iranian languages on University of Chicago’s webpage. We find in a work, a modern onomistics miscellany some interesting suggestions, Sijill Asma al-Arab, v.4., p. 2245. The cognate is proposed as كلتوم “kultuum” too hence invoking an idea for a historical defricitization in pre-classical-Arabic as the name goes back to one of the poets of the Pre-Islamic poetry that was listed in the Seven Hanged Poems, Amr Ibn Kulthum. If so, the transition must have been realized earlier. In the Sijill, كلتوم گلبهار (kultum gholbahar) is proposed as an attestation of its example. However the كلتوم is not analyzed, at all. This may inspire for another consideration for a compound phrase and a lexical search within the Indo-Iranian background, though. Also, it is proposed in line with zoological “elephant” association that the meaning can be cognate with a Latin root كلريوس (Cellarius?) well-known an “lizard”. [Google Books link] The feminine beauty in the Classical Arabic was represented through the natural fauna as well as flora like the premature born (lamb) Khadija etc. The selectivity of the motifs could be explained in their perception of the world consistently and in an ideal beauty given the semiotics of the meaning, that of course presupposes an intertextual reading effort. Therefore, the modern audience should avoid the modern metaphorical esthetization of femininity for its interpretation not to be misled.

I don’t have enough background to know how much sense any of that makes, and I welcome the thoughts of the assembled Hatters.

Unrelated except that it involves Egypt, Slavo/bulbul has alerted me to “Early alphabetic writing in the ancient Near East: the ‘missing link’ from Tel Lachish,” by Felix Höflmayer, Haggai Misgav, Lyndelle Webster, and Katharina Streit. Looks intriguing.

My wife was checking to see if we had a good supply of garbanzo beans when she asked me where the word was from (she knows how to keep me occupied). I thought the answer would be simple, but once you go beyond Spanish it’s a morass. Wiktionary:

From Spanish garbanzo, initially borrowed as garvance in the 17th c. and anglicized as calavance (“chickpea; any kind of bean or pulse”). The original garbanzo was re-established in the 19th c., primarily via American Spanish. The Spanish garbanzo is from Early Modern Spanish garbanços, from Old Spanish arvanço, which is of uncertain origin, presumably influenced by garroba (“carob fruit”) and galbana (“small pea; a variety of pea”), which is borrowed from Arabic جلبان‎ (“peas”). Other theories for the origin of garbanzo include the Basque compound garau (“seed”) +‎ antzu (“dry”) and the Ancient Greek ἐρέβινθος (erébinthos).

I got excited when I went to the OED and discovered that their entry was updated in June 2020, but alas, for the etymology they say “< Spanish garbanzo chickpea (see calavance n.),” and the calavance entry (with its label “Perhaps Obsolete”!) is from 1888. For what it’s worth, here’s that antique version:

Etymology: Originally garvance, caravance, < Spanish garbanzo chick-pea, according to Larramendi < Basque garbantzu, < garau seed, corn + antzu dry. (Diez says the question of derivation < Greek ἐρέβινθος chick-pea is not worth consideration; though the Portuguese form ervanço suggests connection with the Greek) Calavance appears to have come into English through some foreign language which changed r into l.

The AHD has a fresh take, bringing in the Goths:

Spanish, from Old Spanish garbanço, perhaps alteration (perhaps influenced by Old Spanish garroba, carob) of Old Spanish arvanço (compare Portuguese ervanço, chickpea), perhaps from Gothic *arwaits; akin to Dutch erwt and Old High German araweiz, pea, both from Proto-Germanic *arwait-, *arwīt-, pea, pulse, probably from the same same European substrate source as Greek erebinthos, chickpea, and Greek orobos and Latin ervum, bitter vetch (Vicia ervilia), a vetch once widely cultivated in the Mediterranean region as a pulse and as fodder for livestock.]

At any rate, I like the older form calavance, and I like very much this OED citation:

1997 Church Times 14 Mar. 10/5 Chickpeas, or more excitingly, garbanzos, are one of the best pulses.

Roger Kreuz and Richard Roberts write for the MIT Press Reader about a phenomenon that turns out to be not as spooky as the lede makes it seem:

On September 6, 1941, the German-occupied city of Oslo was attacked by the British Royal Air Force. The frightened citizens caught in the open frantically sought refuge from the falling bombs. One of the casualties of the air raid was a 30-year-old woman named Astrid, who was hit by shrapnel as she ran toward a shelter. She was seriously wounded on the left side of her head. Hospital staff feared she would not survive. After a few days, however, she regained consciousness and was found to have paralysis on the right side of her body. She was also unable to speak.

Over time her paralysis receded, and she gradually recovered her ability to talk. Her speech, however, had changed, and people who heard her detected a pronounced German-like accent. This was a serious problem in Norway, where the military occupation had created intense antipathy toward anything German, and her speech caused shopkeepers to refuse to assist her. Clearly she had no desire to speak as she did. Even more mysteriously, she had never lived outside Norway, nor had she interacted with foreigners.

Two years after her injury, Astrid’s strange case came to the attention of Georg Herman Monrad-Krohn. He was a professor of neurology at the University of Oslo and had a particular interest in language disorders. He was also struck by Astrid’s distinctly foreign accent and initially thought that she must be German or French.

Astrid’s case is not unique: An occurrence of what is now called foreign accent syndrome (FAS) was described as early as 1907 by Pierre Marie in France, where a Parisian had acquired an “Alsatian” accent. Over the next century, physicians and language researchers reported dozens of similar cases. As the case studies piled up in the medical journals, scholars struggled to understand what was going on. […]

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