languagehat.com

Adam Aaronson (a software engineer who also plays jazz trombone and electric bass) has a blog post with all sorts of Hattic material; it starts with an observation made by Alex Boisvert on Crosscord, the crossword Discord server:

JET BLACK and JETBLUE have very different meanings, even though they look superficially similar. Same thing with CATNAP and DOGNAP. Any other examples of this?

Adam continues:

Suffice to say, the Crosscord hivemind had other examples of this. Will Nediger replied a few minutes later with the clever MULTITOOL and MULTIPLIERS (words with completely unrelated meanings, despite the fact that PLIERS are a TOOL). Several messages later, Alex chimed back in with the elegant PUB QUIZ and BAR EXAM, a pairing that had been used in some form in crosswords by constructors Christopher Adams (2018) and Robyn Weintraub (2021).

Something about this concept—two sets of synonyms (PUB and BAR, QUIZ and EXAM), which when paired together, form phrases that themselves are not synonyms (PUB QUIZ and BAR EXAM)—captured the minds of Crosscord. Suddenly, the floodgates were open.

People suggested UBEREATS / SUPERFOOD, THROW SHADE / PITCH BLACK, BOOTY CALL / BUTT DIAL, ROMAN MARS / CLASSICAL RUINS, PERMANENT PRESS / FOREVER STAMP, and others.

There’s something going on here. Something more than a shitpost or an ephemeral trend. Double doubles have the proverbial juice, and the juice lies in their structure. Each pair of pairs can be modeled as a square, where the corners are words and the sides are relations between those words […]

It’s this square structure that makes each double double feel tight, feel satisfying, feel like a real “find”. This is the essence of what I’ve started calling square theory, and it applies to much more than just posts in a Discord server.

Click through for much more, including crossword examples (e.g., Will Shortz’s all-time favorite clue, [It turns into a different story] for SPIRAL STAIRCASE). Via MeFi.

A couple of links from the Commenter Known as Bathrobe:

1) Can AI help revive Ainu? Jessie Lau writes for BBC Future:

There are only a handful of native Ainu speakers left. The language is currently listed by Unesco as “Critically Endangered”. Records suggest that in 1870 – one year after Ezo or Ezochi (now Hokkaido) was declared part of Japan – some 15,000 people spoke local varieties of Ainu, and the majority spoke no other language. But various government policies, including the banning of Ainu in schools, almost wiped the language and culture out. By 1917, the estimated number of speakers had plummeted to just 350 and has dropped precipitously since then.

Despite this, Ainu is arguably undergoing a revival. In 2019, Japan legally recognised the Ainu as Indigenous people of the country through a bill that included measures to foster their inclusion and visibility. And now various projects aim to preserve and revitalise the language – including with the help of artificial intelligence. There’s a chance that Ainu could survive for generations to come.

We talked about Ainu in 2016 and earlier this month.

2) Translation in Ukraine During the Stalinist Period: Literary Translation Policies and Practices, an open-access chapter (in Translation Under Communism, pp.141-172); it deals with the translation-related aspects of what I wrote about in this 2010 post and goes into some interesting details, e.g.:
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In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris declared that it wanted no more submissions about the origin of language, and I should probably resist the temptation myself (Betteridge’s law of headlines can be applied here as usual), but hey, it’s a Languagehat tradition — back in 2003, this post, about an “attempt to construct a coherent narrative about the prehistory of language,” began: “The NY Times has decided once again to clamber aboard their spavined, cross-eyed nag and charge creakily into battle with the windmills of linguistics.” So without further ado, I present Carl Zimmer’s NYT “Did Baby Talk Give Rise to Language?” (archived):

If you’ve ever cooed at a baby, you have participated in a very special experience. Indeed, it’s an all but unique one: Whereas humans constantly chatter to their infants, other apes hardly ever do so, a new study reveals.

“It’s a new feature that has evolved and massively expanded in our species,” said Johanna Schick, a linguist at the University of Zurich and an author of the study. And that expansion, Dr. Schick and her colleagues argue, may have been crucial to the evolution of language. […]

Humans and apes are similar in another way: Their babies need time to learn how to make sounds like adults. Scientists have done much more research into how human infants develop language than into how wild baby apes learn to make calls. One striking feature of humans is the way that adults speak to young children. Baby talk — known to scientists as infant-directed speech — often features repeated words, an exaggerated stress on syllables and a high, singsong tone.

This distinctive pattern is very effective at grabbing the attention of young children — even when they’re too young to understand the meaning of the words that adults are saying. It’s possible that children pay attention to infant-directed speech because it helps them learn some of the basic features of language.

So they did studies on bonobos and chimpanzees:
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The phrase “needs must” popped into my head, and I realized it was so elliptical I had no idea how it worked grammatically or how it originated. Fortunately, the OED updated the entry needs adv. “Of necessity, necessarily, unavoidably” in 2003, so I can provide a satisfying answer. This is under II. “With the modal auxiliaries †mote and must, emphasizing the sense of the verb”:

II.4.b. needs must: it is necessary or unavoidable. Cf. needs must that needs shall at shall v. III.27c.
Apparently originally the impersonal use of must (see must v.¹ II.3c [“It behoves (or behoved), it is (or was) necessary to”]) with anaphoric ellipsis of the main verb; by the 19th cent. used in isolation (probably originally as a shortened form of needs must when the devil drives: see sense II.5). Now frequently taken to be a plural noun and verb.

1604 We beleeue them no more then needs must.
E. Grimeston, translation of True Historie of Siege of Ostend 195

1629 Her vnaduised sickle shall not thrust Into her hopefull Haruest, ere needs must.
F. Quarles, Argalus & Parthenia i. 36
[…]

1734 I shall stay no longer in Dublin than needs must.
G. Berkeley, Letter in Works (1871) vol. IV. 218
[…]

1821 I..would have no more of these follies than needs must.
W. Scott, Kenilworth vol. II. iv. 73

1839 ‘Faith, then, needs must,’ said the ensign.
W. M. Thackeray, Catherine vi. 112
[…]

a1902 Then needs must that Laura go with the cook to see if the range was finally and properly adjusted.
F. Norris, Pit (1903) ii. 51
[…]

1998 ‘I’m pleased you have adapted yourself to our work ethic so readily.’ Larkin shook his head. ‘Needs must.’
M. Waites, Little Triggers (1999) ii. 17

Here’s the section on the “devil drives” phrase:
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Jim Bisso posted to the Facebook group The Morphology of Peevology:

Code switching in Yiddish by a Chasid youth. So much English, Yinglish, what have you. Anyway, he went to Iran to find the tombs of Ester and Mordekay.

https://youtu.be/D5TZPlO4Se8?si=GOLMHQI8TesQjzZr

If you know even a tiny bit of Yiddish it’s well worth watching at least some of the 46-minute video; I’m in awe at the language-mixing. Description of the content:

I landed in Tehran and headed straight to Hamadan, where I spent the night. The next day, I explored the vibrant bazaar and visited the sacred Tomb of Mordechai and Esther. Then, I set off to the breathtaking Ali-Sadr Cave, an underground wonder with vast waterways and boat rides—an unforgettable experience.

A decade ago I posted about Eliot Borenstein’s decision to blog his new book, and I took great pleasure in reading the preliminary versions of Plots against Russia and his later Soviet Self-Hatred and Unstuck in Time. Then, alas, he quit:

This was for a number of reasons, but two of them stand out: first, I don’t think many people were actually reading the blogs, and, more important, I didn’t need the publication schedule to force me to write. Plus I was able to skip around from chapter to chapter, the way normal people do.

But now he’s back!

But I’m not ecstatic over my current writing situation. I’ve still been writing, but so sporadically that I find myself having to reread what I wrote in order to figure out what I’m doing. All I really want is to just keep these projects alive in my head, and move them forward at whatever pace ends up working.

Here’s where it gets ridiculous: I’ve written pretty significant chunks of three different book projects. This was the sort of thing that used to work really well for me, but now is a challenge. Still, I don’t want to give any of them up. So I’ve decided not to.

The plan is to serialize all three projects on a weekly basis. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, since, again, I have a backlog. And once I have to start writing new stuff rather than cleaning up old stuff, I have no doubt that my pace will fall back significantly. Which, again, is fine. I’ll put the posts up on my blog (eliotborenstein.net) and link to them on Facebook. At this point, all of these projects feel much more raw than their predecessors. If I get feedback, this will be extremely helpful, but I don’t have any illusions about getting a large readership. All I have to do is pretend that I have a readership.

On Mondays he’ll be posting Marvel Comics in the 1980s, on Wednesdays Unidentified Russian Objects: On Soviet Melancholy (the third and final installment in Russia’s Alien Nations, in case anyone besides me is keeping track), and on Fridays Reading the Superhero: Ethics, Crises, and Superboy Punches; if you have any interest in any of these topics, follow along (and maybe leave the occasional comment to let him know he does have a readership). As I said in a comment to that post: “I, of course, am looking forward to Unidentified Russian Objects. Soviet melancholy is the best melancholy!”
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From Muriel Rukeyser on “The Fear of Poetry“:

Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has—the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge—infinitely precious, time-resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry. […]

Poetry is foreign to us, we do not let it enter our daily lives. […]

In such a town, I spoke to a psychologist, a man who has made his work and his theme the study of fear, and the talk went well enough until poetry was mentioned. Then, with extreme violence, a violence out of any keeping with what had gone before, the psychologist began to raise his voice and cut the air with his hand flat. He said, his voice shaking, that he had cut poetry out of his life, that that was something he had not time for, that was something out of his concern.

From Samad Alavi’s World Literature Today review of Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora (edited by Christopher Nelson):

For me, though, I encountered the best surprises in poems like Reza Baraheni’s “Daf,” which plays with the form and sounds of the daf, a tambourine-like drum. Stephen Watts’s co-translation with the author struck me as itself untranslatable, the words melting into one another and reemerging transformed: “Now night will never sense silence again / and after these circles of turbulence / I’ll not sleep for a geology of un-numberable years / Here night swells on rim edges of drums and bells— / the daf’s white moon.” The impossibly poetic English of the translation sent me to the internet to discover what was going on in the Persian. There, I encountered several easily found videos of Baraheni performing the original poem and was amazed to hear just how closely the English follows the Persian in structure and form, even with all the inventiveness in translation. But you don’t need any knowledge of Persian to appreciate the sound qualities of Baraheni’s performance.

You can read the translation here; a brief excerpt:

Young youth
iris
throat that is kissable
you head beheader
it is the sound of the daf
that knocks off our heads
Are you struck dumb
are you headless
yet
The original:

آه، ای جوان!
ای ارغوان!
آن حنجره
بوسیدنی ست!
بوسیدنی!
سر میزنی!
شمشیر دفدفست كه سرهای خلق را
از بیخ میزند
دف میزنی؟
سر میزنی؟

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Laudator Temporis Acti quotes a passage from Leopardi that I like both for its main thought, which is a good one I don’t remember seeing elsewhere, and for the final sentence, a splendid example of how inescapable is our sense of “things ain’t what they used to be”:

I will say that by their own nature the writings which are closest to perfection normally bring more pleasure on the second reading than on the first. The opposite happens with many books that are written with no more than mediocre art and diligence but not without some extrinsic and apparent merit. These, once they are reread, are found to be much less valuable than at first reading. But if books of both kinds are read only once, they sometimes deceive even the learned and experts in such a way that the very best are rated below the mediocre. However, you must consider that nowadays even the professionals of literature have great difficulty deciding whether to read recent books a second time, especially those whose main purpose is to give pleasure. This was not the case with the ancients, due to the smaller number of books.

Dico che gli scritti più vicini alla perfezione, hanno questa proprietà, che ordinariamente alla seconda lettura piacciono più che alla prima. Il contrario avviene in molti libri composti con arte e diligenza non più che mediocre, ma non privi però di un qual si sia pregio estrinseco ed apparente; i quali, riletti che sieno, cadono dall’opinione che l’uomo ne aveva conceputo alla prima lettura. Ma letti gli uni e gli altri una volta sola, ingannano talora in modo anche i dotti ed esperti, che gli ottimi sono posposti ai mediocri. Ora hai a considerare che oggi, eziandio le persone dedite agli studi per instituto di vita, con molta difficoltà s’inducono a rileggere libri recenti, massime il cui genere abbia per suo proprio fine il diletto. La qual cosa non avveniva agli antichi; atteso la minor copia dei libri.

Yes, our forebears knew automatically whether a book was good or not — they didn’t have to bother with rereading! Because they had so few books! You’d think the thought of the Library of Alexandria might have occurred to him…

I enjoyed Merve Emre’s New Yorker piece “The History of Advice Columns” (archived), but first I had to get past my annoyance at its opening:

The word “advice” comes from two Latin words: the prefix ad, which implies a movement toward something, and vīsum, “vision,” a distinctly vivid or imaginative image. To ask for advice is to reach for a person whose vision exceeds yours, for reasons supernatural (oracles, mediums), professional (doctors, lawyers), or pastoral (parents, friends). It is a curious accident of language that “advice” contains within it the etymologically unrelated word “vice,” from the Latin vitium, meaning “fault” or “sin.” Yet the accident is suggestive.

Why do people feel the need to do this? The etymology of advice has nothing whatever to do with advice columns, it’s just being used as a catchy intro — which is fine as long as you get it right and don’t gussy it up the way Emre does. In the first place, there is no Latin “prefix ad” in the word; as Wiktionary says: “The unhistoric -d- was introduced in English 15c.” And vīsum is not “a distinctly vivid or imaginative image,” it’s just the past participle of videre ‘to see’ and thus means ‘something seen’ or, by extension, as the OED has it, ‘something that seems.’ Here’s the OED’s etymology (entry revised 2011):

< Anglo-Norman avise, avvis, avyse, avys, Anglo-Norman and Old French, Middle French avis, Anglo-Norman and Middle French aviz, also (with influence from classical Latin ad- ad- prefix) Anglo-Norman advise, Anglo-Norman and Middle French advis, adviz (French avis) opinion (c1139; slightly earlier in ce m’est avis: see below), prudence (1285), intention, plan (a1339), deliberation, reflection (c1350), counsel (mid 14th cent.), notice, announcement (late 14th cent.) < a (see a- prefix⁵) + vis (< classical Latin vīsum something that seems, use as noun of neuter past participle of vidēre to see: see vision n.).

Earliest in Old French in the phrase ce m’est avis it seems to me (c1135), developed from *ce m’est a vis, variant of ce m’est vis (late 11th cent. as ço m’est vis, with different pronoun), in turn after classical Latin vīsum est mihi it seems (good) to me.

Compare this nicely done etymological excursus in Ange Mlinko’s “Patterns of Uprooting” (NYRB, December 21, 2023 issue; archived), a review of books of poetry by Ida Vitale and Tomasz Różycki:

“Mystery,” my dictionary reminds me, also carries an obsolete English meaning of handicraft or trade. Vitale’s poems aren’t mystical effusions; they are made things. She may overstate it when she says that poetic devices “require more mental effort”; the key, rather, is openness to experience. I keep going back to her author photo, a modern sacra conversazione, with that one finger (dactyl) proffered for the bird’s (poetic) feet—encapsulating her plea for patient readers.

We discussed the two words mystery back in 2009; I find the play with finger/dactyl and the two senses of feet enjoyable and effective, and no linguistic facts were harmed in the process!

Amanda Gefter’s “Finding Peter Putnam” is one of the most remarkable life stories I’ve ever read; here’s a snippet to give you an idea of who he was:

His name was Peter Putnam. He was a physicist who’d hung out with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and Niels Bohr […] “Only two or three times in my life have I met thinkers with insights so far reaching, a breadth of vision so great, and a mind so keen as Putnam’s,” Wheeler said in 1991. And Wheeler, who coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” had worked alongside some of the greatest minds in science.

Robert Works Fuller, a physicist and former president of Oberlin College, who worked closely with Putnam in the 1960s, told me in 2012, “Putnam really should be regarded as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. Yet he’s completely unknown.”

His ideas, insofar as I understood them, do sound remarkable and prescient. But I’m bringing it to LH for this tidbit:

Just then, a perfect opportunity arose to present Putnam to the public. Wheeler was invited by the Neurosciences Research Program at MIT to speak at their March 1975 meeting on “reality and consciousness.” He insisted he could only do it as half of a pair. […]

I listened to the meeting, recorded on a reel-to-reel, stowed away in the archives at MIT. Here, finally, was Putnam’s chance to explain his ideas to the top neuroscientists of the time. I pressed the headphones tight against my ears.

Wheeler had just finished speaking about the observer in quantum mechanics and introduced Putnam with a warning. “Some terms Peter uses, one needs a glossary to translate.” Wheeler placed a transparency on the projector—he’d made an actual glossary of Putnam’s terms. The crowd burst into laughter. I didn’t have to see Putnam’s face to feel it growing hot. When he began to speak, he stuttered.

“You only perceive signals that are useful for shaping behavior … A game is a special kind of mathematics … But for a game you need a goal function … We’re suggesting that the category repetition is a candidate … You’re searching for rules of choice that allow a repeating or self-reproducing path … There’s a transcendental core to the laws of physics themselves …”

The crowd grew restless. Wheeler’s talk had gone long, and there wasn’t time for Putnam to finish. The neuroscientists headed out for lunch and the tape cut out.

There are probably quite a few people who would benefit from such a glossary when they give talks. Thanks, Nick!