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Stu Clayton sent me Margalit Fox’s NY Times obituary of a remarkable Latinist; it begins:

Reginald Foster, a former plumber’s apprentice from Wisconsin who, in four decades as an official Latinist of the Vatican, dreamed in Latin, cursed in Latin, banked in Latin and ultimately tweeted in Latin, died on Christmas Day at a nursing home in Milwaukee. He was LXXXI. His death was confirmed by the Vatican. He had tested positive for the coronavirus two weeks ago, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

A Roman Catholic priest who was considered the foremost Latinist in Rome and, quite possibly, the world, Father Foster was attached to the Office of Latin Letters of the Vatican Secretariat of State from 1969 until his retirement in 2009. By virtue of his longevity and his almost preternatural facility with the language, he was by the end of his tenure the de facto head of that office, which comprises a team of half a dozen translators.

If, having read this far, you are expecting a monastic ascetic, you will be blissfully disappointed. Father Foster was indeed a monk — a member of the Discalced Carmelite order — but he was a monk who looked like a stevedore, dressed like a janitor, swore like a sailor (usually in Latin) and spoke Latin with the riverine fluency of a Roman orator.

He served four popes — Paul VI, John Paul I and II, and Benedict XVI — composing original documents in Latin, which remains the Vatican’s official language, and translating their speeches and other writings into Latin from a series of papal languages. (He was also fluent in Italian, German and Greek.)

As you can see, the obit itself is pleasingly written; a couple more samples:
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Anatoly Vorobey sent me a link to his Russian-language Avva post and his Stack Exchange post on the same question; I quote the latter:

A recent tweet from Senator Chuck Schumer (quoted for linguistic purposes only) says

Trump needs to sign the bill to help people and keep the government open and we’re glad to pass more aid Americans need

In this sentence, “needs” seems to be used in the sense of obligation or necessity and not personal need; Schumer is not saying that Trump’s interests require that he sign the bill, he’s saying that this is something necessary to do, that Trump should do it.

My question is: is this a relatively new meaning of the transitive verb “to need”? I seem to perceive it as recent and markedly conversational; is this intuition correct? (I’m not a native speaker).

For example, imagine a policeman saying to someone who’s agitating and panicking: “Sir, you need to calm down NOW”. This feels to me like a phrase that could be said within the last 30-40 years, say, but not in 1920.

I’m aware that “need” as a modal verb carries the meaning of impersonal obligation (“you need not do X”), but I’m asking specifically about the transitive verb.

To provide partial support, I see that the American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd edition (1994) defines the transitive sense of “need” only as “To have need of; require”, whereas the current online AHD, 5th edition adds a meaning “2. To have an obligation (to do something): You need to clean up your room.”, which pinpoints exactly the meaning I’m referring to. Is this an omission in the 1994 edition or a real indication that this meaning is relatively new?

He found the answers there unhelpful; I said “I agree with you that it feels recent, maybe in the last few decades, but of course introspection isn’t worth much in these matters.” So I’m posting it here in hopes that the Varied Reader can provide enlightenment.

Daniel Starza Smith writes for OUPBlog:

The Melford Hall Manuscript is a large, expensively bound manuscript volume containing previously unknown witnesses of nearly 140 poems by John Donne (1572-1631), one of the most outstandingly significant poets and preachers of the early modern period. Discovered by Gabriel Heaton of Sotheby’s during a routine survey of Melford Hall in Suffolk, and restored by sale by the prestigious Brockman binders, it sold in 2018 for £475,000 (£387,500 plus auctioneer’s premium). After a high-profile sale at auction, the UK government intervened to keep the manuscript in the country, in recognition of its enormous importance to the UK’s cultural history. In December 2020, the British Library announced that the volume now resides with them, shelfmarked as Egerton MS 3884. While it is being prepared for use by readers in 2021, it has in the meantime been published online here. What can this manuscript tell us about this prolific and brilliant writer and the literary and textual worlds in which he lived?

Donne’s daring and groundbreaking poetry was printed posthumously as Poems, by J. D. in 1633 (then again in 1635 and five other seventeenth-century printings), but many of its earliest readers would have encountered him in handwritten, privately circulated scribal copies. Donne was the most transcribed literary author of his day, and a true publishing phenomenon of the manuscript medium. […] The Melford MS is the second-largest known collection of Donne’s verse in manuscript, and its discovery calls for a major reconsideration of his early readership and reputation. Studying an artifact like Melford can tell us a huge amount about who Donne’s earliest “fans” were, which of Donne’s writings were available to them, and how they accessed, read, stored, shared, and valued it.

It’s an exciting time to be working on Donne’s texts and early readers. Just last year another manuscript was discovered at Westminster Abbey by Matthew Payne, the Abbey’s Keeper of the Muniments. Where Melford is a large bound volume of poetry, the Westminster Abbey MS was a small booklet containing an unusual prose satire. It’s likely that other texts remain to be found, so it’s important that we know as much as we can about this influential figure and his milieu.

It’s fascinating to me that important texts by one of the most famous English poets are still being discovered, and of course it still amazes me that such things are available to all almost instantly via the magic of the internet.

I’m about halfway through True Grit (see this post), which is even better than Norwood (David Eddyshaw will love the passage on Election), and I ran into this description of food for the trail:

Here is what he brought along for “grub”: a sack of salt and a sack of red pepper and a sack of taffy — all this in his jacket pockets — and then some ground coffee beans and a big slab of salt pork and one hundred and seventy corn dodgers. I could scarcely credit it. The “corn dodgers” were balls of what I would call hot-water cornbread.

I had never run across the term, though if you google it it’s clearly still widespread and there are lots of recipes online (e.g.); I like cornbread in any form, but what leads me to post is the “dodgers” part. There’s nothing useful in the OED, and Green’s Dictionary of Slang is currently unavailable (“The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request. Either the server is overloaded or there is an error in the application.”); anybody have any ideas?

I also note that Mattie, the book’s narrator, refers to the “M. K. & T. Railroad,” which turns out to be the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railway, better known as “the Katy”; I well remember thegrowlingwolf reminiscing about it from his Texas days.

Also, incoming Christmas items of interest: the Songdog family gave me Jonathan Waterlow’s It’s Only A Joke, Comrade!: Humour, Trust and Everyday Life under Stalin (1928-1941), which looks wonderful, and bulbul gave me A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, which won the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel and has gotten rave reviews — I can’t wait to dig in. Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it!

Luke Fater writes for Atlas Obscura about an unexpected lexical goldmine:

British-born William Dampier began a life of piracy in 1679 in Mexico’s Bay of Campeche. Orphaned in his late teens, Dampier set sail for the Caribbean and fell into a twentysomething job scramble. Seeing no future in logging or sugar plantations, he was sucked into the burgeoning realm of New World raiding, beginning what would be the first of his record-breaking three circumnavigations. A prolific diarist, Dampier kept a journal wrapped in a wax-sealed bamboo tube throughout his journeys. During a year-long prison sentence in Spain in 1694, Dampier would convert these notes into a novel that became a bestseller and seminal travelogue.

Parts of A New Voyage Around the World read like a 17th-century episode of No Reservations, with Dampier playing a high-stakes version of Anthony Bourdain. Aside from writing groundbreaking observations on previously un-researched subjects in meteorology, maritime navigation, and zoology, food was a constant throughout his work. […]

While you won’t find flamingos, penguins, or turtles on too many contemporary menus, several contributions from A New Voyage reshaped our modern English food vocabulary. In the Bay of Panama, Damier wrote of a fruit “as big as a large lemon … [with] skin [like] black bark, and pretty smooth.” Lacking distinct flavor, he wrote, the ripened fruit was “mixed with sugar and lime juice and beaten together [on] a plate.” This was likely the English language’s very first recipe for guacamole. Later, in the Philippines, Dampier noted of young mangoes that locals “cut them in two pieces and pickled them with salt and vinegar, in which they put some cloves of garlic.” This was the English language’s first recipe for mango chutney. His use of the terms “chopsticks,” “barbecue,” “cashew,” “kumquat,” “tortilla,” and “soy sauce” were also the first of their kind. […]

In the years following its publication, A New Voyage became an international bestseller, skyrocketing Dampier to wealth and fame. The first of its kind, the work generated a hunger among European audiences for travel writing, serving as an inspiration for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Charles Darwin brought a copy of A New Voyage with him aboard the Beagle’s voyage to South America, having cited the book as a “mine of information.” Noting his keen eye for wind and current mapping, the British Royal Navy consulted him on best practices, later extending him captainship of the HMS Roebuck, on which he was commissioned for an in-depth exploration of South Africa, Australia, and Indonesia.

Alas, his name became mud (“For generations, Dampier was taught throughout much of the Commonwealth as, first and only, a piratical figure.[…] Disgraced and indebted by court fines, Dampier died penniless”), but he led an interesting life and provided us with some delicious words. Thanks, Trevor!

Cade Metz wrote for the NY Times last month about a problem that’s been in the news lately:

Last fall, Google unveiled a breakthrough artificial intelligence technology called BERT that changed the way scientists build systems that learn how people write and talk. But BERT, which is now being deployed in services like Google’s internet search engine, has a problem: It could be picking up on biases in the way a child mimics the bad behavior of his parents. […]

On a recent afternoon in San Francisco, while researching a book on artificial intelligence, the computer scientist Robert Munro fed 100 English words into BERT: “jewelry,” “baby,” “horses,” “house,” “money,” “action.” In 99 cases out of 100, BERT was more likely to associate the words with men rather than women. The word “mom” was the outlier. […]

In a blog post this week, Dr. Munro also describes how he examined cloud-computing services from Google and Amazon Web Services that help other businesses add language skills into new applications. Both services failed to recognize the word “hers” as a pronoun, though they correctly identified “his.” […]

Researchers are only beginning to understand the effects of bias in systems like BERT. But as Dr. Munro showed, companies are already slow to notice even obvious bias in their systems. After Dr. Munro pointed out the problem, Amazon corrected it. Google said it was working to fix the issue.

Dmitry Pruss, who sent me the link, wrote:

AI models isn’t a typical matter of experience at LH but I need some grasp of the issues in the famous paper which led to the Google researcher firing, beyond the very basic explanations [in the Times story]. Maybe we can put the recent findings on the language model flaws to a discussion, and perhaps even learn something new / positive from it??

So: any thoughts?

My wife is making Norwegian meatballs today, as she does around this time every year, and as I walked through the kitchen my eye fell on a container of mace. “Hmm,” thought I, “where does that word come from?” So I went to the OED (entry updated March 2000) and found this:

Etymology: < Old French macis (although only attested slightly later than in Middle English) or its etymon post-classical Latin macis aril surrounding the nutmeg (12th cent.). The form macis was taken as a plural in Middle English and a new singular mace was formed from it.
Compare Old Occitan macis (14th cent.), Italian macis, †mace (14th cent.), Spanish macis (1525), Portuguese macis (14th cent.). It is uncertain whether there is any connection with classical Latin macir resin of an Indian tree (Pliny), Hellenistic Greek μάκιρ. There is no probable connection with classical Latin maccis, the name of an imaginary spice in Plautus.

So mace is from a singular reanalyzed as plural, like pea. Who knew?

If you’re wondering about aril (“aril surrounding the nutmeg”), it’s (OED again) “< modern Latin arillus (also in use; compare modern French arille), < medieval Latin arilli, Spanish arillos, raisins.” And mace reminds me of John Collier’s unforgettable short story “The Touch of Nutmeg Makes It”; it’s the first story in this collection, if you want to experience it.

Rose Waldman writes for Tablet about her discoveries as a translator of Yiddish:

Yiddish was the language of my childhood, my first language, the one in which I learned to speak and later, to read and write. In Hasidic Williamsburg, where I was born and raised, Yiddish rumbled all around me. It was a natural part of the environment, sounding native to the very air. […] But then I fell into my literary translation career—“fell into” being the precise description of what happened, though that is a story for another time—and suddenly, I was surrounded by a network of “Yiddishists,” secular people who revered Yiddish, who spoke about the language in romantic, sentimental tones, who quoted Yiddish writers with the same awe my English professors used to quote Chekhov and Austen and Hemingway. The Yiddishists argued over word usage and grammar with an earnestness that can only ever be exhibited by pedantic language-loving nerds, one of whom, I discovered, was I.

My transformation into a bona fide Yiddishist, albeit a Hasidic one, occurred in barely noticeable increments, but all at once I found myself nodding along to phrases like “ancestral language” and “cultural responsibility” and “endangered heritage” with the same earnestness as my Yiddish-loving colleagues. Suddenly, the beauty of a certain Yiddish phrase could make my breath catch. And one day I realized, to my utter surprise, that not only was Yiddish no longer a child’s language to me, but instead rang so richly and resonantly in my ears, its words moved me as no other language could. Yiddish had always been where I felt most at home, but now it had captured my heart.

But there was something else, though it took me a book’s worth of translating before I realized it. I had grown up on Hasidic Yiddish. The Yiddish I spoke (and speak) is homey and friendly and gives me a sense of confidence and belonging. […] We use it. Nearly nobody else does. But for all its life and vibrancy, Hasidic Yiddish is missing a whole bunch of words. No wonder I hadn’t noticed the language’s beauty. So many of its beautiful words had been lost.

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Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, “a writer, historian and critic,” has a TLS meditation, “The punning of reason,” on his ineradicable addiction to punning:

In the beginning was the word. But the trouble was that the word sounded like other words. And it still does, so you poke at it. This is called “punning”. For there was never just the one, solitary, word. It entered the world as one of many. Though each word seemed to possess a specific shade of meaning all its own, they were tied together by invisible lines of phonetic resemblance. The mouth has limits. Tongue, palate, cheeks, and lips can only shape a breath of air in so many ways. Perhaps this was not true for God, when He blew on the face of the waters and His breath – “wind” in one translation of the Hebrew word ruach – hovered there, but it is true for us. And we can be tempted to tug at the invisible lines of phonetic resemblance, to create puns, even – perhaps especially – when it annoys our friends and loved ones.

I pun compulsively. Puns are my constant companions, a floating cloud of potential associations superimposed on the field of linear communication. It is as if I cannot stop touching the words. I read ruach and it becomes Rauch, from the Hebrew for “wind” to the German for “smoke”. Some words summon the punch lines to jokes I haven’t made yet, and I grin inwardly. The Japanese expression itadakimasu, an expression of thanks for a meal to come, makes me think: “eat a duck I must”. As a hundred books of puns destined for use as bathroom reading attest, I’m not alone. (There is in fact a neurological condition characterized by compulsive punning, originally called Witzelsucht, or “joke-seeking”, by Hermann Oppenheimer, who identified it in the late nineteenth century. I swear I don’t have it.) I was visiting Kyoto’s Fushimi Inari shrine with a friend, who told me that the Japanese word for pun is oyajigyagu, or “old guy gag”. Puns are the jokes older men tell. Wordplay does not float free from culture. […]

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I’m reading Charles Portis’s True Grit (having loved his Norwood), and I just came across the sentence “He is a half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cut for sign.” If you google “cut for sign” you can find any number of explanations of this evocative regional term, e.g., from Texas Monthly:

After a harrowing skirmish with the Comanche in 1860, Charles Goodnight cut for sign to track down warriors who had escaped. That practice, in which a person searches for people or animals by “cutting,” or studying a section of land for clues, may seem like a lost art of the Old West, but it is still used today. “Ranchers cut for sign to find lost dogs and cattle or to find trespassing animals that could damage their property,” says Brad Guile, who lives near El Paso and used the technique when he was stationed at Fort Bliss. By identifying subtle changes in the landscape, a person can determine where an animal is headed and how old its tracks are.

But what I want to know is, what is this use of “cut”? The closest sense in the ancient OED entry (not fully updated since 1893) is 16.b. “To come across, strike, hit upon (a path, etc.). esp. U.S. with trail. Also elliptical“:

1892 Field 23 Jan. 119/1 At length we cut our spoor again, and hunted it along carefully and slowly.
1899 T. W. Hall Tales 19 One of his men dashes breathlessly in..with the exciting report that he has cut the raiders’ trail.
1903 A. Adams Log of Cowboy vii. 90 If you have no authority to cut this trail then you don’t cut this herd.
1903 A. Adams Log of Cowboy vii. 90 They were merely cutting (trail cutting) in the interest of the immediate locality.

But this is an extension of the sense “To cross (a line): expressing motion,” where the meaning is clear; I don’t see how you get from that to “cut” = “study a section of land.” All thoughts, anecdotes, and sidetracks welcome.