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I’ve started Kaverin’s 1928 Скандалист [The troublemaker], and I just got to a passage that made reading it worthwhile no matter what else it contains. The novel focuses on the academic world of 1920s Leningrad, and specifically on literary studies; what I hadn’t realized is that it also featured linguistics, and in this passage the character Dragomanov, based on Yevgeny Polivanov (who was eventually shot for opposing Marr) is lecturing on his theories of historical linguistics (the original can be found here — scroll down to “Уставившись на одного из слушателей”):

Fixing his indifferent gaze on one of his listeners, he began talking about the theory of a pan-European parent language. He had expounded it previously. Every “introduction to linguistics” culminated in that theory. From the time of Schlegel and Bopp, countless linguistic works had been built on the basis of that theory.

But he, Dragomanov, announced that day that, in all sincerity, he could not agree with it.

Suddenly starting to pronounce his r’s in the French way, he took chalk in hand and laid out his evidence.

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Just found this in the NYRB letters column (September 26, 2019 issue):

To the Editors:

James Gleick writes, in “Moon Fever” [NYR, August 15], “If it wasn’t for Sputnik, we wouldn’t have had ‘beatniks,’ ‘peaceniks,’ or ‘no-goodniks.’” He is mistaken. The OED shows that S.J. Perelman used “nogoodnick” in The New Yorker in 1936: “A parasite, a leech, a bloodsucker—altogether a five-star nogoodnick!” H.L. Mencken’s American Language (1919) has an entry for the general suffix “-nick”: “The suffix –nick, signifying agency, is…freely applied. Allrightnick means an upstart, an offensive boaster…consumptionick means a victim of tuberculosis.”

Ernest Davis
New York City

Now, that’s the kind of correction I like to see. (I find it hard to believe, however, that anyone but Mencken ever used “consumptionick.”)

Viktor Shklovsky said the word is not a shadow.

He wrote:

If we examine the general laws of perception, we see that as it becomes habitual it also becomes automatic. So eventually all of our skills and experiences function unconsciously – automatically. […] By means of this algebraic manner of thinking, objects are grasped spatially, in the blink of an eye. We do not see them, we merely recognize them by their primary characteristics. The object passes us, as if it were prepackaged.

For this reason he wanted enstrangement (остранение), to make the stone feel stony. He wanted fresh images, not ones that had been lying on the greengrocer’s table all day.

His book Третья фабрика [Third Factory] is a sort of autobiography: “The first factory was my family and school. The second was Opoyaz. And the third – is processing me now.” It’s full of fresh images — his book will be “dry as a cough,” enforced speech is a red toy elephant squeaking. One of the ongoing images is that of flax (Shklovsky worked at a flax center after returning to the Soviet Union and criticized Gorky for his inaccurate account of the subject in a novel); he compares writers to flax and says “Flax, if it had a voice, would shriek as it’s being processed.”

The first reference to flax is on p. 24 of the translation: “We are flax in the field.”

This seemed vague to me, limp, as if it had been lying on the table all day. I found the Russian original (pdf), and on p. 39 it said “Мы лен на стлище.” What was a стлище? It wasn’t in my dictionaries. But the internet told me: стлище is “место, где расстилают по траве лен или коноплю для приготовления его к дальнейшей обработке (для мочки под дождем или росой),” a place where flax or hemp is spread on the grass to prepare it for further processing, for being soaked in rain or dew. In other words, for retting. A стлище is a rettery. Both are unusual, not very pretty words that mean something very specific. They wake up the reader. Field is a common and pretty word that puts the reader to sleep.

The translator did a disservice. He sold me limp greens that were not what I wanted.

Donogoo-Tonka or the Miracles of Science: A Cinematographic Tale is a 1920 novel by Jules Romains (French edition); the complete review gives a nice summary:

A depressed Lamendin, complaining that his “soul is failing”, seeks the advice of a psychotherapist (and “suicide specialist”), whose proposed remedy leads Lamendin to professor Yves le Trouhadec, who has his own troubles. Le Trouhadec’s great ambition is to be named a member of the French Institute, but his election is in doubt, his rivals having spread the word that le Trouhadec’s study of the city of Donogoo-Tonka, in deepest Brazil, is all a fraud (as, in fact, it is).
Lamendin is inspired:

I could, from here, try to found the city of Donogoo-Tonka, since I believe I’ve understood that it doesn’t yet exist.

A staged film purporting to show the distant city, “a heavy-duty scientific lecture”, and soon enough even a prospectus for potential investors: the ruse becomes ever more convincing. So too does the investment-opportunity — helped by some cinematic-novelistic trickery:

The maid brings in the mail. The first envelope, when opened, lets out the prospectus for Donogoo-Tonka. The man skims it, without ceasing to eat his bread and butter. But watch how the twelve letters Donogoo-Tonka rise up, tear themselves free, escape from the paper and start scurrying, one after another, on the table, like a band of little mice.

The reality of Donogoo-Tonka poses something of a problem — there’s nothing to it, after all — yet all those rushing to it, and the capital involved, lead inevitably to the only solution: to create what was supposedly already there. A real Donogoo-Tonka rises on the imagined Donogoo-Tonka. It’s farcical, of course — and sensibly, then, it is decreed, when all is said and done, that: “The worship of Scientific Error is obligatory throughout” the territory.

I love the whole idea, I love the worship of Scientific Error, and I especially love the word Donogoo-Tonka. I discovered it because Viktor Shklovsky referred to it in his supposed recantation “Monument to a Scientific Error.” And I note its possible relevance to deepfake geography.

Anatoly Mariengof has been pretty much forgotten. To the extent he’s remembered at all, it’s as an imaginist poet and as a writer of memoirs, and then only because he was a close friend of Sergei Esenin, perhaps the most beloved poet of the early revolutionary years and an object of enduring fascination since his 1925 suicide. He gets wildly varying treatment in the standard English-language histories. Edward J. Brown’s excellent Russian Literature since the Revolution doesn’t mention him at all, A History of Russian Literature (see this post) simply names him as one of the imaginists, and The Cambridge History of Russian Literature does the same (confusingly calling them “imagists”) but adds that he “deliberately presented himself as a bohemian and clown.” Victor Terras’s A History of Russian Literature does better by him, giving him a whole paragraph that includes a brief description of his 1927 Novel without Lies (about his friendship with Esenin), and ends with the useful summary “Marienhof’s favorite genre was the lyric poema, his favorite persona the tragic clown, and his main themes the nightmare of the modern city and the chaos that was Russia in revolution”; Wolfgang Kasack’s Dictionary of Russian Literature Since 1917 gives him a substantial entry, with good accounts of his life, poetry, and plays. But none of them mention the book I just read with great enjoyment, his novel Циники [Cynics], whose 1973 translation by Valdemar D. Bell and Louis Coleman appears to be unavailable. Given its low profile, I probably wouldn’t have read it if Joseph Brodsky hadn’t called it one of the most innovative novels in Russian literature [одним из самых новаторских романов в русской литературе]. And he was right, and I’m here to tell you it should be much better known (and the translation should be reissued in paperback, or someone should commission another one — I have no idea how good the Bell/Coleman version is).

Those of you who remember I was working my way through the books of 1978 may wonder what I was doing reading a book from half a century earlier. As I mentioned here, I was reading Valentin Kataev’s Алмазный мой венец [My diamond crown] a couple of weeks ago (I wound up being a bit unhappy with it, because he ends up slandering Isaak Babel, who was not only a greater writer but who was tortured and killed by the regime while Kataev was climbing the ladder of Soviet success to the point that in old age he was living the good life and visiting Italy and Paris), and a large part of it is about his close friendship with Yuri Olesha, with frequent mentions of Olesha’s 1928 Три толстяка [The Three Fat Men], and I thought “Hey, I have that book and have long meant to read it, why don’t I read it?” So I did (I wasn’t thrilled — it was way too cartoon-revolution-for-kiddies), and then I noticed that the Mariengof book was published the same year, and I thought “Hey, I have that book and have long meant to read it, why don’t I read it?” So I did.
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Alex Foreman writes on Facebook that you’re not a real prescriptivist unless you believe that the past participle of choose should be corn. Quite right, but the very form “choose” is a despicable piece of illiteracy; the true heirs of Alfred the Great say I cheese in the present, I chess in the past, and I have corn when the participle is called for. And of course they use beech as the plural of book. If you do not do these things, stop whining at the rest of us for our lax usage.

Addendum. More FB Foreman:

A father and son arguing in a reconstruction of 15th century Eastern Norwegian. The father is rebuking his son for his lazy speech, including his merger of /θ/ with /t/

Þ-þ-þ-þak!

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.