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I wrote about Glossographia a decade ago; it’s “a blog dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of language from a social scientific perspective,” run by Stephen Chrisomalis, a linguistic anthropologist and cognitive anthropologist at Wayne State University in Detroit. I was recently surprised and pleased to discover it’s still a going concern, and I thought I’d pass on the post Epithets in contemporary English: the case of -o:

Recently over on the social media hellsite, I offered the following puzzle:

What do the following words have in common? SICK, WINE, RANDOM, WEIRD?

The answer, which a couple people got, is that they all are used to form negative epithets ending in -o. This morpheme is actually somewhat productive: pinko, weirdo, wino, dumbo, sicko, wacko, lesbo, fatso, rando, lameo, maybe also psycho, pedo, and narco if you don’t analyze them as abbreviations.

There are of course a bunch of other words formed using -o as a suffix that aren’t insulting nouns: ammo, camo, repo, demo, aggro, combo, promo, etc. Again, some of these are analyzable as shortenings but others, like ammo for ammunition, have something else going on. But these are different insofar as the role of the -o is not to create a noun describing a person.

Having looked around a while, I can’t find a single one of these epithets ending in -o that’s positive or even neutral. You can’t describe a smart person as smarto or a fun person as a funno (I think?).

The Google Ngram chart for these forms shows them to be largely a late 20th-century phenomenon; wino is the earliest and most popular through the early 90s, now overtaken by far by weirdo, but most of these words seem to emerge in the 1980s or later […]

I think little mini-word classes like these are interesting in that they show linguistic change and productivity on a small scale and in a way that doesn’t really show up in reference grammars and dictionaries. They’re a little aesthetically rich fragment of English informal speech that really, all languages have, but don’t get well-captured in some kinds of formal analysis. And as a language weirdo – or wordo? – I think that’s pretty cool.

So do I. (You can see a Google Ngram chart at the link.)

Pádraic Moran writes for RTÉ about an interesting find:

It’s not often that medieval Irish manuscripts make the news – and it’s all the more unusual when they feature on Dutch national media. Last October, the Dutch national newspaper NRC Handelsblad carried a report that a new word of Old Dutch had been discovered in an Irish manuscript. […] The story has its origins in PhD research carried out at the University of Leiden by Peter-Alexander Kerkhof. He published some of his ideas on a blog dedicated to Dutch studies, where he cited an early Irish text known as “O’Mulconry’s Glossary”. This is found in a manuscript in Trinity College, Dublin, dating from 1572, now bound as part of the Yellow Book of Lecan. The name “O’Mulconry’s Glossary” was assigned by the great (and often controversial) Celticist Whitley Stokes (1830–1901), although the text’s title is really De origine scoticae linguae (“On the origin of the Irish language”). Despite being copied into a 16th-century manuscript, the language is very ancient and coherent with Irish of the early eighth or possibly even seventh century, putting it among the earliest compositions in the Irish language.

De origine scoticae linguae does exactly what it purports to. After a remarkable prologue which claims that the Irish language derives from Hebrew, Latin and Greek (and that the Irish people are descended from Greeks!), it discusses the origins of about 880 mostly Irish words, deriving them from Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, as well as Welsh and Norse. Modern scholars would not now accept most of these derivations, but nonetheless this represents one of the earliest milestones in the study of the Irish language and the beginnings of Celtic linguistics.

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Anne Nelson has a nice piece in the Dec. 4 TLS called How I became a guinea pig: Joining a trial for a Covid-19 vaccine in New York; I recommended it to my wife, and when she got to this passage she called me over:

I’d been following the developments of the vaccine with interest, but I wasn’t particularly looking to participate. The opportunity presented itself in September on my Facebook feed. I filled out the application – why not? – and asked around for advice. My daughter said I was crazy, but she tends to worry. I have three friends who are emergency physicians and who have worked with Covid-19 patients. Dr California said I shouldn’t go near a trial vaccine – look at polio. Dr New York said she knew the vaccine people at Mount Sinai and trusted them as first-rate. Dr Saskatchewan said he wished he could participate in the trial because his own province was spiking.

By the time I’d filtered through all the advice and responded affirmatively, the places had been filled. Given my havering, I was surprised by my disappointment.

“What does ‘havering’ mean?” she asked. I said it was a British word and meant, uh… I realized I didn’t quite know what it meant, and after fumfering for a minute I gave in and looked it up. Turns out the reason I was confused is that it means two different things (OED, entry updated March 2015):

1. intransitive. Chiefly Scottish and English regional (northern). To talk foolishly or inconsequentially; to talk nonsense; to blather, ramble; to chatter, gossip. Frequently with on, about.
1776 Weekly Mag. 25 Jan. 145 Troth, Branky, man, I hinna faul’t my een Since here I left you havrin’ late the streen.
1816 W. Scott Antiquary III. xv. 332 He just havered on about it to make the mair o’ Sir Arthur.
[…]
1907 N. Munro Bud xxvii. 259 ‘The sweetest in the world!’ cried Auntie Bell. ‘I wonder to hear you haivering.’
1943 Scots Mag. May 129 Yin o’ Scotland’s great race o’ engineers that the writers write aboot an’ the orators haver aboot.
1988 C. Reid & C. Reid I’m gonna be (500 Miles) (song) in Proclaimers Sunshine on Leith (record sleeve notes) And if I haver, yeah I know I’m gonna be I’m gonna be the man who’s havering to you.
2009 I. Welsh Reheated Cabbage 260 Lawson eyed and pawed at her in lewd obscenity as he havered on. It was as well she probably couldn’t understand a word he was saying.

2. intransitive. Chiefly British (originally Scottish). To behave indecisively or hesitantly; to vacillate between opinions or courses of action; to waver, dither.
1866 W. Gregor Dial. Banffshire (Philol. Soc.) 73 Ye needna be haiverin’ that wye aboot gain’ haim..wee the lassie. A ken ye like ‘ir.
1919 M. Diver Strong Hours iii. 83 You’ve been havering long enough; and I gather that my proposal—broadly speaking—is not distasteful to you?
1955 J. Bayley In Another Country 75 It was a classic moment for polite havering, but the sensible girl did not haver: he was holding the front door open and she climbed in without more ado.
2013 Express (Nexis) 1 Mar. 15 Over 20 years successive governments havered and dithered over nuclear reactor replacement.

(It’s “Of uncertain origin. Perhaps an imitative or expressive formation.”) Clearly Nelson is using it in the second sense, which apparently is filtering over here like so many UK terms. I’m sure my readers from across the pond know all about this, but I present it as a public service to my fellow confused Yanks.

I’ve gotten back to A History of Russian Literature by Victor Terras (see this post), which I set aside and forgot about for a while, and I’ve run into some more great stuff I have to pass along. From p. 116:

Peter the Great put an end to the role of the clergy in Russian literature. In 1701 the boyar Ivan Alekseevich Musin-Pushkin was instructed “to take charge of the Holy Patriarch’s house, the bishoprics, and matters pertaining to monasteries.” Musin-Pushkin immediately ordered that “monks should write nothing at all when alone in their cells, nor should they keep ink or paper; and if they are to write, then only in the refectory, with the permission of their superiors and in compliance with the traditions of the church fathers. […] Feofan Prokopovich, archbishop of Novgorod and a leading poet, man of letters, and preacher of his age, was the father of the “Clerical Regulations,” which in effect severed the ties between the Russian church and Russian literature. In the West, even in modern times, many clergymen were also important men of letters. In Russia no member of the clergy ever entered secular literature with any success.

From p. 117:

Gradually secondary education also began to spread across the empire. […] Russian education developed from the top down. Russia had a distinguished academy before it had a university; it had a university before it had a network of secondary schools; and it had adequate secondary schools long before it had any organized elementary education.

And from p. 118:

Peter the Great launched a program to make Western thought and knowledge available in Russian. […] The translators of all these works were a motley crowd: Muscovite officials and clerks, Ukrainian clerics, Polish noblemen, Swedish prisoners of war, and Germans from the Moscow “German suburb.” Their lexicon was a chaos of Slavonic high style and vulgarisms, Ukrainianisms and Polonisms, loan translations from the German, French, or Latin, and thousands of outright borrowings. The grammar was anarchic, mixing Slavonic, Muscovite, and Ukrainian forms and syntax. Subsequently Russian literature, in particular the theoretical and practical works of Trediakovsky, Lomonosov, and Sumarokov, played a decisive role in transforming the chaotic language they faced as young men into the serviceable literary idiom they left to their successors.

Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson discusses how he translated his own novel into English:

I never intended to translate my own book. The way it happened felt almost as if by accident. I self-published a fantasy novel called Hrímland in 2014. I was exhausted after the process, but soon after I decided to try out translating it. Gollancz had opened their submissions for a limited time, and I used that for motivation. It was just supposed to be an experiment to see how on earth I would manage to translate this work. I never imagined it would go anywhere. That book ended up becoming Shadows of the Short Days.

See, I knew this was the kind of book where I couldn’t just hand it off to a translator and get a good result without massive interference from myself. I wanted to find out how I could do it, and perhaps in doing so learn something new about how I wrote in English.

Writing fantasy fiction naturally lends itself to a lot of worldbuilding – and that worldbuilding is done through language. In Icelandic, I had pillaged my country’s archaic vocabulary when coming up with fantastical terms in universe, also looking up old kenningar, poetical words and phrases. I turned these words into species, warrior-castes, sorcerer names. Icelandic also lends itself well to making up new words – a language with a lot of compound nouns is fun that way. So, when I looked how I would tackle the translation, I had to decide what to keep and what to translate into English.

When is something too precious to worldbuilding lost in translation? When is something a bit too untranslatable, too culturally important, or just too damn cool to be turned into English?

A whole lot, according to the glossary at the end of the book. […]

In the Icelandic text, the ravenfolk speak a very strange type of Icelandic (or, well, Hrímlandic). Their corvine vocal cords can mimic human languages effectively, but they care little for the ways of land-bound species. They much prefer to speak in the rough caws of their native skramsl (which is an archaic word for a raven crowing). They speak a faux type of Old Icelandic, like something you see when reading the Sagas of the Icelanders. The Sagas took place in the 9th to 11th centuries during the settlement of Iceland, written a few centuries later. In universe, the náskárar learned the human tongue then, and have since not bothered with updating it much.

So how do you translate someone speaking fake Old Icelandic in English? […] This is where it becomes convenient being the author as well as the translator. I did something a bit strange. I rewrote their dialogue and kept a lot of Icelandic words in there. Like, a lot. They almost speak Icelandic half of the time, although it’s the same kind of strange, faux Old Icelandic. The fusion feels like something from another world, a different time, and the English reader gets a real sense that these bastards really are speaking the old tongue. This was a big part of why I wanted to do the translation myself. I knew I wanted to do something unorthodox with them, as with so many other parts of the world.

Even if it’s just mundane things like not translating landi as moonshine.

I personally think those are pretty dubious decisions that another translator would sensibly have avoided, but hey, it’s his book, and it’s fun to read about. (There are more details at the link, of course.) Thanks, MattF!

Joel at Far Outliers is posting excerpts from Iain MacGregor’s Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, The Berlin Wall, and the Most Dangerous Place On Earth, and there’s a point of Hattic interest in Checkpoint Charlie’s Other Names; after explaining that the well-known term comes from the NATO phonetic alphabet (there was a Checkpoint Alpha at Helmstedt/Marienborn and a Checkpoint Bravo at Dreilinden/Drewitz), MacGregor continues:

Checkpoint Charlie was now designated the major crossing point for Allied personnel, foreigners, and diplomats in the heart of Berlin. The Russians simply called it the “Friedrichstraße Crossing Point,” and their East German cousins the Grenzübergangsstelle (“Border Crossing Point”) Friedrich/Zimmerstraße—which was geographically where the checkpoint was located.

Naturally I wanted to confirm these statements, but it turns out the Russian Wikipedia article is named Чекпойнт Чарли, and does not mention that there was any more common Russian version (and when I did a corpus search on Фридрихштрассе I found nothing relevant); furthermore, the Russian Wikipedia article mentions Yulian Semyonov’s spy novel Бомба для председателя (written 1970), whose text contains many mentions of “Чек Пойнт Чарли” [Chek Point Charli] but none of any “Friedrichstraße Crossing Point.” Does anybody know anything about either Russian or German usage back in the ’70s?

Last year Asymptote featured Nina Perrotta’s interview with David Buchta of Brown University about teaching and translating the Bhagavad Gītā. It’s full of good things; here are a few excerpts:

NP: Could you talk a little about the Sanskrit-to-English translation challenges of the Gītā in particular?

DB: A big question I’ve seen with translations of the Gītā is “What do you do with the word yoga?” There’s a recent translation by Gavin Flood, where he focuses on how this word, particularly as it comes up in the Gītā, pairs up with another word, sāṅkhya. He translates sāṅkhya as “theory” and yoga as “practice.” I think there’s something insightful in this. Now, there’s obviously something really simplistic about those translations, but I’ve been studying this stuff for years, and seeing it that way, I thought, “That’s a nice way of thinking about it!” Of course, you need to go and explain what you mean by it.

A lot of translators would leave the word yoga untranslated, because if you think about what yoga means and how it’s used in the Gītā, and the range of meanings of various things that were called yoga in that intellectual and philosophical context, there isn’t anything similar that you could really point to in English. But there’s a problem with leaving the word untranslated, because it’s now an English loanword. It means something totally different as an English loanword than what it meant in the Bhagavad Gītā.

A third approach is to use an etymologically based translation of the word yoga. It’s related to this verb meaning “to connect” or “to yoke” in English, so some people will bring in this notion of joining or connecting. They’ll come up with a translation based on the etymology of the word. But there’s a big problem with that that I can turn back to in a bit.

NP: What are some of the things that yoga meant in the Gītā?

DB: Typically, in a context like the Gītā, the word yoga meant something like a spiritual practice (which is why “practice” isn’t a particularly bad translation for it), a path that led to the goal of some level of self-awareness, self-realization, enlightenment. In the Gītā, one of the main ways in which yoga is presented is more specifically called karma-yoga, which is essentially the practice of “detached action.” Totally different from doing “hot yoga” (I’m using scare quotes) and twisting your body into pretzels. […]

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Valentin Rasputin’s 1974 Живи и помни (Live and Remember) begins softly and tentatively, like the Kreutzer Sonata: in the frigid winter at the start of 1945, the aging Mikheich discovers that his trusty old carpenter’s ax has disappeared from its hiding place beneath the floorboards of the Guskov family’s bathhouse. The thief took some tobacco and a pair of skis as well, but it’s the ax Mikheich can’t stop complaining about, and since whoever took it couldn’t have been from the village (no local would have taken the skis), he figures he’ll never see it again. He’s still muttering about it when his daughter-in-law Nastyona comes home and wonders tiredly why he’s going on about some hunk of metal when the entire world has been turned upside down. (“Nastyona” is an unusual diminutive form of Nastasya; in a nice touch, you discover halfway through the book that she was called Nastya, the usual diminutive, until she married Andrei and his father started calling her Nastyona — since then, everyone does.) But at night, just as she’s falling asleep, something pops into her head and she can’t stop thinking about it. In the morning she sneaks off to the bathhouse and has a look around, but doesn’t notice anything amiss. She can’t let it go, though, and the next day she leaves a loaf of bread there. For two days nothing happens, it’s still there, and she decides she must be wrong, but she replaces it with a new loaf anyway — she can’t get over the fact that no stranger would have known to look under the floorboards. Sure enough, two days later the loaf is gone; she finds crumbs and a cigarette butt. Now she’s sure.

As she suspected, her husband Andrei, who went off to war over three years before, has returned; he finds her in the bathhouse and tells her his story. After fighting and being wounded in the battle for Moscow, at Smolensk, and at Stalingrad, he was wounded so badly he had to be sent to a hospital in Novosibirsk to recover, and he was told by fellow recuperating soldiers that he would surely be sent home. But instead he was ordered back to the front; full of resentment and sure he would be killed this time, he went to the station and found himself unpremeditatedly getting on a train going the wrong way, to Irkutsk, and realized he was going to make his way back to his native village, Atamanovka on the Angara. He tells Nastyona he came back to see her — not his mother, not his father — and she mustn’t tell anyone he’s there: “if you do, I’ll kill you.” He tells her where he’s staying (in a disused house on the other side of the river) and she sneaks across on the ice to bring him his rifle and some food.

That sets up the basic situation; for the rest of the novel, she tries to keep him hid and supplied while fending off the increasing suspicions of her in-laws — the police have been by to ask about Andrei’s disappearance. Their relationship is well portrayed: they become closer than they had been for years, but they’re still in different worlds; after a lyrical passage in which she shares her fond memories of prewar life with him, we learn that he has stopped listening because he’s obsessed by his own terrible memories of the war. The screws are tightened when she discovers she’s pregnant (of course, they’ve been making love); she asks him if he might risk coming forward — surely they’ll forgive him? — but he says they don’t forgive you for desertion: “If they could shoot me and then revive me and shoot me twice more, they’d do it.” Her desperation and his steely resolve are brilliantly portrayed; I was reminded of both Crime and Punishment and Anna Karenina, and this book can hold up its head in that company. The war ends (he knows without being told, because he hears the guns being fired off in celebration across the river) and her pregnancy starts being more apparent; the tension builds unbearably until the final page. This is a magnificent, tragic novel, and I recommend it without reservation; the translation by Antonina W. Bouis seems well done, so even if you have no Russian you can appreciate it. It’s even better than Последний срок (Borrowed Time; see this post), and I might never have read either if I confined myself to Russian lit’s greatest hits and started with his famous Прощание с Матёрой (Farewell to Matyora). Score another one for my obsessively thorough chronological reading program.
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The eudæmonist has a fine post called Diabolo, l’emigrette & la dame de pique that begins fetchingly as follows:

It’s always the way of things, you are merrily reading a newly acquired translation of Pushkin’s ‘Queen of Spades’ instead of starting your workday, and as you are waiting for the Countess to return from the ball in section three and encounter the not particularly pleasant Hermann (not quite Germain), you observe, with Pushkin, with Hermann, the decorations in the Countess’s room – the porcelain shepherdesses, the trinket boxes, the fans, the bandalores.² The bandalores? The bandalores – ah, yes, the yo-yos.³ This seems like an odd addition to a lady’s tchotchkes, so you consult a second translation (because of course you have more than one to hand), which translates the word in question as ‘tops’.⁴ This seems less objectionable as bric-à-brac, but now that you’re looking into the matter you simply must know: what on earth was Pushkin talking about? In consulting with a learned colleague, you learn that Pushkin used the word рулетки (note the plural), which despite its similarity to roulette (which would keep up the gambling theme) the ever (over) helpful lexicographer Dahl defines as a ‘French toy’ on a cord that sounds very much like a yo-yo.⁵ […]

The matter could end there – you know what Pushkin meant, after all – but you feel that you should add that the OED is not particularly helpful on the bandalore, hazarding no speculation on its origins and taking a limited view of its history. The entry does include a reference to an 1864 issue of The Athenæum which mentions Thomas Moore’s gossip about the Duke of Wellington toying with a bandalore (originally published in Blackwood’s), as well as another quotation indicating that even in 1824 a bandalore was a sadly ‘gone-by’ toy, such as an old bachelor’s servant might use to divert an irruption of children. This incidentally makes it plausible for a countess to have a few lying around circa 1833/4 – which would be of a piece with the rest of her out-of-date style.

This does not, however, give you much of a sense of when or or where or why the bandalore was a fashion, and the word keeps running through your head, spinning away only to whirl back again, so you delay the beginning of your work still further to find some seven or more references, including a letter from Horace Walpole to Miss Mary Berry dated 12 October 1790, in which the toy/game is mentioned: ‘I have dined to-day at Bushy with the Guilfords, where were only the two daughters, Mr. Storer, and Sir Harry Englefield, who performed en professeur at the game I thought Turkish, but which sounds Moorish; he calls it Bandalore.’ [N.b.: I have added the italics for Bandalore based on the printed version at the link — LH.] There is also the deeply dull Dramatic dialogues for the use of young persons (1792) by Elizabeth Sibthorpe Pinchard, in which bandalores are called ‘Prince of Wales’s toys’ because ‘They are all the faſhion. The Prince of Wales brought them in’ (pp. 10–11).⁶ Sixteen-year-old Mary Spilsbury exhibited a painting of ‘The bandalore, or fashionable toy’ at the Royal Academy, also in 1792.⁷

There is much more, including the French term l’emigrette and “the diabolo, another string-and-bobbin based toy which, according to the 1911 Britannica, originated in China and was popular in France around 1812 as le diable” (not to mention the footnotes and some colorful images); the only one of the terms I was familiar with was yo-yo, and I am struck by the fact that neither it nor bandalore has a known etymology, though for the former the OED says, rather irritatingly, “probably from one of the Philippines languages.” (As for the latter, I beg leave to doubt the statement at the M-W entry that its Look-up Popularity is “Top 26% of words.”)

Joe Moran is generally a good and thought-provoking read; I’ve quoted him here more than once. I just came across an essay he published last year called “Good Sentences Are Why We Read” (an excerpt from his book First You Write a Sentence); it’s something of a jumble, beginning in a fairly rote way (“No one can agree on what a sentence is. The safest definition is typographic”) and going on to more interesting material that involves quoting lots of other writers:

A sentence can be a single word, or it can stretch into infinity, because more words can be piled on to a main clause for ever. The Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal wrote a whole novel (Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age) containing just one sentence. But he said that his comic sensibility was shaped by a short one he once read on a dry cleaner’s receipt: Some stains can be removed only by the destruction of the material itself.

Marcel Proust, who in The Captive wrote a 447-word sentence about a sofa, said that he wanted to “weave these long silks as I spin them” and to “encircle the truth with a single—even if long and sinuous—stroke.” For Proust, a sentence traced an unbroken line of thought. Cutting it in two broke the line. Depending on its line of thought, a sentence can be a tiny shard of sense or a Proustian demi-world, brought to life and lit up with words.

This next bit is intriguing, but I’m not sure how much to take seriously and how much is the Higher Thumb-Sucking:

Scientists at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kraków analyzed more than a hundred classic works by authors such as Dickens, Joyce and Beckett, and found that the sentences behaved like a mathematical multifractal: a structure whose smallest part resembles its whole. The best writing is self-consistent. It sounds as if it comes from the same breathing body standing in the same place, rather as wine from a certain terroir is said to have, from its climate and soil, a taste irreplicable anywhere else. What special terroir makes a piece of writing irreplicable? Its sentences.

(I’m not fond of “irreplicable” — it gets a few other Google Books hits, but I fail to see how it’s in any way preferable to irreplaceable, which is actually in dictionaries. [N.b.: There is a difference in meaning, as commenters explain below. I still don’t like it.]) There’s some more good stuff in there, along with filler (“Rhythm holds meaning”) and utter tosh (“Bad grammar is usually a sign of something deeper amiss with the rhythm”), but I want to focus on that “447-word sentence about a sofa.” You can see the sentence about halfway down Nathan Brixius’s page (“A sofa that had risen up from dreamland…”) and the original French here (“Canapé surgi du rêve…”), but why pick on that one? It’s only Proust’s third longest! The longest, 958 words according to Brixius, is from Cities of the Plain I and begins “Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional…”; you can see the French here (“Sans honneur que précaire, sans liberté que provisoire…”), and I note that it’s only 858 mots in French, that succinct tongue. (We discussed long sentences back in 2016.)