languagehat.com

Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org has been posting Big List updates pretty much daily (and he’s started a Patreon, if you want to support his good work), and the latest two are so interesting I thought I’d share them here.

jinx:

A jinx is a person or thing that carries bad luck with it. The origin of the Americanism is not quite certain, but it most likely comes from the name of a character in a very popular play at the turn of the twentieth century. The major dictionaries, however, all give tentative etymologies relating to the bird known as the wryneck or jynx because of its use in magic and casting spells. But the avian etymology has significant problems, and there is a clear trail of lexical evidence leading from the play to the word jinx that has been uncovered by researcher Douglas Wilson.

The play is Little Puck, produced by and starring comic actor Frank Daniels and written by Archibald C. Gunter. It debuted in New York in 1888 and, although today it is all but forgotten, it was tremendously successful, with touring companies and revivals throughout the United States of the next two decades. Among the cast of characters was this role, originally played by actor Harry Mack:

Jinks Hoodoo, esq. a curse to everybody…..Harry Mack

At the turn of the twentieth century, Jinks was commonly used as the name of comical characters in theater and in jokes.

Jinks Hoodoo quickly caught on as a nickname for someone who brought bad luck. […]

jody:
[Read more…]

Tom Almeroth-Williams writes for University of Cambridge Stories about “a treasure trove of women’s intellectual history”:

The astonishing collection comprises 47 books and pamphlets owned and annotated by the philosopher Mary Astell (1666–1731), viewed by many as “the first English feminist”. Astell’s hand-written notes reveal, for the first time, that she engaged with complex natural philosophy including the ideas of René Descartes. […]

In the early eighteenth century, only a minority of British women could read in English, let alone in French. But even more unusual is the extent of Astell’s scientific understanding which this precious collection makes clear. Catherine Sutherland, Deputy Librarian at Magdalene, who made the discovery says: “Women’s book collections from this period are so rare but it’s even more amazing to find one being used to advance a woman’s career as a writer. Magdalene’s collection represents the nucleus of Astell’s library, including the books that influenced her most.” […]

[Read more…]

Barry McGuire writes for the Guardian:

As Noongar kids in the Western Australian wheatbelt town of Kellerberrin, we grew up with blue-eyed comic book superheroes and black-and-white TV shows about cowboys and Indians. […] Then Bruce Lee came along. He was a hero different to all the other heroes. I first saw Bruce Lee, brave, powerful and lightning-fast, when his 1971 debut film The Big Boss came to the Kellerberrin drive-in. […]

A few short decades later, I’m proud to be part of a project in which Bruce Lee fights for justice and speaks to us in our own language here on Noongar Boodjar in south-western Australia. Lee’s 1972 movie Fist of Fury is being redubbed for a new audience as Fist of Fury Noongar Daa, an all-Noongar version to be screened at the 2021 Perth festival. It’s set in 1910 and I speak Noongar instead of Cantonese as a friend of Bruce Lee’s character Chen Zhen who fights to avenge the death of his master and for China’s honour against foreign colonial aggressors. […]

The Perth festival artistic associate, Kylie Bracknell, adapted and directed Hecate, the all-Noongar Macbeth at the 2020 festival as part of the 10-year Noongar Shakespeare Project to promote Noongar language to the world. […] With Fist of Fury Noongar Daa, many of the Noongar artists from Hecate have turned from The Bard to The Bruce for the 2021 Perth festival.

Fist of Fury Noongar Daa was inspired by Navajo Star Wars, a 2013 Navajo-dub of the original Star Wars film. Working with huge cultural figures like Bruce Lee and Shakespeare as well as Star Wars is an effective way to make people sit up and pay attention to what you’re doing. This is a language reclamation project nestled inside an Australian-first dub in a language spoken by only 2% of the entire Noongar population. […] Through Fist of Fury Noongar Daa, our language is now living in a different area of life but it is the same vibration. When I saw the first footage in our language, I giggled so much. It took me back to sitting at the Kellerberrin drive-in, but thinking, “Hey, this time this is my language and I understand it.”

I love projects like this. Thanks, Bathrobe!

From Online Etymology Dictionary’s FB post:

The ides of March approach. What’s the past tense of “beware?”

Century Dictionary explains, “Like be gone, now begone, be ware came to be written as one word, beware, and then was classed by some authors with the numerous verbs in be-, and inflected accordingly; hence the erroneous forms bewares in Ben Jonson, and bewared in Dryden.”

But calling any usage “erroneous” consigns you to history’s dustbin. Better if Caesar had waswared the people who had told him he should have bewent.

Fave comment (from Helen Pollock): “Bejaysus! ????” (Of course there’s a commenter who has to spell out that “‘Beware’ is an imperative form. […] It wouldn’t have a past tense.” Thanks, Captain Obvious!)

Helena Smith reports for the Observer on yet another moral panic about foreign incursion on precious linguistic purity:

Usually, Professor Georgios Babiniotis would take pride in the fact that the Greek word “pandemic” – previously hardly ever uttered – had become the word on everyone’s lips. After all, the term that conjures the scourge of our times offers cast-iron proof of the legacy of Europe’s oldest language. Wholly Greek in derivation – pan means all, demos means people – its usage shot up by more than 57,000% last year according to Oxford English Dictionary lexicographers.

But these days, Greece’s foremost linguist is less mindful of how the language has enriched global vocabulary, and more concerned about the corrosive effects of coronavirus closer to home. The sheer scale of the pandemic and the terminology spawned by its pervasiveness have produced fertile ground for verbal incursions on his mother tongue that Babiniotis thought he would never see. “We have been deluged by new terms and definitions in a very short space of time,” he told the Observer. “Far too many of them are entering spoken and written Greek. On the television you hear phrases such as ‘rapid tests are being conducted via drive-through’, and almost all the words are English. It’s as if suddenly I’m hearing Creole.”

With nine dictionaries to his name, the octogenarian is the first to say that language evolves. The advent of the internet also posed challenges, he concedes, but he has never opposed adding new words that translated and conveyed technological advances. “I included them in the Lexicon,” he says of his magisterial 2,500-page dictionary of modern Greek language. “But where possible, I also insisted that if they could be replaced by Greek words they should. I came up with the word diadiktyo for the internet and am glad to say it has stuck.” […] “For Greeks, language has always been a sensitive issue,” says Babiniotis. “I know what I say troubles some, but it is the duty of a linguist to speak out.” Babiniotis’s protestations have been fodder for cartoonists and the butt of debate. But he is not alone.

The emergence of “Greenglish” – Greek written with English letters – as an unofficial e-language since the arrival of the internet has also sparked alarm. Facebook groups have emerged, deploring the phenomenon. “A lot of youngsters use it to message one another because they think it’s easier,” says Susanna Tsouvala at the Polyglot Bookstore, which specialises in foreign language textbooks in central Athens. “Spelling’s easier and they don’t have to use the accents required in Greek, but ultimately it’s going to be our language’s loss.”

For many, book publishers have become the last line of defence. At Patakis, one of the country’s most established publishers, inclusion of foreign words in any work is carefully monitored. “Books are guardians of the language,” insists Elena Pataki, whose family-run firm publishes books for all ages. “We recently published a business book about family-owned enterprises and made a conscious choice to limit references to foreign terms.”

OK, in the first place, “Greece’s foremost linguist” is absurd. Not only should English journos not be in the business of anointing foreign scholars as “foremost,” Babiniotis isn’t a linguist at all — he’s a philologist, lexicographer, and former Minister of Education and Religious Affairs (God save the mark). Actual linguists don’t go around pontificating about the horror of loanwords. (Artemis Alexiadou is an example of an actual Greek linguist; she doesn’t practice my kind of linguistics, but she’s definitely in the field.) In the second place, book publishers carefully monitoring inclusion of foreign words is ridiculous: you’re going to wind up producing books in a language no one speaks, just like in the bad old days of katharevousa. And in the third place, there’s nothing wrong with loanwords, amigo. They’re just words. (Thanks, Trevor!)

Ben Brumfield writes at From the Page about a problem dear to this editor’s heart:

When we transcribe handwritten text, we make mistakes. We misread words with difficult letters; we accidentally modernize a word with archaic spelling; we skip a line. Everyone does it, and even though we humans don’t make as many mistakes as computers do reading handwriting, that might be small comfort for people who are trying to do their best at a difficult task. Is it possible to classify the kinds of mistakes we make when we transcribe?

[…] 21st century crowdsourcing volunteers are not the first people to copy text from a handwritten exemplar to a new medium; typists, printers, clerks, and scribes have been doing nearly the same thing for thousands of years. Editors and other textual scholars in classics, biblical studies, and medieval studies have had to work with differences between copies of the same text, determining which variant might be an error and which might be original (or conjecturing an original if both variants look wrong). Over centuries, they’ve created an extensive literature analyzing scribal errors, classifying them and identifying probable causes. Could we learn from them?

Martin Worthington is an Assyriologist who has asked the same question. In Principles of Akkadian Textual Criticism, he introduces the conclusions of textual scholars from other disciplines to his own field, describing each type of scribal error and looking for examples from Mesopotamian documents. For the most part, he finds that the classifications apply accurately, even though scribes wrote clay tablets instead of parchment or paper. Scribes were most likely to make these errors when working with unfamiliar kinds of texts or when they were sleepy, but errors also occurred when the original was damaged or the style of handwriting was unfamiliar.

Computers are not cuneiform, but I think that we all might be subject to the same kinds of forces, so let’s dive into Worthington’s framework.

Worthington’s classification includes Errors of letter similarity (subdivided into Mis-readings and True typos), Errors of word interpretation, Interference by internal narration (“When we read someone else’s writing, we carry their words in our head on the way to the keyboard. It’s easy for our internal narration of the text to change it to the wording, spelling, or punctuation we’d use instead of that used in the original”), Eye-skip (saut du même au même), Word-skipping (lipography), Haplography (when something is doubled in the original, but we only transcribe it once), Dittography (when we repeat a word or phrase that only occurs a single time in the original), Polar errors (when the original says “hot”, but a copyist writes “cold”, or replaces “big” with “small”), Errors of attraction, Synonym Substitution, Dialect Normalization, Cut-and-Paste Errors (when a transcriber saves effort by copying repeated text that actually varies in tense or spelling), and Hypercorrection (when our transcriptions “correct” errors we perceive in the original which were not actually errors). Ben says “My own experience as a transcriber convinces me that Worthington’s classification scheme is applicable to modern users of web-based transcription software as much as to Mesopotamian scribes working with clay tablets,” and I’d have to agree. Thanks, Leslie!

Also, RusTRANS is “actively seeking essays for a new, Open Access volume which is aimed at stimulating and consolidating scholarship about the global imprint of Russian literature in translation”:

Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context (2023) is intended to constitute the first geographically coherent, culturally inclusive, and theoretically consistent model of the distribution and influence of translated Russian literature on global cultures from 1900 to the present day. Given that many leading studies in this field have privileged Russian cultural transmission in Britain and/or Russian influence on British writers[…], the editors particularly invite new scholarship on the transmission of Russian culture and on intertextualities between specific Russian writers and non-Anglophone literatures.

I found out via Muireann Maguire’s FaceBook post; see here for more details. If you know someone who might be interested, pass it on; that’s definitely a book I’d like to read.

As I said in my review of Sasha Sokolov’s Школа для дураков (A School for Fools), Sokolov was bowled over by Aksyonov’s Затоваренная бочкотара (translated by Joel Wilkinson as Surplussed Barrelware) when he was just beginning to write, so I followed up my reading of Bitov’s Жизнь в ветреную погоду (Life in Windy Weather; see this post) by tackling the Aksyonov, which I read years ago with minimal comprehension. As with the Bitov, I’m really glad I returned to it, both because it shed new light on Sokolov and because I now fully realize why it was such an event in Soviet literature. To give you the basic idea of what it’s about, I’ll quote the summary in Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos, by Mark Lipovetsky and Eliot Borenstein:

The plot of this story is extremely simple. The driver Volodya Teleskopov is bringing empty barrels (the “surplussed barrelware” of the story’s title) to Koryazhsk, the regional center. Along the way he is joined by Gleb Shustikov, a marine; Irina Valentinova, a schoolteacher; Vadim Afanasievich Drozhinin, a scholar; the retired activist Mochenkin; and others. During their travels, strange things happen to them: All of them have lyrical dreams about a “Good Person,” and all of them grow strangely attached to one another and to the barrelware, without which they cannot even imagine their lives. So when the bureaucrats in Koryazhsk refuse to accept the empty barrels, the group decides to continue their journey with their beloved barrelware, only now they have no apparent destination whatsoever. […]

The absence of a mimetic dimension completely transforms the utopian discourse itself. Utopia always considers its own possible application to reality. In Aksyonov’s novel, the presence of “reality” itself seems problematic. In Aksyonov’s hands, the Soviet utopia turns into a kind of children’s fairy tale. The barrelware becomes a magical being, leading the unlikely traveling companions to the magic kingdom; in his letter to his girlfriend, Volodya Teleskopov writes: “Simka, you want the truth? I don’t know when we’ll see each other again, because we go not where we want to go but where our dear barrelware wants us to go. Understand?” […]

[Aksyonov] basically removes the spell of the Soviet utopian myth by transforming it into belles lettres rather than a “reflection of life.” In this case, the text obeys only the laws of literary play.

But not only is it a subversive deconstruction of Soviet myth, it’s an encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet cultural references: poetry from Pushkin and Lermontov to doggerel chastushki, music from Mozart to pop hits and Gulag songs (I was astonished when an entire stanza of «Этап на Север, срока огромные» was quoted — how did that get past the censors in 1968?), and all sorts of Soviet realia that I had to have explained to me by Yuri Shcheglov’s «Затоваренная бочкотара» Василия Аксенова: Комментарий. If you understand the references in this novella, you basically understand the mentality of Aksyonov’s generation.

So what did Sokolov get from it? Beyond the invigorating “you mean you can do that?” effect, there are all sorts of details, like the unpunctuated monologues, the sexualization of teachers (Aksyonov’s flirty geography teacher Irina Seleznyova becomes Sokolov’s biology teacher Vera Arkadyevna, who goes with young men to their apartments and lets them do what they will with her), and the river that “runs through Russia” at the end of the Aksyonov, which could have suggested the river Lethe that may or may not exist in Sokolov; there are butterfly nets in both; even the unusual word земснаряд ‘suction dredge, dredging barge,’ which I have encountered only twice in my reading, occurs in these two texts. In general, there’s what Shcheglov calls “all these fantasies, dreams, doubles, mirror reflections, and excursions into zaum [всех этих фантазий, снов, двойников, зеркальных отражений, экскурсов в заумь], which Sokolov drew freely from. But the main thing is that they’re both superb modernist works that will repay your investment in them; I have only seen Google snippets of the Wilkinson translation of Surplussed Barrelware, but it seems all right, and it has good annotations. Give it a try!

Anatoly Liberman posts about a couple of words with interesting histories:

The German for “to give a shot, to vaccinate” is impf-en (-en is the ending of the infinitive). Impf– is an exact cognate of English imp. How can it be? Many centuries ago, impfen (in a slightly different phonetic form) appeared in Old High German as a borrowing of Medieval Latin impotāre “to graft.” Latin impotus, itself a borrowing from Greek, meant “graft”; Greek émphutos designated “grafted, implanted.” In German, the verb became a term of winemaking and horticulture and acquired the sense “to improve the quality of wine by bunging the vessel.” Centuries later, the term began to be used for “vaccination”: thus, from “corking a bottle” to “administering a shot.”

It is the sense “graft” that determined the development of the same Latin verb in English. The Old English noun impe ~ impa meant “sapling, young shoot” (shoot: compare shot in the arm!). Later, sapling broadened its meaning and began to designate “child.” The train of thought is predictable: compare sap “juice,” the root of sapling “young tree” and still later “young person,” as in Shakespeare; scion also first meant “shoot, slip, graft.” With time, the word imp “sapling” acquired the sense “the child of the Devil” and still later “mischievous child.” […]

[Read more…]

I became aware of Harry Martinson’s book-length poem Aniara as an sf fan in the early ’60s, though it may have been the opera rather than the book; in any case, while I of course welcomed the idea of a spaceship driven off course by an asteroid and sent on an unchangeable new path, the details sounded awfully gloomy, and I never investigated further. Now I learn, from Geoffrey O’Brien’s NYRB review [archived] of poem, opera, and (recent) movie, that Hugh MacDiarmid was one of the original translators! MacDiarmid, as I wrote here, is one of my oldest poetic lodestones, and had I known that I might well have sought out the translation (though it’s apparently not easy to find; Amazon has “3 Used from $893.34 2 New from $969.00 1 Collectible from $199.99”). At any rate, there are some linguistically interesting bits in O’Brien’s review:

When I first encountered Aniara in the original translation by Hugh MacDiarmid and Elspeth Harley Schubert (1963), its propulsive urgency carried me along in an uninterrupted reading. The effect is musical even if the translators did not attempt to replicate the various meters and rhyme schemes deployed by Martinson, and there is an echo in its voicings of cosmic emptiness of MacDiarmid’s stark evocations of rock and sea in such poems as “On a Raised Beach” and “Island Funeral,” as well as his devotion to incorporating scientific and technical vocabulary into his poetry. In 1968, the year it appeared as a science-fiction paperback—oracular song smuggled into mass distribution—Aniara seemed a model for further attempts at epic in its fusing of concepts from astrophysics, the trappings of pulp fantasy, the contemporary science fiction of A.E. van Vogt and Ray Bradbury (writers Martinson greatly admired), the memories of wartime trauma, the fear of future weaponry, and the deep well of myth and ancient history. The theme was claustrophobic but the form was exhilarating, open to all manner of variations and tonal shifts.

Binding it together is the swirl of neologisms around whose repetitions the poem’s rhythm constructs itself: the Mima [“the spaceship’s feminized computer, an omniscient entity whose bulletins from Earth provide respite for the passengers who cluster around her worshipfully in the Mima Hall”] and her priestly guardian, the Mimarobe; Douris (Earth); goldonda (spaceship); phototurb (weapon of future destruction); the abandoned lands of Rind and Xinombra and Upper Gond. Pleasure-seeking passengers are nostalgic for the lost slang of Dourisburg: “Come rockasway and shimble…. Droom dazily, come hillo in my billows.” All this vocabulary is not clutter but a fluid element, offering momentary respite from the oppressiveness of strict definition, a last stand of playfulness even when the subject is annihilation. Of “Aniara,” the name of the spaceship and the most haunting coinage of all, Martinson said, “The name Aniara doesn’t signify anything. I made it up. I wanted to have a beautiful name.” A glossary to the MacDiarmid-Schubert translation describes it as

a combination of letters, rich in vowels, which represents the space in which the atoms move. The adjective aniaros (fem. aniara) in ancient Greek means sorrowful. Thus, Aniara = the ship of sorrow.

When sung by a chorus in Blomdahl’s opera, “Aniara” becomes a wail of lamentation.

I’m curious about the originals of those invented words (the Swedish poem does not seem to be online), but the one that most caught my interest was in another place, where he talks about “the fragments of futuristic dance band music played in the ship’s lounge where everybody is doing ‘the yurg’” — the yurg! (I wonder if it was anything like the lipsi?) Happily, I found the relevant stanza 12 quoted here in Swedish (emphasis added):

Orkestern spelar fancies och vi dansar ut.
Den flicka jag för runt är absolut.
Hon är en flicka ifrån Dorisburg,
men fast hon dansar här sen flera år
i Aniaras danshall säger hon rent ut
att hon för sin del inte alls förstår
att finna någon skillnad på den yurg
som dansas här och den i Dorisburg.

Och när vi dansa yurgen står det klart
att allt som heter yurg är underbart
när Daisi Doody vrider sig i yurg
och jollrar slangen ifrån Dorisburg […]

My question is: shouldn’t it be jurg in Swedish?

If you want to read more about it, with further excerpts in Swedish, check out Lisa’s Reviews > Aniara: En revy om människan i tid och rum, and here’s the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction entry for Martinson.

An amusing 2007 piece by Roger Ebert, “The Ping of Pong: Mystery Solved,” discusses the origins of the term “ping pong,” mainly quoting variously indignant (“I am very sad to see you trapped by your own ignorance”) and would-be scholarly (“As someone who lives in China and has an obsessive need to correct facts, I need to take issue with Nic Hautamaki’s statement that ping pong is derived from Mandarin”) communications from readers. The two most informative are these:

Arsen Azizyan, New Haven CT: “As a Chinese major in college who has spent two years in Beijing, I am compelled to correct Nic Hautamaki’s linguistic note. The term “ping-pong” is, in fact, an onomatope which originated in England, where the sport was invented (a more anemic alternative, now thankfully lapsed, was “whiff-whaff”). The Chinese word “ping-pang” was borrowed from the English, not vice versa – although Mr. Hautamaki’s confusion is understandable, given that the Chinese invented two new characters for the term, both intentional mutations of a pre-existing, phonetically similar character (pronounced “bing”). If any of your readers had doubts as to the practical usefulness of a college education, surely my letter has helped to reinforce them.’

Jake Jacobs, Singapore: “Your correspondent is somewhat misinformed. “Ping pang qiu” came from English, not the other way around. Parker Brothers trademarked the onomatopoetic term back in 1900, and early usage goes back to 1823. The pivot of the Chinese term is “qiu” which means ball, and the “ping pang” is a phonetic copy of “ping-pong.” Your earlier correspondent’s nose was out of joint because a sport (table tennis) which he takes seriously doesn’t get much respect.”

What bothers me is Jacobs’ assertion that “early usage goes back to 1823”; the OED, in an entry updated as recently as June 2006, does not have any citations before 1900 (Daily Chron. 8 May 6/6 “Our correspondent seems to hope that the unclean, playing Ping-Pong with the clean, will become unpleasantly conscious of his uncleanness and reform”). Anybody know anything about the early history of this “imitative or expressive” term?

Also, I learn from the OED that there is another ping-pong: “Also more fully ping-pong drum. A drum which supplies the melody in a Caribbean steel band; a tenor pan (first citation 1948 E. Leaf Isles of Rhythm viii. 196 “This transformation has occurred through the invention of the ping-pong, a percussion steel drum”).