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Trevor Joyce was reading this Guardian article by Ian Sample when his attention was caught by the following sentence:

Contaminated surfaces, such as doorknobs and light switches – “fomites”, to use the scientific terminology – may not be such a big deal, they claimed.

So he did a little searching and sent me the following splendid bit of Wikipedia etymology:

The Italian scholar and physician Girolamo Fracastoro appears to have first used the Latin word fomes, meaning “tinder”, in this sense in his essay on contagion, De Contagione et Contagiosis Morbis, published in 1546: “By fomes I mean clothes, wooden objects, and things of that sort, which though not themselves corrupted can, nevertheless, preserve the original germs of the contagion and infect by means of these”.

English usage of fomes, pronounced /ˈfoʊmiːz/, is documented since 1658. The English word fomite, which has been in use since 1859, is a back-formation from the plural fomites (originally borrowed from the Latin plural fōmĭtēs [ˈfoːmɪteːs] of fōmĕs [ˈfoːmɛs]). Over time, the English-language pronunciation of the plural fomites changed from /ˈfoʊmɪtiːz/) to /ˈfoʊmaɪts/, which led to the creation of a new singular fomite, pronounced /ˈfoʊmaɪt/. The French fomite, Italian fomite, Spanish fómite and Portuguese fómite or fômite, however, are derived directly from the Latin accusative singular fōmĭtēm, as usually happens with Latin common nouns.

What a hoot! I’m just glad I’ll probably never have occasion to say the word out loud. (A fomite, in case you were wondering, is “any inanimate object that, when contaminated with or exposed to infectious agents (such as pathogenic bacteria, viruses or fungi), can transfer disease to a new host.”)

Victor Mair has a Log post about the French idiom autant pour moi ‘my mistake’; it begins with a quote from Elizabeth Dreyer:

Ah! Autant pour moi, as the French say for “I stand corrected”: As much for me. So much for me? … I’ve just looked up the origin of this expression and in fact it’s rather fascinating. People write “autant pour moi” but that is a corruption, a miswriting of “au temps pour moi”. “Au temps!” is the order given in the military when one has to repeat a movement from the beginning because of an error. I have absolutely never seen “au temps pour moi” in print and have seen “autant pour moi” many times.

There is much discussion of the complicated nature of French apologies, but none of the prima facie absurdity of the idea that the idiom is a “corruption” of “au temps pour moi,” which is ipso facto the “correct” form. This idiocy (supported, of course, by the Académie: “Toutefois, pour l’Académie française, rien ne justifie l’usage de « autant »”) arises from the need to find logical explanations for illogical idioms; the supposed “au temps pour moi” may, in fact, exist only as a “logical” rewriting of the idiom (I am unable to find examples of its actual use in its supposed original sense), but it’s “logical,” and the French (if you will forgive the generalization, which I learned from actual Frenchpersons) are especially fond of that virtue. Once again, even the most basic elementary education in the science of language would save people from twisting themselves into these pretzels and trying to impose them on others.

Also, for those who might be interested, an online course on East Caucasian languages is coming up:

In the fall of 2020, the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory (HSE University, Moscow) organizes a course dedicated to East Caucasian (alias Nakh-Daghestanian) languages. The course will consist of 13 lectures by some of the leading researchers of this language family. […]

The course will be open to anyone interested in East Caucasian. Its target audience are students of linguistics at any level and researchers who would like to learn more about these languages and the area where they are spoken. The course does not have a rigid structure, you can choose to follow the whole course or attend a particular lecture you are interested in.

Lectures will be held on Wednesdays 19:00-20:30 Moscow time (UTC+3), starting from October 14. Johanna Nichols’s lecture will take place on Friday, October 16.

Registration form at the link.

I’m rereading Venedikt Erofeev’s immortal Moskva-Petushki, and at one point he refers to “четвертый позвонок” [the fourth vertebra], which turns out to be the name of a novel by the Finnish writer Martti Larni. He’s not in any of my reference books, but of course the internet knows of him, and he has his own Wikipedia article. I was more struck, though, by this brief paragraph about him in A History of Finnish Literature by Jaakko Ahokas (American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1973):

Martti Larni (b. 1909), who has worked for newspapers and publishers, lived a few years after World War II in Wisconsin. He wrote a satire on contemporary life, especially in the United States, Neljäs nikama (‘The Fourth Vertebra,’ 1957), which, although unremarkable, was noticed by the Russians, who translated it and adapted it for the stage. It was a huge success in the Soviet Union, which the author did not expect. Like Talvi, Larni has written a number of uninteresting works.

“Like Talvi, Larni has written a number of uninteresting works” — ouch! And Larni was still alive to see that contemptuous summary. As for the novel, there’s a brief account here:

The protagonist is Jeremias Suomalainen, a teacher and journalist, who becomes in the United States the assistant of the chiropractic Isaac Rivers and later “Professor” Jerry Finn, a citizen of the world. Rivers has a theory: all backaches come from the fourth vertebra. Larni mocks quick marriages and quick divorces, miracle doctors, Hollywood, self-contentedness, ignorance of other cultures, and advertising. In one scene Jerry peddles books; he has an abridged edition – 102 pages – of Anatole France’s collected works.

Sounds kind of like Babbitt.

Neil Patrick Doherty wrote on Facebook, “I have just heard that Derek Mahon has died. A sad loss to Irish poetry.” I wasn’t familiar with Mahon, but I liked the whimsical little poem Doherty posted:

“That day would skin a fairy —
A dying art,” she said.
Not many left of the old trade.
Redundant and remote, they age
Gracefully in dark corners
With lamplighters, sailmakers
And native Manx speakers.

And the bone-handled knives with which
They earned their bread? My granny grinds
Her plug tobacco with one to this day.

Apparently “it would skin a fairy” is a rural Ulster colloquialism meaning “it’s bitterly cold.”

Addendum. Just a quick recommendation for Ann Patchett’s “My Three Fathers” in the latest New Yorker; it’s a splendid piece of writing and makes me want to read more by her.

Maria Popova at Brain Pickings writes about an interesting project:

“If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it,” pioneering anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote in the 1979 volume Some Personal Views, “one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one’s subject matter.” Whether or not theoretical cosmologist Roberto Trotta read Mead, he embodies her unambiguous ethos with heartening elegance in The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is (public library | IndieBound) — an unusual “short story about what we think the All-There-Is is made of, and how it got to be the way it is,” told in the one thousand most common words in the English language. Under such admirable self-imposed restriction — the idea for which was given to Trotta by Randall Munroe, who knows a thing or two about illuminating complexity through simplicity — Trotta composes a poetic primer on the universe by replacing some of the densest terminology of astrophysics with invariably lyrical synonyms constructed from these common English words. The universe becomes the “All-There-Is,” Earth our “Home World,” the planets “Crazy Stars,” our galaxy a “Star-Crowd” — because, really, whoever needs supersymmetric particles when one could simply say “Mirror Drops”?

What emerges is a narrative that explains some of the most complex science in modern astrophysics, told in language that sounds like a translation of ancient storytelling, like the folkloric fables of African mythology, the kinds of tales written before we had the words for phenomena, before we had the understanding that demanded those words. Language, after all, always evolves as a mashup of our most commonly held ideas.

There are a bunch of quotes from the book — as well as a bunch of links, which I have been too lazy to add to the bit I quoted — at Maria’s post. Thanks, Trevor!

I recently ran into a bit of non-US slang I hadn’t been familiar with, the verb carpet meaning “to reprimand, esp. in the context of a superior telling off an employee”; that definition comes courtesy of the invaluable Green, who explains the derivation thus: “the miscreant is standing on his or her superior’s office carpet while receiving a reprimand.” His citations run from 1840 ([UK] H. Cockton Valentine Vox 350: They had done nothing! Why were they carpeted?) to 2002 ([Aus] S. Maloney Something Fishy 39: I’ll be carpetted for letting you lot come along), and along the way there’s a lone US cite from the Oct. 18, 1908 (Wash., DC) Evening Star: “Jockeys can’t pull anything now that they’re […] carpeted for it.” I particularly like this, from 1867 ([UK] M. Lemon Golden Fetters I 271): “Some unpleasant communication, which, though jocosely softened into ‘carpeting’ and ‘wigging,’ is really among the most distressing experiences of life.” The citations for wig ‘to scold, reprimand’ (from “a judge’s wig“) run from 1854 ([Ind] Delhi Sketch Bk 1 Aug. 90/2: Did not the Brigadier find fault with me / And wig me on Parade?) to 1938 ([Aus] X. Herbert Capricornia 483: [He] wigged the Government for its ignorance of what it ought to know); I presume it’s obsolete by now.

Is this usage familiar to my non-American readers? And, for that matter, are any of my fellow Yanks familiar with it?

Reading Leslie Jamison’s NYT Magazine article on Turkish baths (hammams), I hit the following sentence (I have reproduced the italics from the printed version; online, they have gone missing):

A woman named Gamze rubbed down my body with the kessa, a rough glove made from woven goat hair, and then draped my raw skin in the cascading bubbles of the swinging torba, a fine mesh towel dipped in copper tubs of olive-oil soap to heap shimmering white hills along the knobs of my spine, feathery and fizzy against my scrubbed skin, silken and gentle where the kessa had been vigorous and bracing.

It was obvious to me at a glance that “kessa” was not a Turkish word, in that spelling at least, and I grew provisionally irritated but of course had to investigate further. It turns out that 1) the Turkish word is kese (from Persian کیسه‎ [kise], ultimately from Akkadian ???????????????? [kīsu]), and 2) the usual English rendering seems to be “kessa,” as in the article. Which is understandable, because “kese” looks to an English speaker as if it should rhyme with “cheese,” but presents a problem: is it an English word, in which case it should not be italicized, or a foreign term that happens to be spelled in a different way than it is spelled in the original language? I suppose the latter, since it’s not in any of my English dictionaries nor in the OED, which mentions the Turkish word only s.v. purse:

In sense 4 [“In the Ottoman Empire: a specific sum of money, a certain number of piastres; spec. a unit of account equal to about 500 piastres”] after French bource (1665 in this sense, in the passage translated in quot. 1687), itself after Ottoman Turkish kise, (in later sources) kese, literally ‘purse’, denoting a unit of account (see note at definition; Turkish kese; < Persian kīsa or its etymon Arabic kīs (now kīsa; reborrowed < Turkish), both in sense ‘purse, bag’).

(Note that they take the Persian word from Arabic, whereas Wiktionary derives it from Akkadian; perhaps Xerîb will weigh in on this.) I’m provisionally withdrawing my irritation about the italics and deciding once again that language is endlessly confusing. I am, however, still irritated that they leave the essential cedillas off the name of the Çemberlitaş Hamamı, spelling it “Cemberlitas.” (I have had baths both there and at the NYC Russian and Turkish Baths she mentions at the start of the piece, and they were splendid experiences.)

The radio was playing something by Saint-Saëns and my wife asked me about his name; I said I had posted about it long ago at LH, and quickly dug up the 2004 post. It wasn’t very satisfactory, however; Saëns is certainly “a much altered form” of Sidōnius, but how did it get from one to the other? So I looked the saint up in French Wikipedia, hoping to find more detail: “Sidoine de Jumièges, appelé aussi saint Sidoine ou saint Saëns ou en latin Sidoneus…” Well, that’s confusing; can’t they pick a name and stick to it? In his exciting biography (captured by pirates, sold to monks who redeemed him but made him work at the abbey, where he became a monk) it mentions that he made a pilgrimage to Rome “en compagnie du futur saint Ouen.” Well, that’s an odd name too, thought I, so I followed the link to Ouen de Rouen: “Saint Ouen (Sanctus Audoenus Rotomagensis en latin médiéval, issu du germanique Audwin) ou Dadon…” The corresponding English article is under Audoin: “Audoin (AD 609 – on 24 August 684; also spelled Audoen, Ouen, Owen; Latin: Audoenus; known as Dado to contemporaries)…” Also, “His father was Saint Authaire (Audecharius)” and he was “a close friend of Saint Eligius,” who is “also Eloy, Eloi or Loye; French: Éloi.” Much as I love alternate names, I’m afraid the study of medieval saints might be a bit much for me.

Via Laudator Temporis Acti, Sheldon Pollock, from “Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World,” Critical Inquiry 35.4 (Summer, 2009) 931-961 (at 933-934):

First, what precisely do I mean by philology? It is an accurate index of philology’s fall from grace that most people today have only the vaguest idea what the word means. I have heard it confused with phrenology, and even for those who know better, philology shares something of the disrepute of that nineteenth-century pseudoscience. Admittedly, the definition of any discipline has to be provisional in some sense because the discipline itself is supposed to change with the growth of knowledge, and there isn’t any reason why the definition of a discipline should be any neater than the messy world it purports to understand. Still, philologists have not done much to help their cause. An oft-cited definition by a major figure at the foundational moment in the nineteenth century makes philology improbably grand—“the knowledge of what is known”⁸—though this was not much different from the definition offered by Vico in the previous century, for whom philology is the “awareness of peoples’ languages and deeds.”⁹ Perhaps in reaction to these claims, a major figure in the twentieth-century twilight, Roman Jakobson, a “Russian philologist,” as he described himself,¹⁰ made the definition improbably modest: philology is “the art of reading slowly.”¹¹ Most people today, including some I cite in what follows, think of philology either as close reading (the literary critics) or historical-grammatical and textual criticism (the self-described philologists).

What I offer instead as a rough-and-ready working definition at the same time embodies a kind of program, even a challenge: philology is, or should be, the discipline of making sense of texts. It is not the theory of language—that’s linguistics—or the theory of meaning or truth—that’s philosophy—but the theory of textuality as well as the history of textualized meaning.

The footnotes:

8. August Boeckh: “das Erkennen des Erkannten” (“[re-]cognizing [what the human mind has produced—that is] what has been cognized”) (quoted in Michael Holquist, “Forgetting Our Name, Remembering Our Mother,” PMLA 115 [Dec. 2000]: 1977). See also Axel Horstmann, Antike Theoria und Moderne Wissenschaft: August Boeckh’s Konzeption der Philologie (Frankfurt am Main, 1992), p. 103.

9. Giambattista Vico, New Science: Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations, trans. David Marsh (Harmondsworth, 1999), p. 79; hereafter abbreviated NS. See also NS, p. 5: “By philology, I mean the science of everything that depends on human volition: for example, all histories of the languages, customs, and deeds of various peoples in both war and peace.”

10. Holquist, “Forgetting Our Name, Remembering Our Mother,” p. 1977.

11. Quoted in Jan Ziolkowski, “What Is Philology? Introduction,” On Philology, ed. Ziolkowski (University Park, Pa., 1990), p. 6, though the idea is in fact Nietzsche’s, who described himself as “ein Lehrer des langsamen Lesens” (Nietzsche, “Vorrede,” Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols. [Munich, 1980], 3:17).

Pollock has appeared at LH several times (e.g., 2010, 2015), and we discussed philology in 2009.

Anthony Ossa-Richardson sent me a link to the Graun’s A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human? (“We asked GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator, to write an essay for us from scratch”) with the remark “Good to know AI is just as much of ignorant blowhard as most humans”; he pointed specifically to the statement:

Robots in Greek [sic] means “slave”. But the word literally means “forced to work”.

The Grauniacs were kind enough to add the [sic] and the link to an article which correctly states:

‘Roboti’ derives from the Old Church Slavanic [sic! –LH] ‘rabota’, meaning ‘servitude’, which in turn comes from ‘rabu’, meaning ‘slave’.

Remember, kids, you can’t believe everything you read on the internet, especially if it was written by a robot!