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It’s time once again to crowd-source my confusion! In Nathan Heller’s New Yorker review of the new memoir by Graydon Carter (archived), he writes:

Spy, which Carter launched, in 1986, with his former Time colleague Kurt Andersen, strove for a tone he calls “bemused detachment, but witheringly judgmental,” and was almost instantly a hit. Comic magazines like Mad and National Lampoon were zany, gag-filled, world-inside-your-head parodies, but Spy was a reported fact-and-trend magazine—closer, in some ways, to Time or Life. It had columns, features, sidebars, spreads, and crosswords, but in mischievously ironized forms.

Try as I might, I can’t grasp what’s meant by “world-inside-your-head parodies,” and I’m hoping someone can enlighten me.

Incidentally, I’m gobsmacked by the lifestyle of Timesters back in the day:

In the late seventies, when Carter arrived at Time, in a mid-level writing job, he was pleased to find that he never had to use his oven. Staffers charged restaurant dinners and even some family vacations to the magazine, often at their superiors’ urging. Time had a reputation as an apiary for buzzing young Ivy League types. “The general feeling was that everybody else could be making more elsewhere—a theory I did not subscribe to—but the expense account life made up for some of the shortage,” Carter writes. Every Friday, as the upcoming issue was put to bed, carts rolled through the hallways with hot dinner and wine, after which company cars took staffers home—or, in the summer, out to Long Island, where they rented houses in Sag Harbor. For Carter, who had his first Savile Row suit made during those years, Time was where the good going began.

A reader wrote to share the Merriam-Webster Word History of posthaste:

As an adverb, posthaste means “with all possible speed.” It’s found in contemporary writing, but we might think of it as an archaic expression, or at least one that cleverly alludes to days of yore, like on The Simpsons when Mr. Burns, making a rare venture out into the world in his horseless carriage without Smithers, commands to Marge: “You there, fill it up with petroleum distillate, and re-vulcanize my tires, posthaste!” […]

If you didn’t already know the etymology of posthaste, you might see the post at the beginning of the word and assume that it’s functioning as a prefix meaning “after,” the way it does in Latin words like postmortem, or in English words like postgame or postgraduate, or in movements of art or critical theory like postmodernism or post-structuralism.

Not quite. The post in posthaste is the same as in post office: it has to do with the mail. In Middle English, post haste was a noun for the speed with which a person delivering mail was pressed to do their job.

In the 16th century “haste, post, haste” was used to inform couriers (also called posts) that a letter was urgent. Post-haste later came to refer to great promptness and speed for any purpose, and was used in phrases like in post-haste and in all post-haste.

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J. Mark Bertrand writes for Lectio about a gorgeous new edition of the Bible:

When 2014’s Kickstarter sensation Bibliotheca finally delivered at the end of last year, I called its creator, Adam Lewis Greene. […] The longer you have to wait, the more your expectations build. And the higher your expectations, the greater the risk of disappointment. The unexpected popularity of the Bibliotheca project on Kickstarter brought a whole genre of Bibles — the multi-volume, reader-friendly kind — out of the archive of past ideas. Before, the conventional wisdom had been that nobody wanted a beautifully designed and produced edition of Scripture separated into volumes so as to do away with the necessity for super-thin pages and super-small print. (Or at least, nobody wanted to pay for it.) When Bibliotheca raised nearly $1.5 million for exactly such an edition, the conventional wisdom was quickly revised. […]

Bibliotheca turned out even better than I expected. And Adam’s interest in typography proved to be much more than a hipster affection (as more than one cultural commentator had opined): the level of care taken in every aspect of the page design and typesetting was breathtaking to observe.

For example, the first thing I saw when I opened the first volume at random was an example of hanging punctuation, a quotation mark sitting just outside the edge of the column so as not to disturb the visual flow. It’s a gorgeous detail. […] To understand the spirit of Bibliotheca’s design, you have to recognize first and foremost the kind of reader-friendly book it is. This is not a mass market paperback. Not a thriller off the bestseller list. Bibliotheca is designed like an art book. (Not surprisingly, it is also printed by a firm in Germany that prints art books.) Where one kind of design strives for populist accessibility, another aims for the kind of minimalist purity that exalts its content — or rather, signals that its content is meant to be exalted. The designer doesn’t presume to make it beautiful; rather, the designer recognizes its inherent beauty and designs accordingly. That’s what Bibliotheca does.

But of course what primarily interested me was the translation:
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I was reading along in Kathryn Hughes’ fascinating NYRB review (December 21, 2023; archived) of Hilary Davidson’s Jane Austen’s Wardrobe (I had no idea she was so tall!) when I got to this:

The making of dresses and outer garments was entrusted to a local dressmaker; Davidson points out that the complex construction of the sleeves on Austen’s brown silk pelisse could be achieved only by an expert pattern cutter. This, though, remained a surprisingly inexpensive outlay. When Austen employed a London dressmaker in April 1811 to make pelisses for her and Cassandra, the tradeswoman charged only eight shillings, equivalent to perhaps $30 today. The mantua-maker—or dressmaker, as she was increasingly known—would have kept a pattern of each client on file that could be altered to take account of changes occurring through age, illness, and pregnancy.

Mantua-maker! I ran to the OED (entry revised in 2000):

Now archaic and historical.
Originally: a person who made mantuas. Later more generally: a dressmaker.

1694 Mantuamaker.
P. A. Motteux, translation of F. Rabelais, 5th Book of Works Pantagr. Prognost. 237

1712 The most celebrated Tyre-women and Mantua-makers in Paris.
E. Budgell, Spectator No. 277. ¶11

1776 Masks will be..sold by almost all the Milliners and Mantua Makers in Town.
Massachusetts Gazette & Boston Weekly News-letter 22 February
[…]

1997 A Coach and Six to go to her Mantua-Maker’s.
T. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon xiii. 143

So I must have run across it when I was reading Mason & Dixon a decade ago (1, 2, 3) but simply accepted it as one of those mysterious olde-fashioned terms he sprinkled the text with — unless, of course, I did look it up and subsequently forgot it. (Surely not!) At any rate, I turned next to the base word, mantua (entry also from 2000):
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Via Mark Liberman at the Log, a deeply bizarre problem: How a glitch in an online survey replaced the word ‘yes’ with ‘forks’. I’ll let you visit the links for the details of the problem; this user comment will give you the idea:

“Please review [the] answer choices. Every ‘yes’ answer for me was listed as ‘forks’ for some reason. I.e. instead of yes/no it was forks/no.”

The interesting thing is the reason that “Google translate still thinks that ‘yes’ in Spanish means ‘forks’ in English”; in Mark’s words:

That may be puzzling until you realize that ye as the name of the letter ‘Y’ in Spanish can be used to mean a fork in the road, i.e. a Y-junction.

I wonder how long it would have taken me to figure that out.

John Gallagher (seen previously in these parts, e.g. 2020, 2022) reviews Bernard Cerquiglini’s ‘La Langue anglaise n’existe pas’: C’est du français mal prononcé for the LRB (6 March 2025; archived), and he is as enjoyable as ever:

Picture the scene​: it’s a few years after the Norman Conquest, and a man goes out to shoot deer in the New Forest. He’s breaking the law, as the right to hunt here is reserved to the Crown. The man is caught, and arrested – not by his own countrymen, but by ‘a group of armed jabbering foreigners’. Our hapless English hunter is forced to take a crash course in a strange language. First, he learns the word ‘prisun’; soon after, he’ll hear the words ‘foreste’, ‘rent’, ‘justise’. Uneasy in an occupied land, he will find language turned against him, his homely Saxon terms elbowed out by the language (and brute power) of a new Norman elite.

The scene comes from The English Language, published in 1949 by Charles Leslie Wrenn, a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. Wrenn was one of many scholars for whom the history of English after the conquest was painful to relate. In 1855, the philologist and later archbishop of Dublin Richard Chenevix Trench frightened an audience of schoolboys with the story of the deliberate perversion of the language by the French: he accused them of drawing ‘a secret satisfaction, a conscious sense of superiority, in thus stripping the language of its grace and ornament, outraging its laws, compelling it to novel forms, showing, even while it is used, how little it is regarded, and making thus not merely the wills, but the very speech of the conquered, to confess its subjection’.

Hysterics like these are nothing new. By the latter half of the 16th century, when the number of words in English increased at an unprecedented rate, anxieties proliferated about the threat to the language’s good Saxon stock from foreign lexical invaders. Authors and translators borrowed promiscuously from French to expand English’s range of expression, prompting Samuel Johnson to warn that too much translation risked shaking the foundations of English. Since no book ‘was ever turned from one language into another, without imparting something of its native idiom’, translators’ ‘mischievous and comprehensive innovation’ in attempting to ape the style of originals – which, in the 18th century, were very often in French – meant that they wrote with an insidiously Gallic inflection. This, for Johnson, was worse than simply borrowing new terms, something which had exercised critics for years. He warned that ‘single words may enter by thousands, and the fabrick of the tongue continue the same, but new phraseology changes much at once; it alters not the single stones of the building, but the order of the columns.’ If nobody stopped the translators, the English would be left ‘to babble a dialect of France’.

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I’ll quote Nelson Goering’s Facebook post (adding italics where they seem called for):

Happy Nowruz! It’s the vernal equinox today, and also the traditional new year’s day of the Persianate world. The name of the festival means “new day”, but is etymologically basically the same as “new light” in English.

Actually the elements aren’t quite perfect matches, since there are slightly different suffixes involved — a bit like how German Heiligkeit and English holiness are related in their roots, but have different suffixes. In this case, the now- part goes back to an Old Iranian *nawa-, itself from Indo-European *new-o-. English new is from an extended form of this, *new-jo-. Both variants just meant “new”.

For -ruz, that goes back to Old Persian raucah-, which already meant “day” in the oldest records of Persian, the inscriptions of Darius the Great (around the year -500). But the older meaning was definitely “light”, and this is the sense of Avestan raocah-. Avestan is the liturgical language of the Zoroastrian religion, and the oldest language of the Iranic family attested. The word is found already in the oldest layer of Avestan, the hymns of Zarathushtra, which might be as old as c. -1000. This in turn comes from Indo-European *leuk-os-. English light comes from a slightly different formation, something like *leuk-to-.

And I’ll follow that with Martin Kümmel’s extremely interesting comment and the ensuing back-and-forth:
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Sam Anderson has an enjoyable story in Sunday’s NY Times Magazine (archived) about a once-famous wanderer in the Northeast of the U.S. in the Civil War era:

The word “strange” hardly captures his strangeness. He was rough and hairy, and he wandered around on back roads, sleeping in caves. Above all, he refused to explain himself. As one newspaper put it: “He is a mystery, and a very greasy and ill-odored one.” Other papers referred to him as “the animal” or (just throwing up their hands) “this uncouth and unkempt ‘What is it?’”

But the strangest thing about the stranger was his suit.

In summer and in winter, in every possible kind of weather, the man wore, from head to toe, an outrageous outfit he seems to have made himself: rough leather patches stitched together with long leather strips, like a quilt. It was stiff, awkward, stinky and brutally heavy. It looked like knight’s armor made out of baseball gloves. To anyone encountering him on a quiet country lane, he must have seemed almost unreal: a huge slab of brown, twice as wide as a normal man, his suit creaking and squeaking with every step.

In the years following the Civil War, the wandering stranger became an object of curiosity, then a frequent subject of the newspapers. People gave him a name: the Old Leatherman.

It’s a great read, but I’m bringing it here for the Hattic bits:

Month after month, people watched the Old Leatherman clomp past their farms and through their woods and right up the main streets of their tiny towns. At mealtimes, he would stop at sympathetic households — the same ones, over and over — to ask, with a grunt, for food. He rarely spoke, and when he did his words were clipped, strange. In the silence, rumors grew. People speculated that the Old Leatherman was French, or French Canadian, or Portuguese. They said that he couldn’t speak at all, or that he just couldn’t speak English, or that he spoke English perfectly but pretended not to. […]

Who was he? Why was he doing this? People were obsessed. But try as they might, no one could figure it out. “One of the most noted philologists in the State spoke to him in a half-dozen different languages,” The New York Times reported in 1884. “He could get no reply but a guttural sound which meant nothing, and which was more animal than human in its character.”

Maybe he was… a Neanderthal! Or possibly just a Gael.

I decided to look up the surname Wigglesworth (which I’ve always found amusing), and this site said:

English (Yorkshire): habitational name from Wigglesworth in North Yorkshire recorded in Domesday Book as Winchelesuuorde. It is derived from the genitive case of the Old English byname Wincel meaning ‘child’. Additionally, it incorporates Old English worth which translates to ‘enclosure’.

I wasn’t familiar with that worth, so I checked the OED and was pleased to find they had revised the entry in 2017:

An enclosed place; spec. (a) a place surrounded by buildings, as a courtyard, court, or street; (b) a homestead surrounded by land.
Frequently as a place name or as the second element in place names (cf. discussion in etymology). […]

OE [Northumbrian dialect] Neque audiet aliquis in plateis uocem eius : ne geheres ænig mon in worðum stefn his.
Lindisfarne Gospels: Matthew xii. 19
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1557 Elizabeth Lyde widdowe holdeth oon mesuage withe a curtillage and all landes tenementes medowes fedinges and pastures to the sayde mesuage lying called the Woorth of olde astre and a cotage conteyning fyve acres withe the appurtenances lying in the Worthe of the same astre.
in J. Hasler, Wookey Manor & Parish 1544–1841 (1995) 20
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1898 Bosworth, a worth or ‘small estate’ on which stood a boose..a dialect word meaning a ‘cow-stall’ or ‘ox-stall’.
I. Taylor, Names & their History (ed. 2) 72/2
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1917 Probably the ‘worths’ were farms on clearings made later than the original settlements.
Quarterly Review October 338

2011 Tūns, worths and throps may..have been settlements too small and insignificant to attract mention.
P. Cullen et al., Thorps in Changing Landscape vii. 144

And the etymology is one of those expansive ones the online setting now allows them:
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I think Leonid Andreev (also romanized as Andreyev) first swam into my ken in 2016, when I edited Leonid Livak’s In Search of Russian Modernism — see my 2018 review of that superb book, in particular the first quoted paragraph. It took me a long while to get around to him, though, because at the time I was reading my way through the 1850s and when I finally finished my Long March through Russian literature in 2019 I headed straight to the late 20th century. But I finally caught up with him a couple of years ago, prompted by Dmitry Bykov; as I wrote Lizok at the time:

I was reading Bykov again — his “100 books for 100 years” series — and I decided to read his pick for 1900, Leonid Andrev’s “Молчание,” which he calls the beginning of Russian Gothic, and when I read it I thought “that’s Gorbunova’s line of descent.” If you eliminated a lot of details and any hint of пафос and just kept the basic story line, it could fit into one of her collections. (One of her signatures is squeezing out пафос the way Chekhov squeezed the serf out of himself.) Then I read his 1901 story “Жили-были” and could see why it was so popular: he puts vivid characters in a stressful situation and lets things develop very effectively. I’ll have to read more of him.

The story is online here; молчание means ‘silence,’ and in my Chronology I summarized it thus:

after the haughty Father Ignatii’s daughter kills herself and his wife has a stroke, an audible silence fills the house and then the world; in Zhurnal dlya vsekh 12; D. Bykov calls it the beginning of Russian Gothic: “This silence is the main sound of the 20th century”

(Bykov’s entire «100 лекций о русской литературе ХХ века», all 548 pages, is here as a pdf, or you can read it online here — the Andreev chapter is the first one.) So the other day I decided to follow it up with a longer story, his 1903 Жизнь Василия Фивейского [The life of Vasily Fiveisky, translated in 1920 by Archibald J. Wolfe as The Life of Father Vassily], about which I knew nothing — I vaguely assumed it was the life of a saint, since Vasily Fiveisky (Vasily the Theban, or Basil of Thebes) sounded very saintly. But it was not that at all, and the (very sparse) commentary I’ve found on it completely misinterprets it, so I am here to remedy that, with the aid of the earlier short story.

The Life of Father Vassily, in Wolfe’s translation, begins thus:
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