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It popped into my head to wonder about the origin of the titular phrase: did it ascend to antiquity? Was its origin in the Greco-Roman classics, the Bible, ancient Sumer? Imagine my surprise when I turned to the OED (s.v. ox, entry revised 2005) and found:

1.c. Chiefly U.S. [Apparently in allusion to a response given by Martin Luther (1483–1546) at the Diet of Worms (1521).] In collocation with gored. An interest that is threatened or harmed. Chiefly in whose ox is gored.

1843 If the Democrats, under like circumstances, had made such a declaration, the welkin would have rung and rung again with anathemas against repudiation. But it makes a difference whose ox is gored.
Brooklyn Eagle & Kings County Democrat 7 August 2/2

1885 This is a doctrine which if allowed, will be adopted very much on the principle of whose ‘ox is gored’.
American Naturalist vol. 19 593

1901 It makes a difference whose ox is gored, it seems.
F. Norris, Octopus ii. iv. 442

1973 He was widely known as a dare-devil who carried out his intentions without caring whose ox was gored.
V. C. Ike, Potter’s Wheel (1974) ix. 68

1994 Every teaching institution will have its department of cultural studies, an ox not to be gored.
H. Bloom, Western Canon i. i. 15

(I note, with the usual sorrow and deprecation, that the 1885 American Naturalist citation, which you can see in situ here, has an actual author, and a famous one at that: Edward Drinker Cope.) So not only is it not an ancient and universally recognized phrase, it is “Chiefly U.S.” and only goes back to 1845! Anyone know the alleged Martin Luther source?

I have been made aware that “the small South Pacific country formerly known as Nauru” has officially changed its name to Naoero (NY Times story). That is, of course, its right, but my immediate question is: how do you say the new name? The Times has this infuriating paragraph:

How the new name is pronounced depends in part on one’s accent. British, Australian and American English speakers variously pronounce it nah-OO-roo, now-AIR-o or nah-oh-EH-roh.

Well, isn’t that nice! Maybe some people pronounce it Fanshaw. But my question is, how is it pronounced in Nauruan? Anybody know?

I don’t normally make separate posts for different reviews of the same book, but Colin Burrow’s LRB review (9 July 2026; archived) of Arnoud Visser’s On Pedantry has so little in common with Clare Bucknell’s for the NYRB (LH), and it’s so frabjously expressive in and of itself, that I can’t resist presenting it on its own. It starts:

This is what​ ‘Listen up’ sounds like when translated into pedantese: ‘Why, you brute nebulons, have you had my corpusculum so long among you, and cannot yet tell how to edify an argument? Attend and throw your ears to me, for I am gravidated with child till I have indoctrinated your plumbeous cerebrosities.’ So speaks one of the earliest representations of the pedant in English literature, the schoolmaster Rombus who appears in Philip Sidney’s The Lady of May. This was an entertainment put on for Elizabeth I in 1578, in which courtiers were invited to laugh at schoolteachers and the queen was encouraged to choose between different styles of rustic suitor for the Lady of May.

Sidney’s playlet was eventually published two decades later, in the same year as Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. That made 1598 the year of the pedant. Shakespeare’s play included a walk-on part for the schoolmaster and turbo-pedant Holofernes. He is right down in Sidney’s groove, so get your plumbeous cerebrosities (leaden brains) in gear or you won’t understand a word of what he says about his rival, the braggart Armado:

He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument. I abhor such fanatical phantasimes, such insociable and point-device companions, such rackers of orthography, as to speak ‘dout’ sine ‘b’ when he should say ‘doubt’, ‘det’ when he should pronounce ‘debt’: d, e, b, t, not d, e, t.

Holofernes’s first sentence here means that Armado talks bullshit, or takes a small hank of raw wool and spins it out into a thread so fine that it loses all substance. There was a strong association in Shakespeare’s period between rough woven native woollen cloth and honest speech, or what Berowne in the same play calls ‘russet yeas and honest kersey noes’. Nasty overspun silks, expensive imports and foreigners like Armado (whose very name reminds you that the beastly Spanish are always ready to send another Armada) are all threats to the solid English of douBts and deBts and honest truths.

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I hope at least some of y’all are familiar with the W.C. Handy song “Yellow Dog Blues”; if not, there are links to a couple of performances at the Mississippi Blues Travellers page Where The Southern Cross The Dog – Moorhead, Mississippi, one of those maniacally detailed investigations of historical/cultural backwaters that so appeal to me. Most of it is about the music, but I’ll quote the part that goes into the etymology of “Yellow Dog”:

The Yazoo Delta RR was nicknamed the “Yellow Dog.” The Ruleville Depot National Historic Register designation says this nickname came about because the Yazoo Delta RR’s s locomotives and rolling stock were constantly covered in yellow dust from the surrounding agricultural areas and because of the trains’ habit of regularly jumping jumping the tracks.

W.C Handy gives a different explanation for the origin of the nickname “Yellow Dog” in Chapter 6 of his autobiography.

In W.C. Handy’s version, a “blistering sun beats down upon a gang of black section hands during the late nineties [note: construction of the the Yazoo Delta Railroad began in 1897]. They are working down in Mississippi, laying the railroad tracks for the Yazoo Delta line between Clarksdale and Yazoo City. Their hammers rise and fall rhythmically as they drive the heavy spikes and sing ‘Dis ole hammer killed John Henry, won’t kill me. Dis ole hammer killed John Henry, won’t kill me.’

A locomotive, following the progress of the men, is steaming idly on the track. The letters ‘Y.D.’ are painted boldy on its coal car. A travelling salesman comes up the embankment, mops the sweat from his face, shifts a chaw of tobacco from one bulging red cheek to the other, and says: ‘Hey, boy. What in tarnation does that Y.D. stand for?’

A Negro straightens up, rubs the kink out of his back and begins to scratch his head in obvious puzzlement. ‘H’m,’ he ventures slowly. ‘Yaller Dawg, I reckon.’

The strangers eyes twinkle. He cackles softly and walks on down the track. ‘Yaller Dawg,’ he repeats under his breath. ‘that’s pretty cute, hanged if it ain’t. Yaller Dawg. Gee whiz, that’s a good one.’ The Yazoo Delta R.R. was christened The Yellow Dog.

The story was circulated and the idea spread until one branch of of the Yazoo Delta was known as the North Dog. For reasons equally suggestive, the fast, direct train from Clarksdale to Greenville was known as the Cannon Ball, while its slow-time, round-about companion between those points was called the Peavine. Negroes had nicknamed all those roads.”

I just wish our old fiend thegrowlingwolf were still around; I’m sure he would have had plenty to say.

Joel of Far Outliers has posted some excerpts of Mikołaj Gliński’s contribution to a newsletter from Culture.pl, How much Polish is there in Esperanto?; it begins:

The Slavic Esperanto lexicon is generally considered to derive from two Slavic languages, both of which Zamenhof knew very well – Russian and Polish. While Russian, as he later recalled, was his favourite during his early days, as well as the language of the larger part of his linguistic output, Polish was the language spoken in Warsaw, where Zamenhof would eventually spend most of his life. And it’s actually these two languages that make up the 1% of Slavic in Esperanto vocabulary. The problem is that sometimes identifying the original language is very hard if not simply impossible.

While Esperanto words like barakti (to flounder, from барахтаться barahtat’sja), gladi (to iron, from гладить gladit’), krom (except, from кроме krome), or vosto (a tail, from хвост) are easy to identify as of Russian origin (they simply don’t appear in Polish), and others like kolbaso can be considered as coming from Russian based on their phonetic build-up (Rus. kolbasa, compare Pol. kiełbasa), there are also some that can be really problematic. This goes for words like celo (aim), bulko (bun), klopodo (effort), kaĉo (porridge, from kasza / каша kaša), prava (right [in opinion], from prawy / правый pravyj), or svati (to matchmake, from swat / сват svat). Due to their almost identical forms in both languages, it seems hardly possible to tell from which language Zamenhof took the original root.

…

And yet the group of Esperanto words which are usually identified as Polish loan words is significant.

If that interests you, click through for more. And here’s a bit that amused me about a very peculiar feature of Esperanto:
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Adrian Tahourdin’s TLS review of Rebecca Lee’s Rogues, Widows and Orphans: Mischief and misadventures in the world of books just keeps getting better:

The title Rogues, Widows and Orphans is slightly misleading. Although rogues abound here, a book that was largely about typographical misfortunes would test the patience of most readers. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a widow as a “short (esp. single-word) last line of a paragraph left at the top of a page or column and considered undesirable” and an orphan as “a word or line undesirably separated by a page break from the paragraph to which it belongs”. Rebecca Lee ranges far more widely, however, taking in “Ick Lit”, censorship, plagiarism, hoaxes, rejection, writer’s block, literary rivalry, hatchet jobs and the “existential challenge posed by AI”.

The typo has a long and venerable role in the history of publishing, dating back, Lee reminds us, to Shakespeare and earlier. In recent years the Guardian (or Grauniad, as it is affectionately known) has done more than most publications to keep the tradition alive, for example referring to Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Buy. Typos are every self-respecting editor’s nightmare. They leap off the page at you after the words have gone to press (“‘biogarphy’? How did I miss that?”). Not inappropriately, here we have a reference to “Virgina” Woolf. And while Lee writes that there were more than 2,000 typos in the first edition of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), she acknowledges that the story was more complicated.

Arguably, Lee has allowed herself to slide down too many rabbit holes in her quest for “Ick Lit”. Does the unfortunate Harry Stephen Keeler (born in Chicago in 1890), whose plots are apparently “impenetrable”, deserve to have his work re-excavated? Or Amanda McKittrick Ros (born in 1860 in Ireland), known as the “World’s Worst Novelist”, for that matter? Surely her reference to trousers as “the southern necessity” deserves some credit for ingenuity. Aldous Huxley, she remarked to a friend, was “the only critic who understands my writings”, though not, presumably, in the way she intended.

It was when I reached the reference to the divine Amanda that I knew I had to share it; if you missed that 2012 LH post, do click through and acquaint yourself with a truly unique writer.

From Raymond N. MacKenzie’s LRB review (9 July 2026; archived) of David Coward and William Butcher’s new translation of Jules Verne, Journey to the Moon, some passages about how his publisher and his translators treated him:

By the last decades​ of the 19th century, Jules Verne was less a writer than a brand – one carefully cultivated by his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel – promising a specific mixture of scientific plausibility, adventure and moral instruction. ‘Jules Verne’ told readers roughly what they would get: a journey, maps, technological marvels, diagrams, rational wonder. A Verne book was, arguably, less the expression of a single imagination and more a tissue of scientific discourse and popular pedagogy, garnished with vivid illustrations. From the mid-1860s, Hetzel did not simply publish Verne; he curated him. […]

Sometime in 1861 or 1862, Verne met Hetzel, who had published a wide range of authors, including Stendhal and Balzac. A lifelong republican, Hetzel had participated in the 1848 revolution and served as Lamartine’s chief of staff during the period of the provisional government; following Louis-Napoléon’s coup in 1851, he fled to Belgium, publishing from there Hugo’s fierce denunciation of the new emperor, Les Châtiments. Later in the decade, as the political climate in France calmed, he returned to Paris and resumed publishing, branching out into family-oriented subjects and opening a bookshop specialising in children’s books. He saw great potential in Verne’s balloon novel: it was the kind of high-quality, educational fiction he wanted for a new magazine he was planning. He suggested revisions and soon offered Verne a contract under which he would commit to deliver multiple volumes a year (most accounts say three, one roughly every four months). Hetzel would buy these volumes outright for a flat fee, rather than offering royalties based on sales.

It’s hard to imagine other writers – the likes of Flaubert, Gautier or even Balzac – agreeing to such terms. One thinks of the white-hot letter Baudelaire sent to Gervais Charpentier when the latter altered some of his phrasing: ‘I told you: delete the whole piece if you don’t like a comma in it, but don’t delete the comma itself; it’s there for a reason … I’ve spent my entire life learning how to construct sentences, and I say – without fear of being laughed at – that what I deliver to a printer is perfectly finished.’ Verne, however, seemed to welcome Hetzel’s revisions. As their relationship developed, Hetzel’s interventions became so great that the books often changed dramatically – characters were altered or expunged, dark events were softened and endings became uplifting. Narrative structures were simplified. Sexual references were deleted, as were any political jibes. […]

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From the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project comes Gen Z constructions: an overview:

The goal of this page is to provide a brief, preliminary description of some Gen Z constructions that YGDP researchers are currently investigating. The judgments on this page are mostly from the respective researchers’ own intuition; little to no data has been formally collected as of yet. The YGDP hopes to continue working on these constructions to eventually understand them better and publish individual phenomenon pages for each one.

So far, they’ve got discussions of It’s giving (“It’s giving librarian”), Lonely transitives (“I have an apple. Do you want?”), Response particle bet (“Speaker A: I just ordered us a pizza. Speaker B: Bet.”), and Spotlight not (“Not me going to Starbucks for the second time today”). This is the kind of thing more linguistics departments should be doing.

The papyrus was published in 1940, but I hadn’t seen it until now, and perhaps it will be new to you as well: A 3rd century papyrus conjugating γράφω in the indicative, posted the other day by Roger Pearse on his blog:

Here is a truly fascinating item. It’s a leaf of papyrus from Oxyrhynchus. On it, someone has drawn out a table of the forms of the Greek verb γράφω (“I write”)! […] What is displayed here is the forms of the verb, and these are labelled, much as they would be in a modern text. […] The first side of the papyrus, the recto, shows the perfect and pluperfect indicative active forms.

This side of the papyrus, the verso, shows the middle/passive forms. Indeed at the top of the page it states “τούτων παθητικὰ ἐνεστῶτος” = “The present passive forms of these”. Then there is a line of dashes below. In the margins, letters indicating whether each block is singular, dual, or plural.

The first blocks on the left are the present indicative middle/passive. These start with “alpha” – the singular, given as today in order, 1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person […] Then a line and a fresh heading, “παρατατικού“, above the “imperfect” forms, this time with a leading epsilon. In the right hand column are more forms. The heading παρακειμένου precedes the perfect forms. Then below the υπερσυντελισκοῦ, pluperfect. […]

Somehow this is just wonderful to see, for anyone who has laboured over a grammar, memorising forms.

It is, sure enough. And the student even made mistakes, which renders it still more poignant.

Ward Farnsworth is an old favorite around here; see my reviews of his Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric (LH, The Millions) and Farnsworth’s Classical English Metaphor (LH). He has now sent me a copy of his latest magnum opus, The Latin Tamer: Mastering the Language of Rome (cowritten with Sarah van der Pas), which looks ideal for the kind of learner it is aimed at. To quote the Preface (which is available, along with a good many other parts of the book, on the associated website):

The book is distinctive in a few ways. It seeks to spell out the workings of Latin with an extra measure of clarity and patience. It illustrates every point, large and small, with short examples. The examples are mostly from ancient writings and they’re all explained on the spot. That’s the premise of the book: to let you learn Latin by reading and understanding lots of short specimens of the real thing.

This book, and the website that goes with it (along with a lot of practice), will enable you to master Latin if that’s your aim. It can also teach you to understand and appreciate Latin if you don’t have years to spend on it. Since all the illustrations are fully explained, you can (if you wish) wander at will among them and study the grammatical rules when and how you like. The format allows for free-range learning.

This book is especially written to help learners of Latin who like the ideas of the Stoics (another treat for the mind). Many of its examples are drawn from Seneca the Younger and from Cicero, the Roman writers who discussed those ideas the most. You’ll be able to learn Latin by studying samples that especially interest you. And cutting your teeth on authors you want to read later will make it easier when that time comes.

One thing I like about it is the use of actual chunks of Latin (what he calls “illustrations”) to exemplify the grammatical lessons:
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