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Michael Marcus has an extraordinarily interesting Medium post on Borges and his translators; after some introductory paragraphs about Borges himself and disagreements over the different translations of his stories, he points out that “Borges himself was fluent in English, and was prolific in translating English works into Spanish” and asks: “Why didn’t he translate his stories on his own?”

When trying to determine which translation is ‘best’, more insight into Borges’ mind is found than was bargained for — a rabbit-hole pursuit, uncovering discovery after discovery that surprises us with his tastes and his views. In a way that is perhaps typical of Borges, he provided an answer before many of us even came to ask the question.

He then compares four versions — by Anthony Bonner, James E. Irby, Andrew Hurley, and Norman Thomas Di Giovanni — of the opening sentence of “Las ruinas circulares” (The Circular Ruins), commendably giving it first in the original: “Nadie lo vio desembarcar en la unánime noche…” He discusses each translation in some detail; of Bonnier’s, for example, he says:

Infinitas aldeas is translated as numberless villages, suggesting that the villages in the South are so similar as to be almost indistinguishable when looked at collectively.

Readers of this version may pick up on an authoritative tone, almost biblical in its rendering. This is cemented when we come to the point where the man is described as having an invincible intent: the original describes him as having ‘su invencible propósito’. Propósito is one of those words that be interpreted in different ways — Irby’s later translation will call it an invincible purpose; Hurley goes so far as to change it to unconquerable plan — just one example of how variation of a key phrase can affect how the story is received.

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I was considering the word mall, thinking vaguely that it had something to do with Pall Mall, and when I investigated I found such an interesting mess I thought I’d share it. The OED’s entry (revised 2000) starts with “Senses deriving from the place where pall-mall was played” (c1660 “The Mall [at Tours], which is without comparison the noblest..in Europ… Here we play’d a party or two,” J. Evelyn, Diary anno 1644 vol. II. 145); these lead to “A fashionable assembly in the open air; a sheltered walk serving as a promenade; in some towns adopted as a proper name” (1710 “The intrigues of the mall and the playhouse,” S. Palmer, Moral Essays Prov. 203), and this to the modern sense:

I.2.c. Chiefly North American, Australian, and New Zealand. A shopping precinct or street closed to vehicles; a large (usually covered) shopping centre; = shopping mall n.

1959 Kalamazoo’s permanent downtown mall..is an expression of the great need to do something to pull the central business districts of our nation out of the low estate in which they have fallen.
Chain Store Age October e3

1963 The central paved avenue, or ‘mall’ [in a shopping centre], wider than any street, with booths in the middle.
Observer 15 September 23/6
[…]

1980 I’ll paint myself bright green all over and walk down the Mall in the nuddy!
E. Metcalfe, Garden Party 43
[…]

The etymology was surprising:

Probably a specific application of maul n.¹ [‘a hammer’] (compare form mall at that entry, and form maul in quot. 1706 for the Mall n. at sense I.2a), after 17th-cent. senses of French mail (see mail n.⁵ [‘the game of pall-mall; a place where the game was played’]). Compare also pall-mall n.

OK, let’s compare pall-mall:
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David Wright Faladé’s “Amarillo Boulevard” (New Yorker, September 28, 2025; archived) is the best short story I’ve read in a while, dealing with family, race, friendship, Texas, and other large matters with no apparent effort and packing a surprising emotional punch. What leads me to post it is a phrase I had to look up, the last one in this paragraph:

Miss Sammie asked, “Do Atlanta Juneteenths be like we do around here, with the collards and the mac ’n’ cheese and the rest? You know, putting your foot in it.”

To me, to put your foot in it means (to quote the Cambridge Dictionary site) “to say something by accident that embarrasses or upsets someone,” which is clearly not the sense here. Fortunately, I found this Reddit thread:

I used to cook food at a shelter and one time a guest told me “you must have put your foot in this!” I had never heard the saying before and thought he was accusing me of adulterating the food. I tried to apologize, but he told me that it was a compliment. Apparently, it is usually used to express satisfaction with a meal/dish, “you put your foot in that” is a compliment to the chef in the southern U.S. Does anybody have any insight on this idiom? From what I can gather by the context of the situation it has to do with preparing a meal with care/dedication, similar to “you put your heart into it.” But why the foot?

whatcarpaltunnel
“You’ve stumpd your toe in this” or “You stuck your thumb in this” are the ones I’m most familiar with being from the south. These two can refer to a range of expression from being too sweet or complementing the chef(cook) on his mastery, in my experience. I’m hoping someone can chime in on the saying for a more detailed history.

zsluggiest1
I was a chef throughout Louisiana for about 20 years and worked with several mid 60-65 year old black women that all said the same thing. They said it came from the days of slavery when there were very limited ingredients left over for the slaves to feed themselves. When someone would get a dish just right they would say that the cook must have “stuck their foot in it” as to say it had a flavor that was better regardless of using the exact same ingredients as everyone else. It makes a lot of sense given how much more common the phrase is in deep south black culture.

It’s pretty much unusable if you’re not part of the relevant cultural group, but I’m glad to know about it. (Yeah, yeah, the folk history of the phrase is probably not accurate, but people love to find satisfying explanations for opaque idioms.)

I’m only on the first chapter of Gary Thurston’s The Popular Theatre Movement in Russia: 1862-1919, which I can already tell is going to be endlessly informative and thought-provoking (thanks, NWU Press!), and the section “Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy Weigh the Two Cultures” is so interesting I thought I’d quote some chunks of it:

While incarcerated in Omsk from 1850 to 1854, Dostoevsky had experienced a range of behavior generally unknown to Russian writers or readers of the cultured classes. He presented House of the Dead as fragments of a manuscript left by a recently deceased landowner who had spent ten years in penal servitude in Siberia. The chapters, written in the first person, purport to be selections from a larger text made by an editor who introduced the work. The memoir rests squarely on the premise that the Westernized classes have no idea how abysmal their ignorance of the peasant is.

[The gentry] are divided from the peasants by the deepest abyss, and this is fully evident only when a member of the privileged class suddenly finds himself, due to the action of powerful external circumstances, completely deprived of his former rights, and turns to the common people. It does not matter if you have dealt with peasants all your life, if you have associated with them every day for forty years in a businesslike way, for instance in regularly prescribed administrative transactions, or even simply in a friendly way, as a benefactor, or, in a certain sense, a father-you will never really know them.

The narrator repeatedly emphasizes that it took imprisonment at close quarters with peasant convicts to make him see how much he took accustomed social roles and privileges for granted. He experienced the greatest difficulty in being treated by the peasants as a person. “The hatred which I as a member of the gentry, continually experienced from the convicts during my first few years became intolerable, poisoning my whole life” (176).

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I just watched the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, which effectively intertwines jazz music and musicians (Dizzy Gillespie, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, Nina Simone, and many others) with the tragic history of the Congo in 1960, culminating in the overthrow and murder of Patrice Lumumba, one of my early memories as an assiduous reader of international news (it’s filed with the Plain of Jars and Quemoy and Matsu in a dusty cupboard way at the back of my brain). There is also plenty of Congolese music, including a song “Satchmo Okuka Lokole” performed by Joseph Kakasele, “le Grand Kallé”, and his band African Jazz. Naturally, I wanted to know what “Okuka Lokole” meant; I first came across a Louis Armstrong House page making the absurd claim that it means “jungle wizard, the man who charm beasts,” but happily I then found José Nzolani’s detailed PAM article with the following convincing account:

The song is sung in Lingala. But “Okuka lokole” is from Tetela, a Bantu language spoken by the Batetela. This ethnic race of the Anamongo group is located east of Kasai, on land irrigated by the Lomami and Sankuru rivers. The singer Papa Wemba and Patrice Emery Lumuma, the separatist leader, are famous figures of this ethnic group.

The lokole is a long section of hollowed-out tree trunk and carved with a narrow slot. This type of drum is used as a musical instrument or for sending messages. The idiophone instrument produces sounds by being struck on both sides of the slot with wooden sticks. Widespread among the Bantu peoples, the lokole is often compared to morse code. For the Batetela, this large drum plays a special role. “Okuka” in their language is a resistant tree ideal for fabricating lokole drums. It is also one of their surnames.

You can see a lokole at the Wikipedia article, and there are more photos here. As for the Batetela, check out the tangled tale at Wikipedia, beginning:

“Batetela” as a clan or tribe did not exist. Only between 1885 and 1887 are the first public geographical journals, notes and books reporting a people named “Batetela”. Missionaries were reporting all people speaking languages akin to today’s “Kitetela” or culturally similar people as “Batetela” despite the name “Batetela” evolving from the term “Watetera” in reference to bilingual communities from the 1870s Barua lands(Baluba lands in Maniema).

This term “Batetela” was either a corruption or mistranslation off the mid- to late 19th-century term known as “Watetera” which was used to describe the people from this region which Arab slave traders termed “Utotera”.

It goes on in that vein for many paragraphs.

I have to mention also that during the performance of the song the subtitle read “[man singing in Zulu]” (!), and at one point a subtitle reads “from Kobongo towards Kabala” when the towns involved are actually named Kabongo and Kabalo. Africa in general, and the Congo in particular, are treated with remarkable casualness (and I don’t mean just in this movie).

For previous Congo-related onomastic inquiry, see this 2012 post (quickly derailed onto a discussion of TV shows, but I did get a good answer from, of course, MMcM).

Tessa Hadley is not only one of my favorite living writers (see this anniversary post) but a source of interesting words (e.g., gabardine). My wife and I are currently reading Free Love, and when we got to “She stripped off the wallpaper and painted the walls white, ripped up the foul old carpet and bought a striped dhurrie in the market” I put down the book and said “What’s a dhurrie?” She said “I think it’s a kind of rug,” and that turns out to be correct. OED (entry from 1895): “A kind of cotton carpet of Indian manufacture, usually made in rectangular pieces with fringes at the ends, and used for sofa-covers, curtains, and similar purposes” (first cite 1880 “Dhurries are made in squares, and the ends often finished off with fringe; the colours are not bright, but appear durable,” Mrs. A. G. F. E. James, Indian Industries iv. 19); the etymology just says “< Hindi darī,” but Wiktionary takes the Hindi dubiously further:

Probably from Sanskrit स्तरी (starī).

This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.
Particularly: “Is this स्तरी as in a “sterile cow” or a “sterile night”? This seems semantically bold – is there a formation of स्तरी from स्तॄ (stṝ, “to spread, strew”) that’s possible? That would be much more semantically tenable.”

I’ll say it’s semantically bold, but I like the fact that they air their dubious linen in public.

Adam Thirlwell has an LRB review (archived) of “Francesca Wade’s graceful, exacting biography of Stein and Toklas,” and it’s one of the best things I’ve read about Stein — it makes me want to go back to an author I read and enjoyed decades ago but haven’t looked at much since. I’ll excerpt a section about her writing, with its “devotion to the cut”:

Stein loved the idea that writing might have esoteric meanings but that those meanings would be only faintly perceived by the abstract reader, that a text could simultaneously be plain while explaining nothing. The pleasure would have to be elsewhere. This may be the final lesson of Wade’s book, which explores Stein’s biography not for explanations, but in order to better enjoy the pleasure of her sentences as a kind of physical delight. In the end, you have to go back to where you started: the surface and its sentences. ‘All of which was literally true,’ Stein writes in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, ‘like all of Gertrude Stein’s literature.’

Early​ in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein describes the pictures she and Leo acquired as they began their collection: a Daumier and two Gauguins and a Cézanne landscape along with two ‘tiny canvases of nude groups’ and ‘a very very small Manet’. But two paintings in particular are given special emphasis: Cézanne’s Madame Cézanne with a Fan and Matisse’s Woman with a Hat. It’s as though the paintings together offered an ongoing possibility, that the most searching artistic experiments might need to be done through portraits – and that the best subject for an avant-garde portrait is your wife.

Stein wrote her first portrait in 1910, a text in three or four pages about Toklas. She describes Toklas telling stories to her dying mother (like Stein, Toklas’s mother died of cancer when Toklas was young) and then leaving her father and brother for the utopian bliss of the final paragraph, which is her love affair with Stein, a mutual balance of speaking and being heard:

She came to be happier than anybody else who was living then. It is easy to believe this thing. She was telling some one, who was loving every story that was charming. Some one who was living was almost always listening. Some one who was loving was almost always listening. That one who was loving was almost always listening. That one who was loving was telling about being one then listening. That one being loving was then telling stories having a beginning and a middle and an ending. That one was then one always completely listening.

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I have no idea what this site is about other than being a showcase for texts in apparently invented languages; this recent post, for example, begins:

Aża cīfir zuoj

Thorenur khioj thurenur, řa duiker. Siřover taekar ofo, ici se laima şiekhar ifi koiden, siekar, beifir ata zirenur roidir, vu go ifi sibe. Eçe aba diamur ikhi mēli khiari cui ozho, thai mebi, koimir, nofo uzhu, şiala da çuizir reizir, roidir cerenur poi merenur. Seiş lui me khugo eve do feamur soilir. Vēs unu çīmir, ei thoamur imu siekar çafa galu deidir feamur, ethe i vueni çei petenur o apha ucu raifir soelo theamur, lāmur pharenur vai, ri bī vāş boiben thaga morenur ořo eve goekher? Vobe uru zuifir ata çişur laima khoel.

Şarenur udu, zhutenur feamur bamu. Patenur ule reilir ata ucu zuelo bamo goekher? Bui uřu laidir feamur te feuş te, tařover obo uamur ukhu, çui o işi vueni çala ene, şurenur zai mola coekhar lai ifi keala çala khioj ikhi, foimir, efe ukhu mēli noelo otho şarenur noej sibe. Kufa idi çuizir iři imi, řoi vu ono. Uzhu ene zeamur roidir zueş. Da bui eşe sitenur eve rei, khiari ephe theamur ça leilir tuifir işi gaşur zoima thuku, theamur voşur, çofe thuipen khe. Nudo zo goekher? Bai be zhai, çoekar nofo nuima patenur vu feamur kheidir ubu řili rogu ukhu zuelo tāmur eze citenur sibe. Ese vāş neşur. Zirenur khāva şetenur. Şēkhar ethe khiari phī, roidir gifa ucu gei tāmur asa. Zuelo zeizir daimo guşu itenur ru atha feuş khugo akha oco leidir. Ava, ifi aga kufa ephe kāmur řīlir, iekar keka. Ulu fetenur sago da thurenur theidir, zhī boiben, oro khī iamur, vēs, khogo go, ifi rauş siřover ede ephe çuizir pheamur sişur soilir. Coizir phe řuamur, zuoj.

Zuoj indeed, not to mention Iä. Make what you will of it; there are more links, with various speculations, at the MeFi post where I found it. But stay safe out there!

Ben Yagoda is an old LH favorite (e.g., 2015, 2022), so I was delighted to see that last week’s New Yorker included an essay of his (archived) on H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. It starts:

In 1940, St. Clair McKelway typed a memo to William Shawn, The New Yorker’s managing editor for fact. McKelway was writing a six-part Profile of Walter Winchell for the magazine, and he was unhappy that, in two places in the piece, an editor had changed the word “but” to “however.” He made his case for a page and a half, and concluded, “But is a hell of a good word and we shouldn’t high hat it. . . . In three letters it says a little of however, and also be that as it may, and also here’s something you weren’t expecting and a number of other phrases along that line.” He signed the memo “St. Fowler McKelway.”

The “Fowler” was a joking reference to Henry W. Fowler, who, though not a saint in the magazine’s corridors, was certainly a great authority when it came to matters of grammar and style. A few years earlier, Wolcott Gibbs, another editor, had put together an internal document for new members of the staff titled “Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles.” It was a numbered list of thirty-one strictures, and in the penultimate one Gibbs wrote, “Fowler’s English Usage is our reference book. But don’t be precious about it.”

The source of what Kenneth Tynan later called the magazine’s “Fowler fixation” was Harold Ross, who’d dreamed up the idea of The New Yorker and brought it into being in 1925. Fowler’s “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage” was published the following year, and Ross seized on it enthusiastically. (The book is usually referred to as “Modern English Usage” or simply as “Fowler,” in the eponymous manner of Hoyle or Roget.) An E. B. White Notes and Comment piece from the late nineteen-forties shows just how strongly the editor continued to feel. Ross—unnamed, merely described as “a tall, parched man”—sees a copy of the book on the writer’s desk, picks it up, and thumbs through favorite passages. “ ‘Greatest collection of essays and opinions ever assembled between covers,’ he shouted, ‘including a truly masterful study of that and which,’ ” White recounted. “ ‘That’s the business that really fascinates me. . . . I got so excited once I had the pages photostatted.’ ” Thomas Kunkel, Ross’s biographer, reported that, from time to time, Ross would read the “that” and “which” entries for relaxation.

After a long passage on the book’s high status at the magazine, Yagoda turns to the origin of the book and its author:
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Victor Mair’s Language Log post starts off with Japanese 奴隷 dorei ‘slave,’ of which Mair says “Coming at 奴隷 from the Sinitic side, my instinct is to read 奴隷 as beginning with an n-” (in Mandarin it’s núlì) and continues “So I started to ask around how is it that Japanese has a d- initial for 奴隷 (‘slave’) and Sinitic has an n- initial?” The heart of the post is a long and interesting response by John Whitman:

The alternation btw d- and n- with 奴 reflects the general alternation between kan’on 漢音 and go’on 呉音; both go’on and kan’on exhibit characteristics of Middle Sinitic (MS) in Sino-Japanese. The kan’on 漢音 for 奴 is do, but the go’on is nu, identical to the usually reconstructed MS nu for 奴. In this case, the go’on reading is relatively unusual on the Japanese side, but it occurs e.g. in the reading 奴婢 (nuhi ぬひ), the category of slaves in the Ritsuryō 律令 Nara Period legal system.

The d-~n- alternation is standard when there is an opposition btw kan’on and go’on readings involving original MS /n/, for example 男性 dansei ‘male’ vs 男体 nantai ‘male body’. The alternation between 女性 zyosei < dyosei ‘female’ vs女体 nyotai ‘female body is the same thing.

This reflects a change in Sinitic, not Japanese. Some northern MS dialects in roughly Tang times depalatalized MS /m/, /n/, /ng/. South Coblin has a detailed study of this, looking not just at the phenomenon in Japanese kan’on but at Tibetan and intra-Sinitic Buddhistic readings. A mystery, unresolved as far as I know, is how this made it into Japanese kan’on 漢音 but not Sino-Korean, which are both held to have been borrowed around the same time, roughly mid-late Tang, perhaps a bit later in the SK case. One possibility is that the denasalizing region included Chang’an; the Koreans were savvy and in constant contact enough with China to understand that the denasalized pronunciation was substandard, even if associated with the capital region, while the Japanese clerics who imported the readings were less with it, or more superliteralist.

In modern Japanese, kan’on readings are vastly less marked, and almost always used in neologized kango 漢音. Go’on readings have a strong association with Buddhism. The 呉 wu2 designation refers most likely not to any region of China (such as Southeastern China/Suzhgou~Shanghai region), but to the Korean peninsula. The kun 訓 vernacular reading of 呉, kure, refers to Korea and is probably the same word as Korean 고려 Koryŏ [koryə] or possibly Kuryŏ [kuryə], what you get if you subtract the flattering 高 from 高句麗, as non-Korean texts often do. This reflects the fact that both Sinography and Buddhism were originally imported to Japan from Paekche.

What bothers me is the reference to Coblin’s “detailed study of this”; Mair has linked it to Academia.edu, but I found it at JSTOR, and it is not at all a study of the phenomenon in question but a general discussion of early Northwest Chinese phonology. I presume the section Whitman refers to is 2.1 (pp. 12-13) on nasal initials, and I also presume by “depalatalized” he means “denasalized” (since that’s the only thing that makes sense in the context of /n/ > /d/), but I don’t see anything in the passage that would explain the Japanese development (he talks about [nd] but not [d]). If anyone has thoughts about all this, let’s hear them!