languagehat.com

It’s a lot spiffier than this antiquated relic of the 2000s, but it covers a congruent mix of language-related topics. The About page features a Chekhov quote and a list of beliefs (Dogs are the best people; All English is Good English; No such thing as a wrong pronunciation); topics include phrasal verbs, No Irish in the House of Commons, The Irish and the definite article, I goes to work: subject-verb agreement, and many more, some of them listed at Kattullus’ MeFi post, from where I got the link (e.g. Shetland or Zetland ?, featuring yogh [Ȝ]). I learned something about my adopted region from this one:

It is almost a rite of passage, for those trained in the English language of New England, to confuse an outsider by using the phrase “downcellar”. This is a phrase that means both generally “downstairs” and also “in the basement”, and can be used regardless of what floor the speakers are on, or whether they are even indoors.

The phrase “down cellar” is not a recent evolution or an informal term, being attested as far back as the 1700s. Rather it is a product of an older and broader use of the preposition “down” which meant “towards”, evolving through the common directional construct “downtown”.

And though the term is not exclusive to New England, being reported by speakers in surrounding regions as well, it dovetails with a broader New England English proclivity for the direction “down.” New Englanders use it as a catch-all for generalized motion towards, saying things like “down the store”, “down the beach” and “down Quincy Market”.

Regardless of where we are geographically, the direction of travel is “down east” or “down town”, with “uptown” being decidedly too fancy a place to go. We even go “down the Cape”, from Western Massachusetts and Rhode Island, though the phrase “down Cape” has a more specific meaning: to the better beaches past Hyannis!

As an old-style blogger, I wish the entries were dated and there were archives (at least, I can’t find any), but never mind the nitpicking, it’s a good find.

My wife asked me why matrimony meant marriage whereas patrimony meant something entirely different, and I had no answer for her, so I googled around. Wiktionary is no help:

From Old French matremoine, from Latin mātrimōnium (“marriage, wedlock”), from mātri(s) (“mother”) + -mōnium (“obligation”). By surface analysis, matri- +‎ -mony. Compare patrimony.

So I tried the OED (entry revised 2001) and found:

< Anglo-Norman matermoine, matremoine, matrimoigne, matrimone, matrimonie and Middle French matremoine, matrimoigne (14th cent.; c1155 in Old French in sense ‘property inherited from one’s mother’: compare 1a) < classical Latin mātrimōnium state of being married < mātri-, māter mother (see matri- comb. form) + ‑mōnium ‑mony comb. form.

Which is also no help. I recognize that marriage tends to lead to motherhood, but can anyone explain the Latin formation more effectively? Does it have to do with Roman society, or is it just one of those things?

Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel Salvage the Bones was one of my birthday presents this year, and I just got through reading it. If you want the plot laid out, you can read the Wikipedia entry or Parul Sehgal’s NY Times review (archived). Me, I don’t read books for plot, and all I can tell you is that the novel’s architecture and its prose are perfectly fitted to the story being told; I’ll quote a couple of paragraphs, and if you like them you will certainly like the novel:

My mama’s mother, Mother Lizbeth, and her daddy, Papa Joseph, originally owned all this land: around fifteen acres in all. It was Papa Joseph nicknamed it all the Pit, Papa Joseph who let the white men he work with dig for clay that they used to lay the foundation for houses, let them excavate the side of a hill in a clearing near the back of the property where he used to plant corn for feed. Papa Joseph let them take all the dirt they wanted until their digging had created a cliff over a dry lake in the backyard, and the small stream that had run around and down the hill had diverted and pooled into the dry lake, making it into a pond, and then Papa Joseph thought the earth would give under the water, that the pond would spread and gobble up the property and make it a swamp, so he stopped selling earth for money. He died soon after from mouth cancer, or at least that’s what Mother Lizbeth used to tell us when we were little. She always talked to us like grown-ups, cussed us like grown-ups. She died in her sleep after praying the rosary, when she was in her seventies, and two years later, Mama, the only baby still living out of the eight that Mother Lizbeth had borne, died when having Junior. Since it’s just us and Daddy here now with China, the chickens, and a pig when Daddy can afford one, the fields Papa Joseph used to plant around the Pit are overgrown with shrubs, with saw palmetto, with pine trees reaching up like the bristles on a brush.

[…]

Mama taught me how to find eggs; I followed her around the yard. It was never clean. Even when she was alive, it was full of empty cars with their hoods open, the engines stripped, and the bodies sitting there like picked-over animal bones. We only had around ten hens then. Now we have around twenty-five or thirty because we can’t find all the eggs; the hens hide them well. I can’t remember exactly how I followed Mama because her skin was dark as the reaching oak trees, and she never wore bright colors: no fingernail pink, no forsythia blue, no banana yellow. Maybe she bought her shirts and pants bright and they faded with wear so that it seemed she always wore olive and black and nut brown, so that when she bent to pry an egg from a hidden nest, I could hardly see her, and she moved and it looked like the woods moved, like a wind was running past the trees. So I followed behind her by touch, not by sight, my hand tugging at her pants, her skirt, and that’s how we walked in the room made by the oaks, looking for eggs. I like looking for eggs. I can wander off by myself, move as slow as I want, stare at nothing. Ignore Daddy and Junior. Feel like the quiet and the wind. I imagine Mama walking in front of me, turning to smile or whistle at me to get me to walk faster, her teeth white in the gloom. But still, it is work, and I have to pull myself back and concentrate to find anything to eat.

The young narrator, Esch, is a reader, and she is currently absorbed in Greek myth, the Medea story in particular; it is used not for precious parallels but for salutary jolts. And one linguistic point: when I came to a mention of Buras-Triumph, Louisiana, of course I wanted to know how “Buras” was pronounced (anyone who presumes anything about Louisiana place names is a fool — case in point, Natchitoches (/ˈnækətəʃ/). Since the Wikipedia article didn’t tell me, I had to trawl through a number of videos to be sure that the locals say /ˈbjurəs/ (BYOO-rəs), and since I can’t find that corroborated in a printed source that will satisfy the Korinthenkacker at Wikipedia and thus can’t add it to the article, I’m sharing it here. (I did find a video of a woman teaching viewers how to pronounce some of the more opaque Louisiana place names by first parading the wrong versions, often more than once, before triumphantly producing the correct one. Apparently she has no idea that what that does is hammer the wrong forms into your head; when she says “I hear people say X, X, X, X, X, when actually it’s Y!” you’re not going to come away with anything but X. Bah.)

I saw a reference to bootleg records and wondered, for the hundredth time, why they were called that. Obviously it had to do with bootleg booze, but why was that called “bootleg”? And what was the chronology? So I went to the OED, which happily revised its entry just this year (I’ll interleave the corresponding adjective citations for easy comparison):

1. The part of a boot that covers the lower leg; the leather material used for this. Also: a gaiter or greave that covers the lower leg.

1575 [Paid for o]n paire of boote ledges to make [bawdricks] withall.
in J. E. Farmiloe & R. Nixseaman, Elizabethan Churchwardens’ Accounts (1953) 63
[…]

2.a. Alcohol that has been illegally produced, distributed, or sold, esp. during a time of prohibition. Also: a club or establishment selling such alcohol.
Now chiefly in historical contexts.
[On the origin of use in this sense see discussion in Etymology.]

1844 9 Puncheons of Old Rum (real New England ‘boot-leg’), the balance of a very large stock that has gone off very freely.
Subterranean & Working Man’s Advocate 16 Nov.

[adj.] 1861 The vials of wrath spoken of by the sacred writers, as at some future time to be poured out upon mankind, are supposed to be bottles of boot-leg whisky.
Topeka (Kansas) Tribune 9 February
[…]

1928 Gradually I’m becoming acquainted with all the brands of bootleg that the Westcoast offers.
H. Crane, Letter 31 January (1965) 315
[…]

[adj.] 2019 More than 100 people have died after drinking bootleg alcohol in northern India and hundreds more have been put in hospital.
Times 12 February 34/4

2.b. An unauthorized or illicitly traded item; a counterfeit.
Frequently with the implication that the item is a poor quality imitation of a superior product.

[adj.] 1921 War against ‘bootleg’ milk, in an attempt to make all milk sold in the city properly inspected.
Oklahoma News 4 January 1/1

1923 The printing on the base of the tube is frequently badly smudged on the bootleg, whereas on the genuine it is quite clear and readable.
Brooklyn Daily Eagle 12 August 8c/5
[…]

2.c.i. An unauthorized audio or video recording, esp. one that has been illicitly recorded at a live concert or cinema screening. Also: a record, DVD, etc., that has been distributed or reproduced without authorization.

[adj.] 1926 Bootleg jazz records with risque verses distributed.
Dothan (Alabama) Eagle 12 June 2/2 (headline)

1951 Victor presses bootlegs!
Record Changer (New York) November 1 (heading)

1971 This album of the Experience recorded at the Albert Hall in ’69 is not a bootleg (although there’s an inferior bootleg in mono selling at the same price), it’s an official German release.
It 2 June 18/1
[…]

2.c.ii. A piece of music created by merging two or more existing pieces of popular music, esp. the isolated vocals of one piece and the instrumental backing of another. Cf. mash-up n. 2.

1998 Holiday New Bootleg!.. Thomas Bangalter..put out this amazing song called Music Sounds Better With You… There is a bootleg mix that has the vocal from [sc. Madonna’s] Holiday on it.
alt.fan.madonna 30 August (Usenet newsgroup, accessed 13 Aug. 2024)

There are further senses (coffee, football, trousers), but they don’t interest me at the moment. So let’s “see discussion in Etymology”:
[Read more…]

Nitsuh Abebe writes in the NY Times (archived) about a kerfuffle that had hitherto escaped me but is obviously in my wheelhouse, “Whose Punctuation Is More Human: Yours or A.I.’s?”:

There are countless signals you might look for to determine whether a piece of writing was generated by A.I., but earlier this year the world seemed to fixate on one in particular: the em dash. ChatGPT was using it constantly — like so, and even if you begged it not to.

As this observation traveled the internet, a weird consensus congealed: that humans do not use dashes. Posters on tech forums called them a “GPT-ism,” a robotic artifact that “does not match modern day communication.” Someone on an OpenAI forum complained that the dashes made it harder to use ChatGPT for customer service without customers catching on. All sorts of people seemed mystifyingly confident that no flesh-and-bone human had any use for this punctuation, and that any deviant who did would henceforth be mistaken for a computer.

Those deviants were appalled, obviously. I am one; I am, even worse, a former proofreader who could speak at length and with passion about the uses of the narrower en dash. I understand very well that this dash-happy lifestyle is maybe atypical, but I had not expected to see its whole existence questioned. The dash is a time-honored and exceedingly normal tool for constructing sentences! Dickens, Dickinson, Nietzsche, Stephen King novels, this magazine — all strewn with dashes. Part of what makes them popular, in fact, is that they can feel more casually human, more like natural speech, than colons, semicolons and parentheses. Humans do not think or speak in sentences; we think and speak in thoughts, which interrupt and introduce and complicate one another in a neat little dance that creates larger, more complex ideas. (Or, sometimes, doesn’t: The copious dashing in J.D. Salinger dialogue is a great illustration of all the thoughts we leave unfinished.) This is the whole thing punctuation is for. […]

[Read more…]

I heard a piece by the American composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel and liked it, so I looked him up and discovered he’d written a piece called “Language Instruction” that you can read about, and hear a snippet of, here. One of the quotes on that page is an excerpt from Allan Kozinn’s NY Times review (Dec. 8, 2003; archived) of a performance:

For all one hears about the classical music world being a museum culture, there is an alternative musical world in New York, just outside the spotlight focused on the big performing institutions.

Virtually every night new music is on offer, usually in the smaller halls (or in places that specialize in it, like the Kitchen and Roulette), performed by musicians whose interpretive interests draw them toward what’s next rather than what has been. […]

The centerpiece was Derek Bermel’s “Language Instruction” (2003), an amusing full ensemble work based on the rhythms and gestures of language tapes. The clarinet was, in effect, the voice on the tape, and the other instruments were the students — variously willing or difficult, competent or bumbling — who must repeat the phrases. Mr. Bermel spins this interaction into an increasingly chaotic fantasy that would have been perfectly at home on a program with Berio’s Sequenza III and the works by Ms. La Barbara, Mr. Aperghis and Mr. Gal.

It sounds like a lot of fun (I enjoyed the audio clip), and I’m very glad our local classical station plays a good deal of contemporary music instead of sticking with the mossy 18th- and 19th-century standbys. (And if you’re curious, as I was, about the surname Bermel, it’s a “habitational name from a place in Rhineland named Bermel.”)

I was over at XIX век and happened to glance at the list of Russian literature sites in the right margin, and my eye fell on the obdurately lowercase obdurodon. When I clicked through, I found an amazing collection of “Digital humanities projects,” many of them Russian-related, from The annotated Afanas′ev library (“Selected Russian fairy tales from the Aleksandr Afanas′ev collection with glosses and linguistic and cultural annotation”) to Twitter register variation (“Corpus-based study of linguistic properties of English-language tweets”). It’s well worth checking out. And “obdurodon”? Per Wikipedia, it’s “a genus of extinct platypus-like Australian monotreme which lived from the Late Oligocene to the Late Miocene”:

The holotype tooth was placed into the newly erected genus Obdurodon upon description in 1975 by American palaeontologists Michael O. Woodburne and Richard H. Tedford. They named the genus from the Latin obduro “persist” and the Greek ὀδών (odṓn) “tooth”, in reference to the permanency of the molars, a feature which is lost in the modern platypus.

So it’s a bastard formation, but if I can take “television,” I guess I can take “obdurodon.” (It’s not in the OED yet even though it’s been known and named for half a century.) I have no idea why the site is called that, but there’s an image of a pair of them at the top of the main page, and it’s quite cute.

I find it hard to believe I’ve never posted about rebetika, since not only do I love the music (when I was in Athens I sought out a dusty record store where I could buy some LPs I then had to lug back to New York) but the word itself is very interesting. For one thing, there’s no unanimity on how to spell it; Wikipedia has it under Rebetiko (“plural rebetika […], occasionally transliterated as rembetiko or rebetico), while the OED (entry from 2002) has it s.v. rebetika (sadly, it’s not in M-W or AHD under any spelling). Here’s the OED definition, which is quite discursive:

A style of Greek popular song, characterized by lyrics depicting urban and underworld themes, a passionate vocal style, and an ensemble accompaniment played esp. on stringed instruments such as the violin, bouzouki, etc.; (with plural agreement) the songs themselves. Also (in form rebetiko): a song in this style. Frequently attributive.

First recorded commercially in Turkey before the First World War (1914–18), rebetika is assumed to have long existed (under various other generic names) as an oral tradition in Mediterranean seaports and prisons. Following the Greco–Turkish war of 1919–22, the genre became associated with the numerous Anatolian refugees settling in Athens. Extensively recorded and performed in the 1920s and 1930s, notably by immigrants from Asia Minor, Piraeus bouzouki players, and Greek Americans, rebetika also became known in English as ‘Greek Blues’ or ‘Piraeus Blues’.

But it’s the etymology that makes it a must-post, and happily Martin Schwartz has sent me a recent article of his on the subject. First I’ll provide the OED version:

< modern Greek ρεμπέτικα, plural of ρεμπέτικο eastern-style song of urban low life, use as noun of neuter singular of ρεμπέτικος of vagabonds or rebels, probably < ρεμπέτης rebetis n. + ‑ικος ‑ic suffix.

Notes
On the further etymology, compare note at rebetis n.
The forms with ‑mb‑ arise from the influence of an idiosyncratic transliteration of the modern Greek (in which the sequence ‑μπ‑ normally represents b), originally in G. Holst Road to Rembetika (1975).

(I think of it as rembetika because I was introduced to it by that Gail Holst book, which I recommend.) Now to Martin’s “A rebetic roundup: people, songs, words, and whatnot” (published as ch. 27 of The SOAS Rebetiko Reader); I’ll quote some bits and urge you to visit the link for more:
[Read more…]

As I said back in 2014, John Berryman is one of my favorite American poets, and I welcome the imminent appearance of Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs; Shane McCrae, who edited it and wrote the introduction, has a Paris Review essay about it from which I offer a few excerpts:

It has taken me years to realize that The Dream Songs is an epic—and a successful, even great one. For years, I searched for the successful traditional epic I felt certain must have been written by an American, and although I more than once encountered poems that seemed to fit the bill formally, none of them seemed an artistic success to me. Most often, they were let down by their language, which was commonly pedestrian, almost as if it were a secondary or even tertiary concern of their authors. But, of course, the language of an epic poem must be, in its way, as compressed as the language of a lyric poem—and in those moments when it is not compressed, the language must strike the reader as relaxed from compression, and loaded with the certainty of future compression. The language of The Dream Songs is always either compressed or suggestive of compression. The poem has this, and little else, in common with traditional epic.

But The Dream Songs also, of course, features a hero, as epics traditionally do—Henry. […] Henry, of course, is no Odysseus, though he more closely resembles Odysseus than all other epic heroes, with the exception of the unnamed protagonist of Dante’s Commedia (indeed, Henry strikes me as a combination of both heroes, but sitting in an armchair, sometimes a desk chair, at the end of a long day, talking, sometimes singing, sometimes shouting, in an otherwise empty room). Henry is an unheroic hero—a heroic hero has in-narrative effects upon the physical world and the people in it; Henry, for the most part, does not. When he does, the reader must take his word for it that he does; he, rather than the narrative of the epic, describes the effects he has. He is, in other words, a twentieth-century white American male, not especially remarkable, the sort of person who doesn’t establish or recover a nation, or parley with angels, or explore hell, but the sort of common person of whom nations are constituted, to whom angels were once commonly believed to minister in small ways, of whom hell was once commonly believed to be full. Henry is a hero for a disenchanted nation, from which once-common beliefs have mostly fled. He does not mourn the disappearance of those beliefs; he has held on to the beliefs he could. […]

In a 1968 interview with Berryman, Catherine Watson wrote, “Not all the songs about Henry are in the books, Berryman said, but ‘if there is a third volume, it will not take him further. It will be up to the reader to fit those poems in among the published ones.’ ” Berryman understood his epic to be complete, but he did not believe that its completeness could have only one form—although his remark does suggest that it has an established beginning and end; note the phrase, “fit those poems in among.” Only Sing collects 152 possible additions to the epic, each of which is worth reading for its own merits. […]

[Read more…]

I was reading James Hill’s NY Times piece “In This Parisian Atelier, Bookbinding Is a Family Art” (archived), which describes the work done in the Atelier Devauchelle and has gorgeous illustrations (some of which are video clips), when I came across a word that was more or less new to me (in that I may have seen it before but had no idea what it meant):

Naïk Duca has worked at the atelier for 19 years. She presses a thin heated roller onto foil to repair gold lines on leather book covers, a process known as gauffering.

Most dictionaries do not have this specialized sense of the verb: Merriam-Webster “to crimp, plait, or flute (linen, lace, etc.) especially with a heated iron,” AHD “To press ridges or narrow pleats into (a frill, for example),” OED (entry from 1900) “To make wavy by means of heated goffering-irons; to flute or crimp (the edge of lace, a frill, or trimming of any kind).” But Wiktionary does:

1. (transitive) To plait, crimp, or flute; to goffer, as lace.
2. (transitive) In fine bookbinding, to decorate the edges of a text block with a heated iron.

The odd thing is that the prevailing spelling is goffer: M-W says, s.v. gauffer, “variant spelling of ɢᴏꜰꜰᴇʀ,” AHD has “gof·fer also gauf·fer,” and OED’s entry is “goffer | gauffer.” Wiktionary, bizarrely, has one entry for gauffer and another for goffer, with differing definitions and no hint that they are related. As for the etymology, AHD says:

[French gaufrer, to emboss, from Old French, from gaufre, honeycomb, waffle, of Germanic origin; see webh- in the Appendix of Indo-European roots.]