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This is one of those occasions when I vaguely thought I knew a word but when push came to shove it turns out I have no idea what it actually means. The word is supercargo; I supposed it was some kind of cargo, but just now I looked it up and what do you know, it means “An officer on a merchant ship who has charge of the cargo and its sale and purchase.” Etymology:

Alteration (influenced by SUPER-) of supracargo, alteration (influenced by SUPRA-) of Spanish sobrecargo : sobre-, over (from Latin super-; see SUPER-) + cargo, cargo; see CARGO

The way I came to look it up is interesting as well; I decided to reread the Strugatskys‘ 1962 Попытка к бегству (Escape Attempt; see this 2011 post), and near the start one character tells another “Будь моим суперкарго” — ‘Be my supercargo.’ That made no sense to me, so I looked it up. Interesting that Russian seems to have borrowed the English word.

Incidentally, I can’t believe I didn’t mention in that earlier post these quatrains:

Пусть тахорги в страхе воют,
Издавая визг и писк!
Ведь на них идёт войною
Структуральнейший лингвист!

Let the takhorgs [alien creatures] howl in fear,
emitting cries and squeals!
Making war on them is
the most structural linguist!

На войне и на дуэли
Получает первый приз —
Символ счастья и веселья —
Структуральнейший лингвист.

In war and in a duel
the first prize,
symbol of happiness and joy, goes to
the most structural linguist!

It’s rare to see verse celebrating structural linguists.

Having read Astafyev’s 1960 novella Звездопад [Meteor shower — not, as David Gillespie renders it, “Starfall,” even though звезда is ‘star’ and пад- is the ‘fall’ root!] and enjoyed it, I looked around to see what else was published around then; Vladimir Tendryakov’s “Тройка, семерка, туз” [Three, seven, ace] came out the same year, and I remembered enjoying that back in 2011, so I thought I’d read the novella he published the following year, Суд [The trial] even though I’d seen it described as criticizing flaws in the Soviet legal system — what do I care about flaws in the Soviet legal system? But I decided to trust the writer, not the description, and I’m glad I did, because as soon as I read the first page I realized how stupid and misguided the description was (oh, how I hate sociological criticism!).

The first third of the hundred-page story is taken up with a bear hunt, and it’s perhaps the most gripping hunting story I’ve ever read — I was consistently wrong about where it was going, and when tragedy struck it came from a completely unexpected direction (even though the ground had been prepared earlier). I won’t soon forget that ravine, that bog, that shaky wooden footbridge; it’s as powerful as the best stories of men in nature, Jack London, say, or Hemingway. And then the consequences begin, leading to the final trial. Now, maybe Tendryakov actually did want to criticize the Soviet legal system, just as Dostoevsky wanted to criticize the tsarist legal system in The Brothers Karamazov; I neither know nor care. What matters in the story is the Dostoevskyan exploration of conscience that ensues; every character is presented convincingly, especially the experienced hunter at the center of events, Semyon Teterin, who had reluctantly agreed to take a diligent amateur and a drunken wannabe along with him on his nighttime expedition. It’s wonderfully written, from fine nature descriptions to a long passage about how in the drive to improve people’s lives it’s easy to take shortcuts and ignore truth; a couple of nice pithy bits: “В старину говорили: на роду написано. Пустое! Просто жизнь коленца выкидывает” [In the old days they used to say it was fate. Nonsense! It’s just life playing little tricks] and “Доброта, как и озлобление, бывает заразительной” [Kindness, like malice, can be infectious]. And of course there are the kind of interesting specialized vocabulary I love to run into, like согра [sogra] ‘swampy forested depression’ (of unclear origin; see Vasmer). It’s been translated twice, by Alex Miller as “The Trial” and by Olive Stevens as “Justice,” and it would be well worth your while to seek out one of those from your friendly local library. (If you read Russian, of course, just follow the link above.) There was a movie made from it in 1962; if anyone knows if it’s well done, do speak up.

For those who don’t care about Tendryakov but like music, I’ve got you covered; Martin Schwartz, an Iranianist who also happens to be an expert on Greek urban vernacular music (he put together one of my favorite CD compilations, Greek-Oriental Rebetica: Songs and Dances In The Asia Minor Style – The Golden Years: 1911-1937, from his own collection of 78s, with superb liner notes, texts, and translations), sent me a link to Radio Rebetiko, which not only plays the songs but provides the texts (in Greek), and Adam Neely explains “The Girl from Ipanema” in a very informative half-hour video (though I wish he pronounced Brazilian Portuguese better — he says “IpanEEma” and “GHilberto” and seems to think the ‘girl’ of the title is garrota rather than garota).

Interesting excerpts from A Power in the World, by Lorenz Gonschor (U. Hawaii Press, 2019), courtesy of Joel at Far Outliers (Sources of Tahitian Legal Terms, Sources of Samoan Legal Terms):

Unlike the Hawaiian constitutional model with its hybrid forms combining classical elements of statecraft with Western forms, the Tahitian legal code and its derivatives primarily used concepts from either biblical or English law, for example, the word ture for “law,” a Tahitian form of the Hebrew word ה רָוֹתּ (torah), basileia (pātīreia in contemporary Tahitian spelling), deriving from Greek βασιλεία (basileía) for kingdom, or tāvana, Tahitian rendering of governor (> *gāvana > tāvana) to designate the heads of the formerly independent clans or chiefdoms that were reorganized as districts within the new Christian kingdom (Académie Tahitienne 1999, 530; Montillier 1999, 270–271).

The marked contrast to the terminology for the equivalent political institutions in the Hawaiian kingdom—namely, kānāwai, aupuni, and kia‘āina, all of which derive from classical Hawaiian statecraft—is clear. It is also hardly surprising, given the nature or Pomare’s kingdom and the other Tahitian-language realms as secondary states modeled on outside examples, and not primary states that developed endogenously, such as the classical Hawaiian predecessor states of the Hawaiian Kingdom (Hommon 2013, 184–185).

[…]

What is also intriguing about the Samoan constitutional system is that despite the absence of classical state-like political structures, the vocabulary created for concepts of modern statecraft was remarkably traditional, much more than the equivalent terms in Tongan and Fijian. For instance, the Samoan term for law is tulāfono, a concept clearly grounded in classical concepts of governance. Other terms for innovative institutions were literal translations, such as failautusi (someone doing writing or accounting) for secretary (that is, cabinet minister). Very few words, however, were direct borrowings from foreign languages comparable to Tahitian ture and basileia or Tongan lao and minisitā.

I would not have expected a Polynesian language to borrow either torah or basileia.

Edwin L. Battistella at OUPblog posts about a magnificent old term that is too little known:

It turns out that honeyfuggler is an old American term for someone who deceives others folks by flattering them. It can be spelled with one g or two and sometimes with an o replacing the u. To honeyfuggle is to sweet talk, but also to bamboozle, bumfuzzle, or hornswoggle.

The word has some twists and turns in its history. According to both the Oxford English Dictionary and the Dictionary of American Regional English, it was first recorded as a Kentucky term in 1829 with the definition “to quiz” or “to cozen,” both of which at the time meant to dupe.

The earliest example in the Newspapers.com database is from an 1841 story in a Tennessee newspaper, the Rutherford Telegraph, in which an editor used the term to mean insincere flattery. He said of the Speaker of the Tennessee state senate that “Some may say it is impolitic of me to talk thus plainly about Mr. Turney, and think it better to honey-fuggle and plaster over with soft-soap to potent a Senator.” […]

Honeyfuggle remained a marginal term, often characterized as slang or as a regionalism, but it popped into the national consciousness when Taft deployed it to characterize his predecessor and then-rival for the 1912 Republican presidential nomination. In a speech in Cambridge, Ohio, Taft said:

I hold that the man is a demagogue and a flatterer who comes out and tells the people that they know it all. I hate a flatterer. I like a man to tell the truth straight out, and I hate to see a man try to honeyfuggle the people by telling them something he doesn’t believe. […]

Where does honeyfuggle come from? One theory, found in Bartlett’s 1848 Dictionary of Americanisms is that it is a variation of a British English dialect word coneyfogle, which meant to hoodwink or cajole by flattery. Coney is an old word for an adult rabbit and was sometimes used to indicate a person who was gullible. Fugle, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is older dialect term meaning “to trick or deceive.” So to coneyfogle or coneyfugle meant to cheat a mark.

Today the OED reports that honeyfuggle is “Now somewhat dated.” Perhaps we should try revive it.

Amen!

Dan Nosowitz has a typically compendious post at Atlas Obscura, Why North Carolina Is the Most Linguistically Diverse U.S. State:

Walt Wolfram grew up in a city so linguistically fascinating that the first time he met Bill Labov, the godfather of American sociolinguistics, Labov simply cornered him and made him say different words. Yet he left his native Philadelphia for a teaching job elsewhere—a place of even greater linguistic intrigue. “I got an offer I couldn’t refuse, Wolfram says, “to die and come to dialect heaven.”

Wolfram is coauthor of Talkin’ Tar Heel: How Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina, an examination of his adopted home, where he works at North Carolina State University (alongside his coauthor Jeffrey Reaser). He also happens to be one of the great American linguists of the past 50 years, with a specialty in ethnic and regional American English dialects. He has been a central figure in getting stigmatized dialects, such as African-American English and Appalachian English, recognized as legitimate language systems.

Wolfram has called North Carolina the most linguistically diverse state in the country, but that diversity is waning. The Tar Heel State is the intertidal zone of the linguistic South: Overwhelming forces wash in and out, but weird, fascinating little tide pools remain.

There’s interesting history, e.g.:

Distinctly Southern dialects among the white population of the American South seem only to have taken hold starting around the time of the Civil War. (African-American and other minority dialects have their own histories, which will be addressed later.) “The things that we think are Southern today were embryonic in the South before the Civil War, but only took off afterwards,” says Wolfram. The period from the end of the Civil War until World War I—which seems like a long time, but is very condensed linguistically, less than three generations—saw an explosion of diversity in what are sometimes referred to as Older Southern American Accents.

And there are descriptions of dialect diversity:

North Carolina, smack in the middle of the Atlantic South, found more of those dialects within its borders than any other state. On top of that, North Carolina is home to a dialect found nowhere else in the world: the English spoken by those in the Pamlico Sound region, the coastal area that includes the Outer Banks.

Only a few generations ago, you could find an Appalachian speaker in the mountains of the west, a Tidewater speaker in the counties bordering Virginia, a Black Belt speaker in the eastern lowlands, and a Pamlico Sound speaker out on Ocracoke and Harkers Island, all without leaving the state.

These are dramatically different ways of speaking. Frankly, it would take too long to get into what makes them unique, but it’s easy enough to hash out a few of the best-known distinguishing features.

The whole thing is well worth your while. Thanks, jack!

In David Quammen’s NYRB review (Nov. 8, 2018) of Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution, by Menno Schilthuizen, he writes:

And then there’s a humble little fish called the mummichog (Fundulus heteroclitus), a bottom-wallowing native of brackish waters along the Eastern Seaboard, including big urban ports such as Bridgeport, Connecticut, that are silted up with decades of toxic chemicals such as PCBs and other industrial waste. A genetic study of Bridgeport’s mummichogs, Schilthuizen reports, found genome changes that protect those fish from the effects of PCBs. Who says there’s no good news in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London?

I found the word mummichog enchanting; I looked it up in the OED (entry updated March 2003), where it is defined as:

A killifish; esp. Fundulus heteroclitus (family Cyprinodontidae), a small marine killifish of sheltered parts of the east coast of North America, which has dark and silvery vertical bars on the sides and is often kept in aquaria or used as bait.

The first and last citations are:

1787 T. Pennant Arctic Zool. II. Suppl. 149 Inhabits New York, where it is known by the Indian name of Mummy Chog.
1851 M. H. Perley Rep. New Brunswick (1852) 194 It [sc. the striped Killifish] is also known by its Indian name of ‘mummachog’, corrupted by the English settlers on the Gulf shore of New Brunswick, where it abounds, to ‘mammychub’.
[…]
1977 Audubon Sept. 8/1 The first modification of my reverent attitude resulted from my need for mummichogs, alias killifish.
1987 J. Hersey Blues (1988) 82 A handful of mummichogs, robust and chubby four-and five-inch light brown fish with dark bars along their flanks..swam downward from the surface.

The etymology is “< Narragansett moamitteaũg, plural (1643 in R. Williams A Key into the Language of America)”; I guess it’s not further analyzable, which is a pity. As for the almost as delightful killifish, the best the lexicographers can do is (in the words of the AHD) “Perhaps KILL² [i.e., ‘creek’] + FISH.”

A few years ago I posted about a book available from Open Book Publishers, but I had no idea how wide a net they cast or how many interesting fish they caught. Now Owlmirror has started posting links to two particularly attractive sections of the site: Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures (see Owlmirror’s recommendations here) and World Oral Literature Series (here). All pdf’s are free (though you have to pay for physical books), and David Eddyshaw has already downloaded Oral Literature in Africa. Enjoy!

Addendum. Today I found in the mailbox an Amazon package with 50 Writers: An Anthology of 20th Century Russian Short Stories, edited by Mark Lipovetsky and Valentina Brougher; it is a spectacular selection of authors and looks wonderful. Thanks, D20!

Yesterday I read Turgenev’s last work of fiction, Клара Милич (Clara Militch); I wasn’t going to bother posting about it because it struck me as basically a bunch of silly hugger-mugger: virginal young Yakov Aratov lives with his elderly maiden aunt and rarely goes out, but his only friend, the boisterous Kupfer, drags him out to meet the strangely alluring title character, “a girl of nineteen, tall, rather broad-shouldered, but well-built” with “a dark face, of a half-Jewish half-gipsy type,” who sings and reads Pushkin — not all that well, but passionately — and after she poisons herself onstage he becomes obsessed with her, finally having nightly visions of her and dying; on his deathbed “in his clenched right hand they found a small tress of a woman’s dark hair.” Oooh! Mystery!

But then I looked up what the ever-quotable Prince Mirsky (see, e.g., this post) had to say about it, and was so pleased that I thought I’d write a post after all. He calls it the most important of the late “fantastic” stories, but says “the mysterious element is somewhat difficult to appreciate quite whole-heartedly today. It has all the inevitable flatness of Victorian spiritualism.” And on the next page he sums up Turgenev thus:

Turgénev was the first Russian writer to charm the Western reader. There are still retarded Victorians who consider him the only Russian writer who is not disgusting. But for most lovers of Russian he has been replaced by spicier food. Turgénev was very nineteenth century, perhaps the most representative man of its latter part, whether in Russia or west of it. He was a Victorian, a man of compromise, more Victorian than any one of his Russian contemporaries. This made him so acceptable to Europe, and this has now made him lose so much of his reputation there. Turgénev struck the West at first as something new, something typically Russian. But it is hardly necessary to insist today [mid-1920s] on the fact that he is not in any sense representative of Russia as a whole. He was representative only of his class—the idealistically educated middle gentry, tending already to become a non-class intelligentsia—and of his generation, which failed to gain real touch with Russian realities, which failed to find itself a place in life and which, ineffective in the sphere of action, produced one of the most beautiful literary growths of the nineteenth century. In his day Turgenev was regarded as a leader of opinion on social problems; now this seems strange and unintelligible.

All true. (Mind you, if you like ghost stories and that sort of thing, you may well like Clara Milich; by all means give it a try.)

C.S. Lewis makes a good point and a nice comparison (from An Experiment in Criticism, via Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti):

‘Why’, they ask, ‘should I turn from a real and present experience— what the poem means to me, what happens to me when I read it—to inquiries about the poet’s intention or reconstructions, always uncertain, of what it may have meant to his contemporaries?’ There seem to be two answers. One is that the poem in my head which I make from my mistranslations of Chaucer or misunderstandings of Donne may possibly not be so good as the work Chaucer or Donne actually made. Secondly, why not have both? After enjoying what I made of it, why not go back to the text, this time looking up the hard words, puzzling out the allusions, and discovering that some metrical delights in my first experience were due to my fortunate mispronunciations, and see whether I can enjoy the poet’s poem, not necessarily instead of, but in addition to, my own one? Do we not all still enjoy certain effects which passages in classical or foreign poets produced in us when we misunderstood them? We know better now. We enjoy something, we trust, more like what Virgil or Ronsard meant to give us. This does not abolish or stain the old beauty. It is rather like revisiting a beautiful place we knew in childhood. We appraise the landscape with an adult eye; we also revive the pleasures—often very different—which it produced when we were small children.

Admittedly, we can never quite get out of our own skins. Whatever we do, something of our own and of our age’s making will remain in our experience of all literature. Equally, I can never see anything exactly from the point of view even of those whom I know and love best. But I can make at least some progress towards it. I can eliminate at least the grosser illusions of perspective.

Also, for those of you who miss libraries and their ambience, Oxford has you covered with Sounds of the Bodleian. You can choose between the rustlings, shufflings, and discreet coughs of four different reading rooms, each with a glorious image that enables you to experience that great institution vicariously. (One of my favorite lines in all science fiction, from the thoroughly delightful “The Last of the Spode” by Evelyn E. Smith: “Pity about the Bodleian, though.”)

I thought I’d pass along couple of tidbits from the Jabotinsky novel that didn’t fit into yesterday’s post. At one point he refers to the institution of the Überbrettl:

Überbrettl […] was the first venue in Germany for literary cabaret, or Kabarett, founded 1901 in Berlin by Ernst von Wolzogen. The German Kabarett concept was imported from French venues like Le Chat Noir in Paris, from which it kept the characteristic atmosphere of intimacy. But the German type developed its own peculiarities, most prominently its characteristic gallows humour.

The distinct cabaret atmosphere was sketched by Otto Julius Bierbaum in his 1897 novel Stilpe, which inspired Wolzogen in the foundation of the Überbrettl. He chose the initial name both to parody Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch concept and to contrast the widespread Brettl (i.e. “(stage-)board”) variety shows without further artistic ambitions.

I don’t know if German speakers will agree with me, but I think that’s a funny word.

And there’s a passage where he mentions the “седьмая держава” [seventh power] in a context that makes it clear the referent is the press — what in similar contexts in English is called the “fourth estate”; a little googling showed me that the “correct” term is шестая держава [sixth power], the term having been coined at a period when the “five powers” were England, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. I don’t know how or when it got turned into the seventh, but somehow that expression has wound up in a Russian-Hebrew dictionary.