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The news of the death of the actor Robert Forster inspired me to watch the final scene of Jackie Brown, in which he gave an indelible performance as Max Cherry, and that led me to a Google trail which wound up on p. 114 of Robert Miklitsch’s Roll Over Adorno: Critical Theory, Popular Culture, Audiovisual Media, where I was stopped by the following passage:

While Jackie’s musical point of audition is realized via black R&B artists such as Bobby Womack and Randy Crawford, Melanie’s is associated with white pop-rock bands like the Guess Who and the Grass Roots. In fact, it’s not insignificant that the latter musical points de capiton are introduced in the scenes that immediately precede Melanie’s death.

Now, I’m familiar with all sorts of French phrases used in English texts, from the simple (point de vue, if you’re feeling too continental to say “point of view”) to the fancy (point de repère, ‘point of reference, landmark’), but I’d never run across point de capiton, and I didn’t even know what a capiton was (turns out it’s a kind of padding; since the French word was borrowed into English in the 17th century, meaning “Silk or linen flock,” the OED has an entry for it from which we learn that it’s “< Italian †capitone irregularity in a silk thread (a1347), probably < classical Latin capit-, caput head”). A bit of further googling told me that point de capiton is a Lacanian term, and happily there’s a Lacanian Wikipedia-equivalent (called No Subject for doubtless good and sufficient reasons) which has an article on it:

The French term point de capiton is variously translated in English editions of Lacan’s work as “quilting point” or “anchoring point.” […] It literally designates an upholstery button, the analogy being that just as upholstery buttons are places where “the mattress-maker’s needle has worked hard to prevent a shapeless mass of stuffing from moving too freely about,” so the points de capiton are points at which the “signified and signifier are knotted together.”

I have no idea what that means, and I don’t care enough to subject myself to the immersion in Lacan that would be necessary to find out — I long ago came to the conclusion that Theory is not for me. I have no objection to Lacanians using Lacanian terms in their Lacanian writings; that’s what in-groups are for. But I do object to the usage in the Miklitsch sentence I quoted. In the first place, his book, while Theory-oriented (as you can see from the title), is not specifically a work of Lacanian theory, and in fact Lacan is mentioned only a few times; is this particular Lacanian phrase so crucial to his argument it has to be used in this particular context? In the second place, the sentence just before it uses the phrase “point of audition” (which he explains elsewhere is an auditory equivalent of “point of view,” which seems both useful and self-explanatory), and when you read the two sentences together it seems to the untutored eye that point de capiton must be just a fancily French elegant variation on “point of audition.” I try not to fall too quickly into the category of grumpy old fart, and I try not to let my Theory-phobia morph into simple philistinism, but it does seem to me that authors should try a little harder to write accessibly — not for the general reader (since the general reader is unlikely to attempt a book called Roll Over Adorno: Critical Theory, Popular Culture, Audiovisual Media), but for the reader who, while comfortable with academic prose and the usual touchstones of modern academic reference, is not completely immersed in them. Otherwise you’re basically writing only for your own grad students.

This MetaFilter post contains some fine words:

The boundary wikipedia maintains between *unusual* units of measurement and *humorous* units of measurement is permeable and probably subjective; the rate of flow from one to the other might well be measured in miner’s inches (Colorado, Arizona, or New Zealand standard).

The shake (10 nanoseconds) and jiffy (varying lengths of time, depending on field of use) are still on both humorous and unusual lists; the smoot (5 feet 7 inches) had been on both but, despite some pushback that people actually use it, is now classified as merely humorous. The Waffle House Index (previously), the banana equivalent dose, the foe, and the centipawn are all notable, highly specialized units in some sort of use; funny but functional. For all its Pratchettlike appeal, the FFF (furlong-firkin-fortnight) system doesn’t seem to be used that much except for giggles (as measured in aH, natch).

For your further consideration, a list of measurements that don’t even qualify as unusual (failing wikipedia’s “notable” criterion): Ponder the archaic Finnish peninkulma, the maximum distance over which you can hear a dog bark; the hedon, a unit of pleasure in ethical mathematics; and the cran, a measure of uncleaned herring equivalent to 42 British wine gallons (US). (Lovely old fishing pictures on that last link, which describes the quarter cran basket.) And for your melancholy / steampunk / poetical needs, obsolete units of measurement too.

There are, of course, many more in the lists. I have kept the links to lists but was too lazy to add links for individual units — you’ll have to go to the MeFi link for that. My favorite is the peninkulma; at that link you can find a detailed discussion of its changing length, as well as an etymology:

Although it’s length has changed over the years, etymologically the peninkulma kept its canine definition throughout: the word itself brings together peni, a Finnish word for “dog” (apparently not much used in modern Finnish except as a stock name for a dog, like “Rover” or “Rex”) alongside the Finnish word kuulua, essentially meaning “to be heard” or “to be audible”.

And the MeFite who posted it has a rumination:

Imagining anxiety at measuring the peninkulma (“the distance a barking dog can be heard in still air”). I know it’s not meant to be a unit with such precision, but a few steps inside the edge of the circle with radius of 1 peninkulma, you still hear your dog barking and while maybe you know why he’s still barking you’ve already walked like five versts from home and maybe there’s some new thing he’s barking at, some danger he’s warning you of, maybe you should go back and check. Also, did you even shut the gate, is he still following you? (You totally forgot to shut the gate.) Then a few steps further on, outside the edge of a circle you can’t see, you’re still measuring it, the woods go silent. They were already still but now the absence of barking seizes all your attention, muffles all other sound. Is this the edge of your hearing? Is it quiet because he got back into the house and is now eating your dinner? Is he just quiet because he’s caught your scent and is now using all his breath to run to come play with you & see how you are because you forgot to shut the gate, probably on purpose, the purpose of making sure your best friend is free to run after you to make sure you’re ok in the woods on such a still day?

Needless to say, this LH post is highly relevant.

I am becoming irritated by the vagueness surrounding the origins of the word millionaire, and I am hoping the Varied Reader can help out. I was intrigued by the idea that (as Wikipedia puts it s.v. John Law) “The term ‘millionaire’ was coined specifically to describe the beneficiaries of Law’s scheme,” i.e. the Banque Royale (“The collapse of the Mississippi Company and the Banque Royale tarnished the word banque (‘bank’) so much that France abandoned central banking for almost a century, possibly precipitating Louis XVI’s economic crisis and the French Revolution”), but I can find no confirmation of that. The Wikipedia Millionaire article says “The word was first used (as millionnaire, double “n”) in French in 1719 and is first recorded in English (millionaire, as a French term) in a letter of Lord Byron of 1816, then in print in Vivian Grey, a novel of 1826 by Benjamin Disraeli.” French Wikipedia says “Le mot « millionnaire » a été utilisé en premier par Steven Fentiman en 1719,” but I can find no information on this alleged Steven Fentiman (not a very French-sounding name) or on what he might have published in 1719. The Trésor de la langue française informatisé says “1740 millionnaire «celui dont la fortune est de plusieurs millions» (LE SAGE, La Valise trouvée, ds Œuvres, éd. 1821, t.12, p.258),” but I can’t find an accessible edition of that volume of the Œuvres. Any further information will be gratefully &c. &c.

Just checked the OED (updated March 2002) and found “< French millionnaire, noun (early 18th cent. or earlier as millionaire) and adjective (1740),” so I’m guessing Steven Fentiman is a red herring (and now I’m wondering where he came from).

Jonathan Dent, OED Senior Assistant Editor, provides a roundup of the new words, phrases, and compounds added to the OED this quarter:

New additions this September cover a lot of ground, stretching alphabetically from abugida (a system for organizing words or characters in the Semitic languages of Ethiopia, or a writing system used in some South or South-East Asian languages) to the slangily dismissive whatevs. This update travels back to the early Jurassic to examine dinosaurs of the genus Anchisaurus, drops in on ancient Rome for the fertility ritual Ambarvalia, and returns to the present day for a phenomenon celebrated (or at least, endlessly photographed) in the archetypal modern Western city: Manhattanhenge is an alignment of sunrise or sunset with the streets of New York, first recorded by this name in an email from the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in 2003. Among the earliest additions this quarter is an adverbial sense of ange (expressing a feeling of distress or anxiety) found in Old English works copied over a thousand years ago, while the most recent was first used less than seven years ago: a satoshi is the smallest monetary unit in the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, and is named after Satoshi Nakamoto, the—probably pseudonymous—developer(s) of Bitcoin.

The italicized words have links to their OED entries; he goes on to discuss the categories of food and drink (e.g., angels’ share, “the portion of distilled spirits […] lost to evaporation while ageing in casks”), politics and society (simples: “This modification of the interjection simple is probably unfamiliar to anyone outside the UK”), World English and regional words (sumphy, “a Scottish adjective meaning either ‘stupid’ or ‘sullen’”), and sf (“Star Wars fans eagerly awaiting the release of The Rise of Skywalker in December can pass the time by checking out the linguistic histories of lightsabre, Jedi, Padawan, and the Force”). I was particularly struck by the new entry for chess (pie), “a pie or tart filled with a mixture of eggs, butter, and sugar, to which nuts and fruit are sometimes added”:

Etymology: Origin unknown.
It has been suggested that chess is an alteration of cheese n.1 (compare cheesecake n. and cheese pie n. at cheese n.1 Compounds 2: the former at least denotes a similar dish and did not necessarily contain cheese; compare also chess cake in quot. 1860), but the form chess is not attested as a variant of cheese n.1 Another theory is that the name is an alteration of chest n.1 in chest pie, with reference to storing pies in a chest, but no evidence has been found of a form chest pie (or of pie chest). There is an anecdote in which the pie was described as ‘jes’ pie’ (just pie), which became chess pie, but there is no evidence to support this.

What a tangled recipe for such a simple word!

Dmitry Pruss sent me this link (in Russian), called Старинные люди у Холодного океана [People from Old Times by a Cold Ocean]; it contains excerpts from the 1914 book of that title by Vladimir Zenzinov, who (as you’ll see if you visit that Wikipedia link) had an extraordinary life. Among his adventures as a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party was being arrested and banished to Siberia; after he escaped and was recaptured, he was sent to northern Yakutia “to make escape impossible” and “devoted himself to ethnographic studies,” among which was the book in question, about the villagers of Russkoye Ustye in the delta of the Indigirka River, “settled several centuries ago by ethnic Russians, who mixed to some extent with the indigenous Even people.” The LiveJournal link has remarkable photos; I thought I’d translate the first part of the section on language (IX. Особенности языка):

In the course of centuries, the speech of the Indigirkans was influenced in very complex ways by the language of the Yakuts and the people of the Kolyma region, as well as by the Russians who had long lived in Yakutia, who had also developed distinctive linguistic features thanks to their long separation from Russia in Siberia. Apart from that, the people of Russkoye Ustye preserved words and expressions peculiar to them, for example “Yo, brat!” [an expression of pain or strong feeling] and “kabyt’” [= kak-nibud’ ‘so-so’].

The weakness of the influence of the Yakut language on the speech of the Indigirkans […] is perhaps the most interesting feature of their way of life. Knowledge of Yakut is not widespread; only a few inhabitants can make use of a limited vocabulary of Yakut words, with the help of which they manage to make themselves understood by Yakuts and Yukagirs. In this they differ greatly from the Kolymans and the Ust-Yanskyans, for whom Yakut is as native a language as Russian. The Russians of Ust-Yansk and Kolyma speak only Yakut among themselves; Yakut is the conversational language of the entire North.

Zenzinov goes on to say that the people of Russkoye Ustye are well aware of their unusual ways of speaking, and will often say to visitors “We say it like this; how would you say it?”

Merrill Perlman of the Columbia Journalism Review writes with her usual sensible approach (see this LH post from April) about the foofaraw that’s sprung up around the internet about recent changes in the Associated Press Stylebook’s hyphenation guidelines:

Even though the guidelines were not sudden, and even though AP explained them thoroughly, people were upset. Among those guidelines was to omit a hyphen in a compound modifier “if the modifier is commonly recognized as one phrase, and if the meaning is clear and unambiguous without the hyphen.” One example—the one that gave many editors fits—was “first quarter touchdown.” Well, angry mob, your voices were heard. AP announced on Twitter that it would reverse its decision […]

But were you satisfied? Of course not […] In fact, even after the Twitter reversal, the myth persisted that AP had laid down “laws” about the use of hyphens […] The apparent problem is that AP refuses to set down “rules.” As the stylebook says, using hyphens “can be a matter of taste, judgment and style sense.” Judging by many of the Twitter reactions to the change to the changes, people want “rules.” “Rules” are easy to follow; “guidelines” require you to stick your neck out and decide based on what the orchid-loving detective Nero Wolfe would call “intelligence guided by experience.” It means you have to believe in your own decision-making abilities. […]

Slate, which called the AP Stylebook “that fusty old guide to grammar and punctuation that most news publications have relied on for decades,” used the occasion to talk about why people react with such vehemence to changes most people wouldn’t even notice. “Grammar and punctuation and diction rules exist to uphold consistency, which in turn helps writing become clearer to the greatest number of possible readers,” Seth Maxon wrote. “As fewer and fewer people seem to agree on not just the truth, but the very meaning of language, it’s a tool that’s more valuable than ever.” The changes “made us question our faith. Institutions and rules are crumbling everywhere we look, and now, this too succumbs to anarchy? The AP Stylebook represents not just a set of laws about right and wrong, but the idea that something, anything, can be trustworthy and endure.” And when it looks like the institution is crumbling, people react as if the world were ending.

She ends with this admirable thought: “Creating our own grammar—and words, and usage—is how language changes. If you want ‘rules,’ make them for yourself, but be prepared to defend them.” And, I would add, try to accept the fact that people are going to break them.

Leah Donnella, of NPR’s Code Switch podcast and blog, has written a nice piece on “Podunk” as slang term and place name (with a murky history):

A common implication of Podunk is that it’s a place so dreary and remote that it’s not even worth situating on a map. One of the most famous people to refer to Podunk was Mark Twain, who in 1869 wrote that a certain fact was known even “in Podunk, wherever that may be.”

But there are a couple of things that people who use the term probably don’t know. First, Podunk is the name of a few real towns. There’s a Podunk in Connecticut, one in New York, Vermont, Massachusetts. The Connecticut Podunk is well-known (OK, not that well-known) for an annual bluegrass festival. […]

The other thing people likely don’t know? Podunk was a place name long before it became a punchline. Podunk is an Algonquian word. Quick explanatory comma: Algonquian languages are a family of indigenous languages spoken from New England to Saskatchewan to the Great Plains. Those languages include Fox, Cree and Ojibwe. There are a bunch of words in English that have Algonquian roots: skunk, moose, caribou. […] But beyond its Algonquian roots, much of the linguistic history of Podunk is kind of murky. “We have no idea what the word means,” says Ives Goddard, senior linguist emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution and a leading expert on Algonquian languages. “You’ll be able to find guesses in the sources if you look around. Don’t believe any of it.” (I did, in fact, find some definitions — the most plausible being from the Nipmuc Indian Association of Connecticut’s quarterly newsletter: “Podunk or Pautunke, means ‘where you sink in mire’, a boggy place, in the Nipmuc dialect. But the Podunk called their homeplace Nowashe, ‘between’ rivers.”)

But according to Goddard, when it comes to Native American place names in the Eastern United States, a lot of what we think we know is actually misinformation. He says the standard source for these definitions is a man named William Bright, a linguist who in 2004 wrote a book called Native American Placenames of the United States. “He was a good linguist, a smart guy,” Goddard says of his colleague, who died in 2006. “But when he got to Eastern areas, there wasn’t any information.”

Rather than saying he didn’t know what certain place names meant, Goddard says, Bright cited a man named John C. Huden, who in 1962 published a book called Indian Place Names of New England. But Huden, Goddard adds, didn’t exactly have indisputable definitions himself. Huden “would look through all this amateur literature and find a [place] name, find a translation, and pick the one he liked,” Goddard explains. “And this book was considered authoritative. So if you’re looking at Bright, as I just did, he cites Huden, and then he cites like three or four people after Huden who are just copying Huden, of course, and are equally uninformed.”

That kind of thing drives me nuts. If you don’t know, just say so — don’t pick some amateur guess you happen to like!

I’ve reached what is structurally the halfway mark of The Brothers Karamazov, the end of Part Two (Book Six) and of the first volume of my faded yellow 1970 Soviet edition, even though it’s considerably less than half the number of total pages, and I thought I’d post a few thoughts about what I’ve read. I’m not going to go on and on about the Grand Inquisitor and the Life of Zosima (which end the first half) like everyone else does, partly because everyone else does and partly because I just can’t take them as seriously as I did in college now that I’ve read the Writer’s Diary — the first just seems to me like a fictionalized version of the rants from the Diary (Catholicism is going to merge with socialism and become atheist and stamp on the human face forever!) and the second like a barely fictionalized version of the ideals he promotes there (we must all love our neighbor and take on each other’s guilt!). It’s kind of interesting to see how Dostoevsky handles the intractable problem of theodicy (no better than anyone else, because there’s really nothing you can say but “God works in mysterious ways,” no matter how you dress it up), but it does stop the novel dead in its tracks for a while, much as the historical rants do in War and Peace (the difference being that Dostoevsky’s rants are better written). I will, however, quote the bit that resonates most strongly with my personal sense of how to approach the world morally, Alyosha’s response to Lise’s “aren’t we showing contempt for him, analyzing his soul like this?”:

Рассудите, какое уж тут презрение, когда мы сами такие же, как он, когда все такие же, как он. Потому что ведь и мы такие же, не лучше. А если б и лучше были, то были бы все-таки такие же на его месте…

Think about it, how can it be contempt when we ourselves are just like him, when everyone is just like him? Because we too are just like him, no better. And even if we were better, we would have been just the same in his place….

[Read more…]

A delightful short episode of Hall’s Pictorial Weekly, broadcast on October 2, 1974:

While working on a feature about John B Keane, Frank Hall chances upon some Cork County Council road workers tarring a stretch of road between Kiskeam and Boherbue. […] Frank Hall initially wants to know if the men have seen Eddie Bradley, but the subject soon turns to turns to the difference between fresh tarring and loose chippings. Maurice O’Keeffe explains that loose chippings means there is a dangerous surface and Ned Dennehy adds that they could break the glass in the car.

Maurice O’Keeffe does not have a preference but decides fresh tarring gives a better result. He then asks Frank Hall if he has a fiddle in his car. When Frank Hall cannot provide a fiddle, Maurice O’Keeffe sends him on an errand to collect his own fiddle from his home in Kiskeam so he can play some music while the men take their lunch break.

I’m a sucker for this kind of Irish conversation (some of the men are more immediately comprehensible than others). Thanks, Trevor!

Nicola Davis writes in the Guardian about gingerly attempts to read what’s written in carbonized scrolls:

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD79 it destroyed the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, their inhabitants and their prized possessions – among them a fine library of scrolls that were carbonised by the searing heat of ash and gas. But scientists say there may still be hope that the fragile documents can once more be read thanks to an innovative approach involving high-energy x-rays and artificial intelligence.

“Although you can see on every flake of papyrus that there is writing, to open it up would require that papyrus to be really limber and flexible – and it is not any more,” said Prof Brent Seales, chair of computer science at the University of Kentucky, who is leading the research. […] Experts have attempted to unroll about half of the scrolls through various methods over the years, although some have been destroyed in the process and experts say unrolling and exposing the writing to the air results in the ink fading. […]

While ink in some Herculaneum fragments has been found to contain lead, Seales says it is only trace amounts and does not allow the inside of the scrolls to be read using x-ray data alone. Seales says it has also proved impossible to replicate findings that letters within Herculaneum scrolls can be deciphered by the naked eye from scans captured by a slightly different x-ray technique. As a result the team have come up with a new approach that uses high-energy x-rays together with a type of artificial intelligence known as machine learning.

The method uses photographs of scroll fragments with writing visible to the naked eye. These are used to teach machine learning algorithms where ink is expected to be in x-ray scans of the same fragments, collected using a number of techniques. The idea is that the system will pick out and learn subtle differences between inked and blank areas in the x-ray scans, such as differences in the structure of papyrus fibres. Once trained on the fragments, it is hoped the system can be used with data from the intact scrolls to reveal the text within. Seales said the team have just finished collecting the x-ray data and are training their algorithms, adding that they will apply the system on the scrolls in the coming months. […]

Dr Dirk Obbink, a papyrologist and classicist at the University of Oxford who has been involved in training the team’s algorithms, said the project was immensely exciting and agreed it is possible the text might turn out to be Latin. “A new historical work by Seneca the Elder was discovered among the unidentified Herculaneum papyri only last year, thus showing what uncontemplated rarities remain to be discovered there,” he said. But Obbink is hoping the scrolls might even contain lost works, such as poems by Sappho or the treatise Mark Antony wrote on his own drunkenness. “I would very much like to be able to read that one,” he said.

I know there’s no actual news here, and I should probably wait until they actually decipher something, but the idea is so exciting (Sappho!) I couldn’t hold off. Thanks, Trevor!