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Mike Colias has an enjoyable WSJ column (archived) about a Ford executive who “kept a meticulous log of mixed metaphors and malaprops uttered in meetings over a decade”:

Mike O’Brien emailed a few hundred colleagues last month to announce his retirement after 32 years at Ford Motor. The sales executive’s note included the obligatory career reflections and thank yous—but came with a twist. Attached to the email was a spreadsheet detailing a few thousand violations committed by his co-workers over the years.

During a 2019 sales meeting to discuss a new vehicle launch, a colleague blurted out: “Let’s not reinvent the ocean.” At another meeting, in 2016, someone started a sentence with: “I don’t want to sound like a broken drum here, but…”

For more than a decade, O’Brien kept a meticulous log of mixed metaphors and malaprops uttered in Ford meetings, from companywide gatherings to side conversations. It documents 2,229 linguistic breaches, including the exact quote, context, name of the perpetrator and color commentary. After one colleague declared: “It’s a huge task, but we’re trying to get our arms and legs around it,” O’Brien quipped: “Adding ‘legs’ into the mix makes it sound kinda kinky.” […]

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Anatoly Vorobey quotes (in Russian) a Facebook post by Gombo Tsydynzhapov about watching Cowboy Bebop in English with French subtitles and discovering that the two versions radically diverged, so that when the hero says “Hell, I’ll take my chances” the subtitle has “Rien a faire. C’est la vie,” and “I hate theme parks” gets rendered as “Maintenant, tout est fini”, which leads Gombo to the thought that in the Japanese original everything might be totally different. Anatoly adds:

Просто сад расходящихся тропок какой-то. Понравилась оформление идеи (не новой, конечно), что появление дополнительной версии с совсем другим текстом заставляет обе подозревать в недостоверности.

It’s a sort of garden of forking paths. I liked the presentation of the idea (which isn’t new, of course) that the appearance of an additional version with a completely different text makes you suspect both of being unreliable.

There is a lively comment thread; I was particularly struck by jr0, who says “Мне всерьез лингвисты задвигали, что перевести реплику Jesus Christ! как Черт! — норм” [Linguists have seriously suggested to me that translating the line “Jesus Christ!” as “the Devil!” is normal] and when called on it insists stubbornly that it is some kind of… sin? blasphemy?… to render a godly name by a satanic one, even if they are used equivalently in colloquial speech. An interesting form of prescriptivism!

I just watched Jean Grémillon’s 1941 movie Remorques, part of the Criterion Channel’s French Poetic Realism series (which is introducing me to filmmakers I’d barely heard of, like Grémillon and Julien Duvivier); it’s an excellent movie (with a screenplay by Jacques Prévert), but I’m posting because I didn’t know the word remorque ‘towline,’ and it’s got an interesting etymology — it’s from Latin remulcum:

From Ancient Greek ῥυμουλκέω (rhumoulkéō), from ῥῦμα (rhûma, “tow-line”) + ἕλκω (hélkō, “to drag”); for first element see ἐρύω (erúō, “to pull”).

And its Romance descendants are all distorted in minor ways: Italian rimorchio (from a diminutive *remurculum) and the verbs Portuguese rebocar and Spanish remolcar. If I had read more sea stories and watched more movies set on ships, I’d know more nautical terminology!

Looking at a map of Switzerland, I noticed a town called La Tour-de-Peilz on Lake Geneva and wondered how it was pronounced. Wikipedia told me it was [la tuʁ də pɛ] (ah, the transparency of French spelling!), but then I wanted to know where the name was from, so I proceeded to French Wikipedia, where I found this:

Dans son livre « Noms de lieux des pays franco-provençaux », Georges Richard Wipf écrit que « le gallois blaidd (loup) étant à l’origine des termes bela, belau, bele et bel, ce qui postule ble → bel, on peut penser que *bleiz a aussi pu évoluer […] en *beilz, d’où *peilz. » L’auteur prend toutefois soin de préciser qu’« il ne s’agit que d’une hypothèse, mais elle expliquerait le nom de Peilz (La Tour-de-Peilz, VD). »

Cette étymologie est toutefois controversée et plusieurs autres explications ont été avancées. Celle retenue de préférence aujourd’hui est une origine remontant à un gentilice latin Pellius, hypothèse confortée par le lieu-dit En Peilz, à l’est de la ville, où ont été retrouvés de nombreux vestiges romains.

I mean, I’m all for trying to peer into the past of words, but the pile-up of “ce qui postule … on peut penser … a aussi pu évoluer” hardly needs to be clarified by “il ne s’agit que d’une hypothèse.” I am irresistibly reminded of the insufferable Brichot.

But that Welsh word blaidd ‘wolf’ is interesting; it goes back to Proto-Celtic *bledyos (etymology unknown: “Probably borrowed from a non-Indo-European substrate language”), whose Old Irish descendant bled (eDIL) means ‘sea-monster; whale.’ There’s a fine piece of semantic development for you! I deduce that the Irish, not having wolves, applied the inherited name to their native sea-monsters. (The modern term for ‘wolf’ is mac tíre ‘son of the land’; make of that what you will.)

I’ve started watching Jacques Rivette’s Jeanne la pucelle (it’s almost six hours long, so I’m taking it in chunks, which fortunately it breaks easily into); it’s gorgeous, and Sandrine Bonnaire can do no wrong as far as I’m concerned, but the subtitles are occasionally iffy, and I’m here to complain about one that particularly irritated me. Someone is talking about the warring forces in France and mentions a group that the subtitle calls “the Godons.” I thought I knew a fair amount about the period, but that didn’t ring a bell; after some googling I realized that it was this. OK, apparently “godons” was a variant form of the more familiar “goddams” (though I note that the Wiktionary article says “speculatively connected to English God damn, although the profanity is not attested in Middle English” [see Xerîb’s comment below for further demolition]), but what a lousy way to render it! “The English” would be preferable, but even “the goddams” would give more of a hint to the viewer not versed in Medieval French obloquy. And this from a subtitler who, when Jeanne tells her uncle she wants to go to see the Dauphin and he says “Qui — le roi de Bourges?” renders his response “the Well Served?” Which is not only unintelligible to the non-specialist viewer but misses the entire point of mockingly calling him “King of Bourges”!

Dave Wilton has a Big List entry tracing the history of the word callow:

Callow is a word that dates back to the beginnings of the English language, but it has shifted in meaning significantly over the past eleven-hundred years. Today it means inexperienced or naive, and it often appears in the phrase callow youth. But way back when it was associated with aging, for in Old English the word calu meant bald. […] The meaning of callow remained stable through the Middle English period, but in the late sixteenth century the word began to be applied to young birds, who were unfledged, that is without feathers. […] And by the end of the seventeenth century, callow was being used to refer to young and naïve people without allusion to fledgling birds. […] This inexperienced sense would quickly overtake the bald sense, driving the latter out of the language.

I’ll add this to my stock of ammunition to be used against those who object to semantic change (my go-to example has been bead, originally ‘prayer’): “Oh, so you think callow should only mean ‘bald,’ then?”

I was wondering if it was related to Russian голый ‘naked’; Wiktionary says yes, but the OED (entry revised 2016) is more cautious:

Cognate with Middle Dutch calu, cāle (Dutch kaal), Middle Low German kale, Old High German kalo (Middle High German kal, German kahl); further etymology uncertain.

Notes

Further etymology
Perhaps < the same Indo-European base as Old Church Slavonic golŭ naked, bare, or perhaps an early borrowing into Germanic of classical Latin calvus bald (see calvity n.).

Trevor Joyce sent me a link to Danica Salazar’s Guardian piece on an OED update a couple of years ago, but it slipped to the unseen recesses of my inbox before I got around to it, and I hereby abashedly retrieve it for your delectation. After an introit on how “English spread across the globe,” we get to the good stuff:

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has documented many of the words that these new communities of English speakers have added to the vocabulary. Many of these words are borrowings from other languages with which English is in constant contact, such as lepak (to loiter aimlessly) from Malay, deurmekaar (confused, muddled) from Afrikaans, kaveera (a plastic bag) from Luganda, and whāngai (an adopted child and the adoption itself) from Māori, which may be unfamiliar to British English speakers but are words characteristic of Malaysian English, South African English, Ugandan English and New Zealand English respectively.

Speakers of world varieties of English are remaking its vocabulary to better express their identities, cultures and everyday realities. In Hong Kong, people exclaim add oil as a show of encouragement or support, an expression literally translated from the Cantonese gā yáu, with reference to petrol being injected into an engine. In the Philippines, many houses have a dirty kitchen, which is not actually a kitchen that is dirty in the sense you think, but a kitchen outside the house where most of the real cooking is done – a necessary convenience in a tropical country where it is best to avoid trapping heat and smells indoors. In Nigeria, a mama put is a street-food stall, and its name comes from the way that its customers usually order food: they say “Mama, put …” to the woman running the stall, and point to the dish they want so it can be put on their plate.

Meanwhile, the Japanese have invented, and South Koreans have popularised, the word skinship, a blend of the words skin and kinship that refers to the close physical contact between parent and child or between lovers or friends.

What great expressions! (Yes, I know some of you feel strongly that such terms are not part of English as you conceive it; we can take the objection as read.) The etymology for kaveera (East African English /kaˈvera/) actually provides a morphological analysis in Luganda, though it would have been nice if they’d ventured a guess as to where ‑veera comes from:

< Luganda (a)kaveera < (a)ka-, singular class prefix + ‑veera (single-use) plastic bag (plural (o)buveera buveera n.).

Compare buveera n. (which is also used as a plural of kaveera n. in English).

Belated thanks, Trevor!

Dennis Duncan’s LRB review-essay on Raymond Queneau’s life and career (Vol. 46 No. 12 · 20 June 2024; archived), formally a review of The Skin of Dreams (Loin de Rueil), translated by Chris Clarke, begins with the language angle:

‘Si tu t’imagines,’ Juliette Gréco sang. ‘If you imagine.’ It was her first time singing in public, on 22 June 1949, at the Boeuf sur le Toit cabaret, the beginning of her seven-decade reign as the first lady of French chanson. Both the venue and the song were selected by Gréco’s unlikely svengali, Jean-Paul Sartre. François Mauriac, three years away from his Nobel Prize, was in the audience. So was Marlon Brando. After the concert he gave Gréco a ride home on his motorbike. ‘Si tu t’imagines,’ indeed.

But the song isn’t a wish-upon-a-star fantasy. ‘Imagine’, here, is used in its finger-wagging, admonitory sense: you’ve got another think coming if you imagine that … That what? The next line is the song’s best, a sound poetry joke. Over the music-box twinkle, Gréco suddenly glitches, ‘xa va xa va xa’, clicking plosives like the needle skipping on a record, until the line resolves: ‘va durer toujours’. If you want to be boring about it, ‘xa va’ = ‘que ça va’: ‘If you imagine/That this will, that this will, that this/Will last for ever …’ But the poem that Sartre chose, and had set to music, was by Raymond Queneau. And Queneau spells it ‘xa’.

Ten years later, in the summer of 1959, the French edition of Elle magazine reported on a new and virulent linguistic disease sweeping the country. ‘The Zazie phenomenon is ravaging France like an epidemic. In the streets and on the métro, from the mountains to the beaches, we are all “speaking Zazie”.’ That summer, simply everyone was imitating the insouciant, potty-mouthed heroine of Queneau’s latest novel, Zazie dans le métro. ‘Unbearable’, Elle’s columnist mock-harrumphed.

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We’ve had a number of posts on printers’ terms (e.g., Wayzgoose, Printer’s Pie), but this one has leaped to near the top of my list of favorites:

Zwiebelfisch

German

Etymology

Zwiebel (“onion”) +‎ Fisch (“fish”), originally “fish of low quality”, then “low quality, clutter”.

Pronunciation

IPA(key): /ˈt͡sviːbl̩ˌfɪʃ/

Noun

Zwiebelfisch m (strong, genitive Zwiebelfisches or Zwiebelfischs, plural Zwiebelfische)

1. (printing) A character that is by mistake printed in a font different from the rest.
2. misprint

That’s great on so many levels I can only doff my hat in awe. Also, Zwiebel is from Late Latin cēpulla, diminutive of Latin cēpa ‘onion,’ which makes sense but is unexpected. (The Latin word is “A borrowing from an unknown, possibly Anatolian source.”)

Elyse Graham writes for the Princeton Alumni Weekly about the strange fate of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s career:

At the start of the 1940s, F. Scott Fitzgerald 1917 was, as the kids say, in his flop era. In the first year of that decade, the total sales for all of Fitzgerald’s books, from This Side of Paradise to The Great Gatsby, were a whopping 72 copies. The amount of scholarly ink spilled on him could fit into a thimble. When Fitzgerald died in December 1940 — of a heart attack, at the age of 44 — the world’s verdict on the author was that he was a tragic figure: a sort of literary sparkler who burned too bright, too young, then fizzled out when his decade did, enjoying great celebrity during the Jazz Age and losing it all in the 1930s when the public had too many worries to care about flappers and champagne.

His early death was all the crueler, critics said, because it came late enough for him to see the collapse of his youthful promise. On his 40th birthday, the New York Post published a profile that depicted him as a washed-up alcoholic who knew his best days were behind him, interesting only as a symbol of the failures of his generation […]

As artists even better than him have done — Mozart is an example — Fitzgerald died in penury. He was living in a girlfriend’s apartment in Los Angeles, drinking too much and scratching up a bare living by writing screenplays. At the time of his fatal heart attack, he was reading an issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

Just 30 people came to his funeral. The newspapers covered his death, but the story they told was a tragedy of youthful talent squandered: “Roughly, his own career began and ended with the Nineteen Twenties,” said The New York Times. “The promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled.” “Poor Scott,” Ernest Hemingway said of him, and the label stuck. Poor Scott, who died in the worst way an artist can die: too early, but late enough to see himself forgotten.

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