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Paul Lukas’s H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright Typographic Mystery will be of interest to anyone with even a casual interest in typefaces; it’s well-written, suspenseful, and amusing. I got to it via chavenet’s MeFi post, which attracted plenty of good comments, including one linking to a handy comparison showing the (very few) differences between Arial and Helvetica. And the Lukas post introduced me to a word I didn’t know (or, he added cautiously, had forgotten): gunite, “A form of shotcrete in which a dry cementitious mixture is blown through a hose to the nozzle, with water injected only at the point of application.” Both Wiktionary and the OED have the obvious etymology (gun +‎ -ite), but only the former adds the crucial information “originally a trademark from 1909.” The OED (entry revised 2024) defines it more wordily and more informatively:

A form of sprayed concrete in which a dry mixture of cement and sand is forced at high pressure through a hose, water being added as it passes through a nozzle at the end of the hose, allowing the resulting concrete to be applied at high velocity to surfaces for which poured concrete cannot easily be used. Frequently as a modifier, designating equipment used in the application of gunite, or something made or constructed using gunite, as in gunite hose, gunite pool, etc. Cf. shotcrete n.

The first citation:

1912 Sealing rock with gunite to stop disintegration at Panama.
Scientific American 27 January 44/2 (caption)

I can’t say I particularly like it, but it’s a short, memorable word, clearly fit for purpose.

Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org has a Big List entry on a word that was unfamiliar to me; it begins:

Literally, laneway (lane + way) is a redundant term, and one that is unfamiliar to most Americans. It is found in Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the U.K. Originally simply meaning a road, the word in Canadian usage has narrowed to mean an urban back alley.

Today, laneway is chiefly found in Canada, but older instances of the term are found chiefly in Ireland. The oldest example I’ve been able to find, however, is in England’s Lancaster Gazette of 11 May 1822 in a notice of a property sale that describes the bounds of the property: […]

We see the distinctly Canadian sense of an urban back alley in the early twentieth century. From the Toronto Daily Star of 5 June 1911:

The light necessary to the tenants of the offices on the east side of the Traders Bank building is supplied from windows looking out over a narrow laneway and across the roof of the Nordheimer building.

And there is this from the 2 November 1923 issue of the same paper that makes the distinction between a laneway and a street clear:

Juryman: “Do you know if this is a laneway or a street?”

Mr Murphy: “It is a laneway, and has not been opened as a street. Application has been made.”

In the latter half of the twentieth century we get the Canadianism of laneway house or laneway dwelling, referring to a small house built on a laneway behind an existing house. The term is especially prevalent in Toronto and Vancouver.

There’s a fair amount of additional material on Canadian developments; as always in cases such as this, I’m struck by my complete ignorance of a term in common use across the border. Are you familiar with it?

Xerîb sent me a wonderful word, saying accurately that “It has Hattic interest in two ways.” The OED (entry revised 2002) says s.v. moloker n.:

slang. Now rare. Perhaps Obsolete.
A cheap hat, spec. a renovated silk hat.

1890 Molocher, a cheap hat.
A. Barrère & C. G. Leland, Dictionary of Slang vol. II. 60/1

1893 A good Molocker (Molocker, it appears, is the trade term for renovated old chapeaux).
Westminster Gazette 18 July 3/3
[…]

1906 The man who takes your [old silk] hat away from your door sells it to a wholesale dealer in old hats, who promptly converts it into a ‘myloker’, or a hat for the second-hand market.
Tit-Bits 21 April 120/1

There’s also a verb, ‘To renovate (a silk hat),’ qualified as Obsolete. rare, with a single citation:

1863 ‘Tis like an old hat that has been ‘molokered’, or ironed and greased into a simulacrum of its pristine freshness.
G. A. Sala, Breakfast in Bed v. 105

The etymology is “< Yiddish melokhe handicraft, craft, trade < Hebrew mĕlā’ḵāh work, occupation.” Xerîb kindly provided some additional links, including the Jewish English Lexicon entry for melacha ‘Work or actions forbidden on Shabbat or Yom Tov; often refers to creative work or the use of electronics; Work in general,’ with a set of Example Sentences (“I couldn’t start fixing the chair, because that would be melacha”), the Green’s Dictionary of Slang entry, and the Internet Archive copy of Sala’s Breakfast in Bed highlighting the last citation, whose full context is worth quoting here:
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Granta magazine has an online series, Mark Up, for which they “invited writers to tell us their thoughts on punctuation and grammar”; so far, though, the only one that seems to fall under “grammar” is a cranky rant about the verb “to gift” by Christian Lorentzen, who sounds like a nonagenarian even though he looks considerably younger, so I’m going to focus on the others, which are far more interesting: Harriet Armstrong on what we really mean when we punctuate our text messages with ‘lol’, Madeline Cash on her mother’s use of ellipses, Will Harris on Alice Notley’s ‘wrong’ quotation marks, Maggie Millner on pauses, silences and choosing where to end the line, Grace Byron on the question mark, Rebecca Perry on parentheses, Akshi Singh on X (to indicate a kiss), and Adam Mars-Jones on lesser-known punctuations marks (¶, ç, ⁁). I suppose it’s worth saying that these essays are not the work of linguists and doubtless contain statements that will not pass muster to the eagle eye of a specialist, but I like this sort of thing. I particularly enjoyed the Will Harris piece, which begins:

The first thing you notice when you open Alice Notley’s epic poem The Descent of Alette is the quotation marks: there are lots of them and they’re in all the wrong places. This is how it starts:

‘One day, I awoke’ ‘& found myself on’ ‘a subway, endlessly’

‘I didn’t know’ ‘how I’d arrived there or’ ‘who I was’ ‘exactly’

‘But I knew the train’ ‘knew riding it’ ‘knew the look of’

‘those about me’

It’s clear that quotation marks are not being used here in ordinary ways – to indicate either direct speech or quotation from another text. Perhaps they’re performing another of their main roles: to point out a received idea, suggesting the author’s knowledge (and disavowal) of a choice of words – this is a ‘classic’ usage. Reading Alette, you sense Notley weighing up each phrase in this way, inspecting every word through the wry spectacles of quotation.

I love a good technical discussion of anything connected with language, so I enjoyed Timothy Linward’s Wargamer post Meet the mom and pop duo bringing Japan’s D&D killer, Sword World, to the West (I got the link from Nelson Goering’s Facebook post):

Though little known outside its native Japan, Sword World has had a colossal influence on gaming history and fantasy media. In the home market, it surpassed Dungeons and Dragons so completely that it all but erased D&D from Japanese pop culture, and its setting ‘Raxia’ laid the foundations for the Japanese take on Western fantasy you’ll find in modern manga, anime, and videogames. Yet the team producing the first English translation of this cultural behemoth is an unassuming couple from Kansas, Ai Namima-Davison and her husband Shawn – here’s their story. […]

Some history is necessary here. “One of the things that makes Sword World significant in terms of its role in RPGs in Japan, is that it actually started as a ‘replay’ of a D&D campaign”, Shawn explains. In 1986, Yasuda was approached by the publishers of Comptiq magazine to write a series of articles about the fancy new hobby of TTRPGs, and specifically D&D. He chose to frame his articles around ‘replays’ – written scripts not dissimilar to modern actual play shows, only in text format – which illustrated a game his friend Ryu Mizuno was running for his gaming group, ‘Syntax Error’.

The articles were incredibly popular, so much so that Mizuno rewrote the adventure from the replays into a series of fantasy novels, called ‘Record of Lodoss War’. Up to this point Western heroic fantasy hadn’t really landed in Japan, thanks in no small part to The Lord of the Rings having a very rough Japanese translation. While most Americans won’t know Record of Lodoss War at all, and those who do will most likely know it from the anime adaptation, it was more than just successful in Japan- it was ground zero for the Western-inspired fantasy.

Ai gives an example of the influence Record of Lodoss War held on her imagination. “When I was 21 years old, and traveling by myself to Turkey [through Greece] – I forget the name of the town – as I was walking around, somebody was calling the boat to Lodoss Island”. She recalls her sheer surprise: “It’s like, what? I can go there!?” In fact it was ‘Rhodes’ island, but as Ai says, “The sound is the same in Japanese”. A boat trip to Rhodes followed. […]

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An interesting NY Times piece by Sarah Chatta (archived):

Millions of banned books were smuggled into the Soviet Union in the 20th century — often in small batches, hidden in deliberately mislabeled containers, packed in food tins or tampon boxes and, in at least one case, tucked into a child’s diaper. […] Published in Russian and other languages and known as “tamizdat,” the books were part of an audacious American venture, part literature, part propaganda and part spycraft, to destabilize the authoritarian Soviet regime from within.

Over the past several years, Hunter College in Manhattan has become home to a library of these remarkable books, thousands of which were once banned in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and hundreds more that are censored in Russia today. The library is run by the nonprofit Tamizdat Project, which now possesses one of the largest special collections of contraband Russian literature in the world. The library is open to visitors upon request, and this month White Rabbit Books on the Upper West Side will open a new section of its store devoted to selling old and new contraband Russian literature curated by the project.

The Tamizdat Project is the brainchild of Yakov Klots, a soft-spoken, unassuming literary scholar who teaches at Hunter. He chose the name from a Russian word meaning “published abroad,” which, along with samizdat (“to self-publish”), was one of the two main methods of evading Soviet book censorship. The Iron Curtain, he noted, “wasn’t so iron after all,” and the books seeped through. Mr. Klots has assembled the library bit by bit, recruiting his students to build the metal IKEA bookshelves and soliciting book donations from friends and strangers, including the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Beyrle. […]

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As a Laurence Sterne fan of long standing (see my reveling in A Sentimental Journey in 2012 and my description the following year of his influence on Russian lit: “both writers got this style from the fons et origo of all divagating, diverting, dissertating novelists and prestidigitators of prose, Laurence Sterne, especially his Sentimental Journey and Tristram Shandy“), I was pleased to read Peter Budrin’s OUPblog post about what sounds like a very interesting book, his Laurence Sterne and his Readers in Early Soviet Russia: The Secret Order of Shandeans:

Laurence Sterne, the eighteenth-century author of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, might seem an unlikely figure to capture the imagination of early Soviet intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. The Bolshevik Revolution dismantled the cultural institutions of the old regime, displaced much of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, and set out to create a new literary canon for a new Soviet reader. From the outset, literature was subject to political control.By the 1930s, the state increasingly defined a canon of approved literary classics, while the newly-established doctrine of Socialist Realism began to dominate official literary institutions.

What place could there be, in such a system, for an eccentric Yorkshire clergyman whose popularity in Russia had peaked more than a century earlier, at the turn of the nineteenth century? And yet, in the two decades following the 1917 Revolution, Sterne’s name began to appear with notable frequency in lecture halls, private correspondence, diaries, and unpublished manuscripts. Laurence Sterne and His Readers in Early Soviet Russia: The Secret Order of Shandeans traces Sterne’s reappearance in early Soviet culture. Drawing on letters, diaries, translation drafts, marginal notes, illustrations, and editorial correspondences, the book reconstructs how Soviet readers encountered Sterne and what they sought in his writing. […]

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David S. Reynolds’ NYRB review (February 22, 2024; archived) of Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature by David Anthony provides repellent instances of “hostile portraits of Jews in various realms of US culture during the two decades before the Civil War,” but I’m bringing it here for this passage:

It has been said that nineteenth-century America was mawkishly sentimental—a culture of pap and prudery against which serious authors like Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman rebelled. To some extent this was true, as evidenced by the era’s didactic novels, religious tracts, and codes of proper decorum. It was an age when Evangeline St. Clare, the angelic heroine of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best seller Uncle Tom’s Cabin, inspired millions, and when, in polite circles, undergarments were called “unmentionables,” legs “limbs,” men’s trousers “continuations,” and a trip to the bathroom “visiting Aunt Jones.”

We all know about “unmentionables” and “limbs,” and the OED confirms that use of “continuations” (though it doesn’t sound much like a euphemism: “Gaiters continuous with ‘shorts’ or knee-breeches, as worn by bishops, deans, etc. Hence in later slang, trousers, as a continuation of the waistcoat”; 1883 citation “For fear of spilling it over what a tailor would call my continuations”), but I can find nothing to back up the claim about “visiting Aunt Jones” except the footnoted source for the assertion, R.W. Holder’s How Not to Say What You Mean: A Dictionary of Euphemisms (Oxford University Press, 2007). The relevant entry in that volume reads

aunt² a lavatory
To whom many women say they are paying a
visit. In Victorian days it was their Aunt Jones.

Which sounds more like the notoriously chatty and unreliable Eric Partridge than a dependable reference work, and I can find no examples of this alleged usage in Google Books. Is anyone familiar with it?

Matthew Scarborough, LH’s house Indo-Europeanist (e.g.), has a new project going, which I’ll let him introduce:

A small project that I’ve started doing for fun – and to be frank give me a small outlet in this current moment of being between jobs – is an account I’ve made over on Bluesky posting a line-by-line translation of Hesiod’s Theogony (for the non-Hellenists out there, a roughly seventh to sixth-century BCE short epic on the origins of the Greek pantheon) together with metrical analyses and, since line three, phonological transcriptions of the Greek text.

I am currently aiming to post one line per day, together with parsed vocabulary, and I’ve already put together a full translation and transcription with metrical analyses and parsing of the entire text on my computer, so the only thing preventing me from not doing the whole text over the course of the next two and a half years is simply me remembering to post a line per day (and Bluesky continuing to be a viable online platform, which in this current social media ecosystem, who knows?).

I do have an ulterior goal from all this, however. I aim to add philological and etymological commentary to the master file that I’ve prepared and add as an introduction a sketch of Greek historical grammar. In something more of a book-like format, it could serve as an introduction to Greek historical linguistics and Indo-European to students of Greek or students of Indo-European, and possibly a reliable linguistically annotated text for general linguists who might want illustrative examples of Ancient Greek in the heterogeneous variety of East Ionic that is typically used for early Greek epic poetry.

Anyway, if this is the sort of thing you might be interested in check it out. As of today I’ve posted up to line 43 of 1021, so there’s already a month’s backlog for reading. I think the expanded historical linguistic commentary and grammar outline is a good idea for a textbook project, but I don’t know how big of an audience there is for it. I can’t be the only person who thinks that the textbook would be a good thing to be out there if I can just manage to finish it in the first place. Let me know if the comments what you think.

I for one think this is a great idea and hope he keeps it up.

As I said here, my wife and I are reading Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, and I’ve gotten to another passage of sufficient Hattic interest to post. One of the protagonists is Hari Kumar, who was raised by his father Duleep to be a perfect Englishman; in this section we are learning about Duleep’s background:

Duleep Kumar was the youngest of a family of four boys and three girls. Perhaps a family of seven children was counted auspicious, for after his birth (in 1888) it seemed for several years that his parents were satisfied and intended no further addition. […] Of the four brothers only Duleep completed the course at the Government Higher School and went on to the Government College. His family thought that to study at the college was a waste of time, so they opposed the plan, but finally gave in. In later years he was fond of quoting figures from the provincial census taken round about this time, that showed a male population of twenty-four and a half million and a female population of twenty-three million. Of the males one and a half million were literate; of the females less than fifty-six thousand, a figure which did not include his three elder sisters. His father and brothers were literate in the vernacular, semi-literate in English. It was because as a youth Duleep had acquired a good knowledge of the language of the administrators that he began to accompany his father on visits to petition the sub-divisional officer, and had the first intimations of the secrets hidden behind the bland face of the white authority. There grew in him a triple determination – to break away from a landlocked family tradition, to become a man who instead of requesting favours, granted them, and to save Shalini from the ignorance and domestic tyranny not only his other sisters but his two elder brothers’ wives seemed to accept uncomplainingly as all that women could hope for from the human experience. When Shalini was three years old he began to teach her her letters in Hindi. When she was five she could read in English.

Duleep was now sixteen years old. The Government College to which he had gained admittance was at the other end of the earth: a hundred miles away. His mother wept at his going. His brothers scoffed. His elder sisters and sisters-in-law looked at him as if he were setting out on some shameful errand. His father did not understand, but gave him his blessing the night before his departure and in the morning accompanied him to the railway station in a doolie drawn by bullocks.

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