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Exploring Ephemera is “The official blog from Ephemera Society”; from the About page:

Founded in 1975 by the designer, photographer and writer Maurice Rickards (1919-1998), the Ephemera Society champions the very special contribution made by ephemera to an understanding of our past. Dedicated to the collection, conservation, study and educational use of ephemera, the society’s fairs, journal, blogs and website provide opportunities for collectors and researchers to share their expertise and enthusiasm. […]

Our Pepys logo pays tribute to the celebrated diarist, Samuel Pepys (1633-1703). Probably the first ‘general ephemerist’, Pepys included in his collection trade cards, board games, labels, ballads and other street literature. The Society’s Pepys medal, for excellence in ephemera studies, has been awarded to 16 recipients.

Just scroll down the main page and you’ll see all sorts of intriguing posts, like “Undies Without Coupons” (“Who would have thought that a wartime parachute could find a second life as nightwear?”); there are more at the MeFi post where I got the link.

And if you don’t care about ephemera, try John R. Gallagher’s The Curious Question of AI-written Lists: Or, LLMs are Genre Machines; it’s full of useful observations, like:

A good way to think about the output of LLMs is not an instance. It’s not actually a concrete piece of writing. The sentences aren’t sentences. This is a fundamental misinterpretation of what LLMs are doing. LLMs, as genre machines, produce the most abstracted patterns of genre signals possible. Then they write out that abstraction as a set of sentences. That abstraction, when you just glance at it, when you just skim it, feels fine. But when you stare at it with intent, when you close read it, you realize there is nothing there but signals that require interpretation.

Thanks, Leslie!

We occasionally discuss Biblical cruxes (e.g., Daughter of Greed), and there’s a good one at Poemas del río Wang; the post begins:

I introduced the Jewish epilogue of the post on Saint Martin and his geese with this image, which, with its depiction of a goose-like bird and a signature unmistakably Jewish, proved perfect to illustrate the peculiar story of the Jews who delivered roast geese to the Habsburg emperor on Saint Martin’s Day.

But what exactly is this bird with that enormous egg?

The inscription only reads: זה עוף שקורין אותו בר יוכני zeh ʿof she-qorin oto Bar Yochnei, that is, “This is the bird called Bar Yochnei.”

All that remains is to figure out which bird is called Bar Yochnei.

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Joel at Far Outliers is reading (and sharing excerpts from) Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch, and this post is obvious LH material:

Louis picked up much of his Lallans from a shepherd named John Todd, known as “Lang John” for his height, with whom he would tramp for hours in the hills while the sheep were grazing. “My friend the shepherd,” he said later, “speaks broad Scotch of the broadest, and often enough employs words that I do not understand myself.” Louis recalled Todd in an essay entitled “Pastoral”: “He laughed not very often, and when he did, with a sudden, loud haw-haw, hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. His face was permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more like a picture than a face.”

But it was Todd’s eloquence that captivated Louis. “He spoke in the richest dialect of Scotch I ever heard, and this vocabulary he would handle like a master. I might count him with the best talkers, only that talking Scotch and talking English seem incomparable acts. He touched on nothing, at least, but he adorned it; when he narrated, the scene was before you.” Many of Louis’s original readers would have recognized a famous phrase that Samuel Johnson composed in Latin for his friend Oliver Goldsmith, Nihil tetegit quod non ornavit: “He touched nothing that he did not adorn.” The allusion is a beautiful tribute to the old shepherd, ranking his skill in language on a level with a writer of great distinction.

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I was reading Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker essay on child stars (archived) when I got to this passage:

The astonishing young actor known as Master Betty was the prototype of the species. An Irish boy with a stage father, Betty became a sensation in Belfast, at the start of the century, by playing adult roles, then conquered London, where he starred in “Hamlet”—the ironies of the “Players” scene must have been thick in the air—and “Richard III.” A genuine wonder, he was almost certainly one of Charles Dickens’s models for the “Infant Phenomenon” in the Crummles troupe of “Nicholas Nickleby.”

Betty’s story, remarkable as it is, has been told only once, by the acidly entertaining English historian Giles Playfair. Writing in the sixties, Playfair compared Betty to the newly minted Beatlemania, convinced that the new stars would fade as completely as the old. Yet Bettymania was the real thing. “He and Buonaparte now divide the world,” the artist James Northcote wrote to a friend after Betty’s London début. In Stockport, church bells rang to celebrate an extra performance; in Sheffield, “theatrical coaches” were dispatched from the Doncaster races to carry six eager passengers to see him. In Liverpool, the rush for seats was so great that, Playfair recounts, “hats, wigs, boots, and tippers flew about in all directions.”

I stopped reading right there, wondering what the hell “tippers” might be. I asked my wife, but she didn’t know. I googled around and got nothing useful. Finally I decided to find the original of the quote; it wasn’t easy, because it had been truncated without notice (shame!), but here it is, from Playfair’s The Prodigy: A Study of the Strange Life of Master Betty: “hats, wigs, boots, muffs, spencers and tippets, flew about in all directions.” Tippets! That word I was familiar with; a tippet is “A shoulder covering, typically the fur of a fox, with long ends that dangle in front,” and the word derives from Latin tapete ‘cloth (decorative, for use as carpet, wall hangings etc.).’ [Or perhaps not; see ktschwarz’s comment below.] So now you know, and we can join in lamenting the editing failure at the fabled magazine.

Some wonderful language in Peter Linebaugh’s CounterPunch review of Common People:

Common people used to be people of the commons. Leah Gordon & Stephen Ellcock with additional writing by Annabel Edwards, Common People: A Folk History of Land Rights, Enclosure and Resistance (Watkins: London 2025) explain this in such a lovely book. It brings together word and picture. Of the 240 pages there is scarcely an image-less page and no image without good speech quoted along with. I will say something about each but first overall on this the 500th anniversary of the German Peasants’ Revolt the book is introduced by images of Albrecht Dürer’s “Monument to the Vanquished Peasants.” […]

After this introduction we plunge right in to history and its dates, eight pages of clear timeline of enclosures and resistance. Here are the facts of the English class war between the Haves and the Have Nots. These facts form what E.P. Thompson would call “idioms” or “peculiarities of the English.” I looked up the word “idiom” in Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage and learned that it comes from a Greek word closely translated as “a manifestation of the peculiar” and Fowler explained that in the realm of speech this might refer to what is peculiar to the language of a people, the dialect of a district, or the vocabulary of a technique. The idiomatic exists alongside, though not against, abstract grammar. So it is with commoners and their powers of pasturage, estovers, turbary, pannage, piscary: all are idiomatic, that is, peculiar to language, district, and profession. Some might mistake the idiomatic with the incidental or trivial.

Look at the pictures of Crow Scaring, another of Twig Gathering, or Gleaners, or Leech Finders, or Acorn Knockers. We are invited to remember the world where Adam delved and Eve span. It is through them that we begin to find uncanny, magical, and spiritual relations. […]

The chapter on ‘Rural Rebels and Traditions’ begins with ten well-chosen illustrations with an emphasis on disguise, masking, cross-dressing, black face, fools, jesters, and mummers, and then a further two dozen photos and art of the resistance embedded in the deep folk history of opposition – the hobby horse, the straw bear, the sweep, Morris dancer, Jack-in-the-Green, oak apple day, the green man, mari lwyd, hoodening, the burryman. Like the Flora Britannica wonderfully described in Richard Mabey’s book of the same title, these popular forms are particular to place and peculiar to community life in the commons, “the granular minutiae of quotidian peasant activities.”

I have no nostalgia for the Old Ways and the life of the doughty peasantry, but I love granular minutiae and forgotten words. Thanks, Trevor!
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Here’s the start of the first chapter in How Literatures Begin (see this post), “Chinese,” by Martin Kern:

To think about the beginning of Chinese literature raises a simple question: which beginning? The one in high antiquity? The one around 200 BCE, following the initial formation of the empire, when China’s “first poet” Qu Yuan (ca. 340–278 BCE) came into view as the model that has since been embraced by public intellectuals and literati for more than two millennia? The medieval period, from, roughly, the third through the ninth century, that gave us “classical Chinese poetry”? The early twentieth century with its conspicuous break with tradition and the promotion of modern, vernacular literature in response to both the collapse of the empire and the full experience of foreign—Japanese and “Western”—literature? Sometime in between, when particular genres came to flourish, such as Chinese theater and opera under Mongol rule (1279–1368) or the Chinese novel soon thereafter? All these are legitimate choices, some perhaps slightly more so than others. They can be based on language, literary forms, political institutions, exposure to the world beyond China, the concept of modernity, and other factors. What follows is an essay on antiquity: the time that is at once discontinuous with all later periods and yet its constant point of reference.

Mythologies of Writing and Orality

For most ancient traditions, the modern notion of “literature” does not map well onto the nature, purposes, functions, aesthetics, and social practices involved in the creation and exchange of texts. In pre-imperial China, the term wen originated as broadly denoting “cultural patterns,” including those of textile ornament, musical melodies, the various formal aspects of ritual performances or any other aesthetic forms; it also was often used to refer to ancestors as “cultured” or “accomplished.” It was only over the course of the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE) that the idea of “literature”—at that point just one of the many forms of aesthetic expression—was gradually privileged above all others to the extent that wen, together with its extension wenzhang (patterned brilliance), came to refer primarily to the well-developed written text. In other words, there was no early Chinese term for “literature” until wen, perhaps some fifteen centuries after its first appearance, began to be used primarily in that sense.

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A new Digital Scholarship in the Humanities article by Eetu Mäkelä, James Misson, Devani Singh, and Mikko Tolone (open access) examines Early English Books Online (EEBO):

Abstract

Digital archives that cover extended historical periods can create a misleading impression of comprehensiveness while in truth providing access to only a part of what survives. While completeness may be a tall order, researchers at least require that digital archives be representative, that is, have the same distribution of items as whatever they are used as proxies for. If even this representativeness does not hold, any conclusions we draw from the archives may be biased. In this article, we analyse in depth an interlinked set of archives which are widely used but which have also had their comprehensiveness questioned: the images of Early English Books Online (EEBO), and the texts of its hand-transcribed subset, EEBO-TCP. Together, they represent the most comprehensive digital archives of printed early modern British documents. Applying statistical analysis, we compare the contents of these archives to the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), a comprehensive record of surviving books and pamphlets in major libraries. Specifically, we demonstrate the relative coverage of EEBO and EEBO-TCP along six key dimensions—publication types (i.e. books/pamphlets), temporal coverage, geographic location, language, topics, and authors—and discuss the implications of the imbalances identified using research examples from historical linguistics and book history. Our study finds EEBO to be surprisingly comprehensive in its coverage and finds EEBO-TCP—while not comprehensive—to be still broadly representative of what it models. However, both of these findings come with important caveats, which highlight the care with which researchers should approach all digital archives.

1. Introduction

The purpose of this article is 2-fold. First, we aim to show, with major datasets often used for digital scholarship, that the collection history and composition of datasets matter, and cannot be ignored when doing research without jeopardizing the validity of results. Second, by demonstrating this principle in a descriptive manner across various dimensions of interest (including temporal, geographical, and linguistic coverage), we also wish to offer a solution: a series of practical guides for users of these datasets, with which they can make informed decisions about which imbalances they need to account for, and how. While this paper’s analyses of composition and its consequences will benefit users of the datasets of Early English Books Online (EEBO n.d.) and EEBO-TCP (n.d.) specifically, our guides offer a template which is readily usable for other collections, as evidenced by our sister publication on Eighteenth Century Collections Online (Tolonen, Mäkelä, and Lahti 2022).

It looks like a valuable read for anyone who uses those archives. Thanks, Leslie!

Every once in a while journalists turn their beady eyes on the ever-fresh topic of “how those crazy kids are talking these days” and make solemn efforts to decipher it; the latest entry, by Callie Holtermann in the NY Times (archived), is less solemn and more sensible than most, and it includes an admirable bit of institutional self-flagellation (the passage beginning “In November 1992”):

If you’d like to truly mortify yourself in front of a young person, try asking the meaning of a phrase that’s being repeated in schools around the country like an incantation: “6-7.”

The conversation might go something like this. You’ll be informed that it doesn’t have a definition — it’s just funny, OK? And also, isn’t it a little bit embarrassing that you’re asking? “There’s not really a meaning behind 6-7,” explained Ashlyn Sumpter, 10, who lives in Indiana. “I would just use it randomly,” said Carter Levy, 9, of Loganville, Ga. Dylan Goodman, 16, of Bucks County, Pa., described the phrase as an inside joke that gets funnier with each grown-up who tries and fails to understand it.

“No offense to adults, but I think they always want to know what’s going on,” she said.

They have certainly been trying. Several months after “6-7” began popping up in classrooms and online, the phrase has become the subject of perplexed social media posts by parents and dutiful explainers in national news outlets, most of which trace it to the song “Doot Doot (6 7)” by the rapper Skrilla. Last month, Dictionary.com chose the term as its word of the year, acknowledging it as “impossible to define.”

This is the oldest trick in the adolescent handbook: Say something silly, stump adults, repeat until maturity. Today, though, such terms ricochet around a network of publications and on the pages of influencers, all promising to decipher youth behavior for older audiences. “Six-seven” feels a bit like a nonsense grenade lobbed at the heart of that ecosystem. Desperate to understand us? Good luck, losers!

It is not the only way that younger generations are, consciously or not, scrambling the Very Earnest analysis of their forebears.

She goes on to talk about skibidi, Ballerina Cappuccina, Tralalero Tralala (a shark with human legs), and “Pudding mit Gabel” before continuing:
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OK, this is one of those ridiculously trivial questions that bother me enough to bother you all with. I came across a reference to L’Hoest’s monkey and of course wanted to know how to pronounce the name; my first-approximation guess was /lo:sts/ (“loasts”), and that is indeed how the zookeeper says it in this video (though she may not be pronouncing the final /s/), so that might have satisfied me… but I went to the Wikipedia article hoping for confirmation, only to discover that it was named “in honor of François L’Hoëst [nl], director of the Antwerp Zoo, in 1898.” At that Dutch page we learn that “François L’Hoëst (Tongeren, 1 maart 1839 – Antwerpen, 29 oktober 1904) was een Belgisch zoöloog.” So now I need to know how Belgians say the name L’Hoëst; the diaeresis is a confusing creature, as we learned in the Citroën thread. Anybody know?

I thought Anatoly Vorobey’s Avva post (in Russian) was of enough general interest to translate it here; Anatoly and his wife, of Russian origin and living in Israel, are both fluent in English:

R. and I have a bit of a problem at home with switching to English in spontaneous communication without really meaning to, and in the last couple of years, our older child has enthusiastically joined in. Every now and then I catch myself and try to put an end to this depravity by saying something like “today everyone is going to speak such and such a language,” but it never works. Yesterday I accidentally discovered a very effective remedy, which I’m sharing: when, for example, a child says something in English for no particular reason, I add “Yulia said in English.” As soon as I starting doing this, it turned into a competition within the family, and we all “catch” each other using English, including me (“Dad said in English”), and we try to watch ourselves and not switch in the middle of a sentence unless there’s a good reason.

In our family, the main way to get people to do something less is to make a joke out of catching them doing it. I don’t know what that means, but it’s a fact.

I think this is what the kids call a “lifehack.”