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I’ve just started Komiks: Comic Art in Russia, by José Alaniz, and I’m enjoying it greatly despite the sprinkling of typos and minor errors that seem to disfigure even the best-produced books these days (and this is a gorgeous piece of work, with a section of color reproductions that make the high price seem justified for once). Alaniz traces the origins of the Russian form back to icons and lubki (the plural of lubok), and here’s an interesting section on the history of the latter word (which I had just assumed was as ancient as the thing itself):

Since Snegirov [should be Snegiryov] launched the formal study of the lubok in the 1820s—to no small controversy among educated circles, who considered it beneath contempt—scholars have skirmished over several issues involved in the study of the subject. Avram Reitblat, reviewing the recent literature in 2001, notes that the very term “lubok” is problematic, since the historical record indicates that before Snegirov few people actually called the prints by that name. Instead, depending on the region and/or what they depicted, the prints went by poteshnie listy (“funny sheets”), Suzdalskie (from Suzdal), panki (“little panels”), bogatyry [should be bogatyri] (“knights”), konnitsa (referring to figures on horseback), friazhkie (“Western European”), prazdniky [should be prazdniki] (“holidays”), prostovik (“simple”), balagurnik (“joker,” “jester”), satira (“satire”), Moskovskie kartiny (“Moscow pictures”), or simply listy (“sheets”)—among a plethora of other names.

Snegirov himself called the prints “lubok” fully aware of the term’s ambiguity: did it refer to the bark (lub) of the linden tree, from which he claimed peasants formed the wood blocks; or did it point to Moscow’s Lubianka Street, where the sheets were printed and near which they were sold; or, indeed, to the wooden box in which the ofeni carried the prints for sale? Or did the word simply connote something “crude,” “badly made,” and “ramshackle,” as it did in other contexts? Evidently, Boris Sokolov surmises, Snegirov simply picked one of the local names for the prints; already by the 1840s this had grown into a general term, handed down to the present day.

I love that kind of philological background (though I don’t love the refusal to put Russian words in italics, which makes it just that little bit harder to read, since at first glance you don’t know whether, say, “ofeni” is some obscure English word, a typo, or a Russian word—in fact, it’s the latter, the plural of ofenya ‘peddler, huckster’).

Addendum. I know it’s almost superfluous to say about any new book, however prestigious the publisher, but man, this could have used some copyediting. I’ll give them a pass on “V. S. Zemenkov” for the correct B. S. (his name was Boris), since that takes specialized knowledge, but on p. 20 it has “discreet” when “discrete” is meant, and on p. 39 “…shows the worker grown enormous, so that he now dwarves the Whites…” [emphasis added]. Come on, that’s just plain sloppy.

I got an e-mail from Christian Purdy, Director of Publicity at Oxford University Press USA, with an appeal for the public to help find cites for an interesting class of words:

To commemorate the centenary of the start of the First World War, the OED is revising a set of vocabulary related to, or coined during, the war. Part of the revision process involves searching for earlier or additional evidence, and for this we need the help of the US public.

Our first quotations are often from newspapers and magazines, and we know that there may well be earlier evidence in less-easily-accessible sources such as personal letters, soldiers’ diaries, and government records, many of which are now being made available in digital form for the first time. We are hopeful the public can help find earlier evidence for the use of some wartime words? We are gathering all contributions on the OED appeals website.

The top item at the website now is skive, meaning ‘to avoid work’; their first quotation is from a 1919 magazine article, and they’d like to antedate it. Give ’em a hand!

John E. McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun tells a wonderful story that may help explain why it’s so hard to convince people (journalists, in particular) “that some of their imagined rules and standard practices are without foundation”:

After my grandfather died suddenly of a heart attack in 1945, my father, Raymond McIntyre, undertook to make a go of his general store in Elizaville Kentucky.

He told me that one week the man who drove the bread truck was apprehensive. He also made deliveries to a remote little country store, and he had been accustomed to offload his stale bread there. “But last week,” he said, “I didn’t have any old bread to give them, and I delivered fresh loaves. They’re going to be mad as hell when they realize what I’ve been doing.”

The next week when the bread truck man came by, my father asked him how it had gone with the other store. And the bread man said, “They sure were mad at me. The storekeeper told me all his customers had complained and he never wanted me to deliver any of that damned raw stuff to his store ever again.”

Once you’re accustomed to journalese and its non-idiomatic practices, it sounds like natural language to you and actual English just seems wrong.

Visit his post for a funny footnote and a couple of examples of newspaper superstitions of the sort he deplores.

A Wordorigins post on the Mohawk origin of the toponym Toronto, deriving it from “tkaronto, meaning ‘trees standing in the water,'” led me to ask for an explanation of the morphology of tkaronto, i.e., how exactly it means ‘trees standing in the water.’ Since Dave Wilton didn’t know, I thought I’d see if any of my readers do.

For someone who doesn’t dance, I seem fated to spend a surprising amount of time investigating the names of (usually long-forgotten) dances. Back in 2011 it was the lipsi; last year it was the money musk, in its guise as monimaska (манимаска); now, in reading Sollogub‘s best-known (if not best) work, Тарантас (“The tarantass“), I encounter the following sentence in the chapter devoted to describing the haphazard upbringing of the older of the two travelers, Vasily Ivanovich, born in the 1780s in an estate near Kazan: “Никто ловче его не прохаживался в матрадуре, монимаске, куранте или Даниле Купере” [No one was more adroit than he at dancing the matradur(a), the monimaska, the courante, or the Daniel Cooper]. The monimaska is our old friend the money musk, the Daniel Cooper famously occurs in War and Peace (you can see and hear a lively rendition here), but what’s a matradur(a) (you can’t tell from the Russian declined form whether it’s masculine or feminine)?

I did a ridiculous amount of googling before discovering that it has an entry in Vasmer, which explains that матрадур, or матрадура, is a loan from Polish matradur, itself borrowed from Italian matratura ‘castanet’ (apparently archaic). Dances certainly get around! An amusing side note about this particular dance is that Gogol used it for one of his jokes in Dead Souls: the landowner whom Nabokov called “the braggard and bully Nozdryov” describes a champagne he drank once as “не клико, а какое-то клико-матрадура, это значит двойное клико” [not a Clicquot but a matradura-Clicquot — that means a double Clicquot]. This has confused readers for generations, ever since the dance whose name he’s using fell into oblivion.

I’ve long been a fan of the Glaswegian dialect (see this post from 2003); EveningTimes (“Nobody knows Glasgow better”) has a post called “The Weegie Words: you help us list 100 words that prove you come from Glasgow,” starting with the opaque (if you’re not Glaswegian) “Happenin? You wint tae cum to ma bit cos I’ve goat an empty ra morra ‘n a fancy a swally?” and interpreting it (they don’t, however, explain the “empty ra morra,” which I’m curious about), and it’s a lot of fun. Thanks, AJP!

A Spear’s article by Teresa Levonian Cole describes the history of Deir al-Surian, ‘Monastery of the Syrians,’ and its remarkable library:

The tower, built around AD 850, contained the monastery’s original library. It might have remained a library like any other, had it not been for a decision by the new vizier to tax the monasteries in Egypt. To plead exemption for Deir al-Surian, Abbot Mushe of Nisibis made his way to the Abbasid capital of Baghdad in 927, and, while awaiting the Caliph’s decision (it was favourable), embarked on a five-year spree that would yield a cache of 250 manuscripts from Syria and Mesopotamia.

This would form the core of his monastery’s collection which, over the years, increased to number Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic and Christian-Arab texts, dating from the 5th to the 18th centuries. They would include biblical, Patristic and liturgical writings, as well as early translations of philosophy, medicine and science, many of whose original Greek texts have been lost.

Of these treasures, the most ancient are the writings in Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic, the language of Christ), which include the earliest dated Old and New Testament manuscripts ever found in any language: part of the Book of Isaiah, dated AD 459/60, and a Gospel of AD 510.

A great many of its treasures were ripped off — excuse me, I mean “acquired” — by various minions of imperialism like the Egregious — excuse me, I mean Honourable — Robert Curzon, but quite a few remain, and they’re now being well taken care of thanks to the unstinting efforts of the monastery’s new librarian, Elizabeth Sobczynski. The whole thing is well worth a read. (Thanks, Paul!)

Veronica Davidov has a good post at All the Russias’ Blog (sponsored by the NYU Jordan Center) about “how American Media misunderstood the Sochi Olympics opening,” with an analysis of the “long grand narrative of Russian and Soviet history presented as a psychedelic dream of a young girl named Lyuba.” Davidov focuses in particular on the image of the red balloon, “uniformly interpreted throughout the American mediascape as letting go of the dream of communism,” and I urge you to read the whole thing (and listen to Bulat Okudzhava’s “minute-long existential melancholy song about a blue balloon and the cycle of life and time” [text]). What I want to mention here, though, is what won me over when I was watching the ceremony. It was a one-two punch: first, for the letter Н (N), they had the name Nabokov and a bunch of his beloved butterflies; then, for Ъ (the hard sign [not П = P, as I originally wrote!]), they had Pushkin (of course)… and Khatul Madan! How could I resist?

Lexicographer (and jazzman) Peter Sokolowski (Time called his one of the 140 Best Twitter Feeds of 2013!) invited me to a talk he gave this evening on the UMass Amherst campus, just five minutes’ drive from here (though we allowed half an hour lead time for snowy roads and unfamiliar geography, and needed every bit of it); as the announcement put it, “His talk, ‘The Dictionary as Data’ examines not only the transition of dictionaries from print to digital, but also what we have learned about English from having over a billion words looked up per year on the Merriam-Webster web site.” It was fascinating, as you might imagine — not only is the topic intrinsically interesting to anyone who cares about words and dictionaries, but he had wonderful stories about discovering there had been a sudden spike in look-ups of some unexpected word and trying to find out why. Usually it turned out to be a news story that was easily found on the internet (when Michael Jackson died, everybody and his brother looked up “emaciated”), but once it was a word used on a TV show that a lot of people were watching but that left not a trace online. Peter is a wonderful speaker, and it’s no wonder M-W has him doing their Ask the Editor videos (here he is, for example, on “hopefully”).

However, I wanted to take mild issue with a couple of things he said, and since I didn’t get a chance in the Q&A afterwards I figured I’d do so here. One was when he said (in the context of Bill O’Reilly’s use of uncommon words) that snollygoster (“A shrewd, self-interested but unprincipled person”) was “one of the rare words dropped from the Collegiate.” Now, as a professional editor I have used the Merriam-Webster Collegiate for over a quarter of a century (I have copies of the last four editions), and one of my little hobbies when a new edition comes out is to go through a few pages comparing them with the corresponding section of the previous one to see what’s in and what’s out, and (as is only logical) there are quite a few words dropped each time. If that weren’t the case, the Collegiate would be almost as fat as the Unabridged (though it does get a bit bigger each time; the eighth edition had 1,568 pages, the eleventh has 1,664). [As des von bladet points out in the comments, “one of the rare words dropped” probably means that the words that are dropped are not often used, rather than (as I took it) that words are rarely dropped from the Collegiate; my apologies to Peter for my misunderstanding, assuming that’s what it was!]

I’m sure he’d agree with me on that; he wouldn’t agree on this next point, and neither (I presume) would any other M-W editor, but I insist that their hallowed tradition of putting the senses in chronological order is a bad one and should be dropped. He made a point of saying how nice it was to see the historical progression, and yes, that is nice — as a lover of word histories, that’s exactly the sort of thing I want to know. But most people are not lovers of word histories, they just want to know what a word means, and they assume that the first definition the dictionary gives is the main one and often don’t bother with any of the others. Don’t take my word for it; go ask a random sample of people. I have had to explain how this works to professional editors, never mind laymen; people simply don’t read the prefaces to dictionaries, and they don’t care about how Noah Webster or Philip Gove did it. If you want your dictionary to be the great democratic institution it can be, you need to aim it at the average user, not the aficionado of lexicography. If people want more word history than they get in the etymology, well, that’s what the OED is for.

Update. I’m pleased (and astonished!) to report that M-W is changing its position on word order; Peter wrote me:

And about the word order: it’s already changed as you indicate in the new work ongoing for the Unabridged online. Going forward, that’s the way we’ll do things. This is already the policy in the most recently edited M-W dictionary, the Learner’s (check out the definitions at learnersdictionary.com). For the Unabridged, when the word’s date refers to a sense that is not the first one, the oldest sense will be listed in parenthesis.

Changing the Unabridged and Collegiate will take some time, but that is our ultimate goal.

The most useful U.S. dictionary is getting even more useful!

Brad Darrach did a great Mel Brooks interview for Playboy back in 1975, catching Brooks at his peak; it’s long, but well worth it if you enjoy laughing. I’ll just excerpt a short bit in which he is unwontedly serious and surprisingly astute about Russian literature:

Brooks: Tolkin is a big, tall, skinny Jew with terribly worried eyes. He looks like a stork that dropped a baby and broke it and is coming to explain to the parents. Very sad, very funny, very widely read. When I met him, I had read nothing—nothing! He said, “Mel, you should read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Gogol.” He was big on the Russians. So I started with Tolstoy and I was overwhelmed. Tolstoy writes like an ocean, in huge, rolling waves, and it doesn’t look like it was processed through his thinking. It feels very natural. You don’t question whether Tolstoy’s right or wrong. His philosophy is housed in interrelating characters, so it’s not up for grabs. Dostoyevsky, on the other hand, you can dispute philosophical points with, but he’s good, too. The Brothers Karamazov ain’t chopped liver.

Playboy: What about Gogol?

Brooks: Now you’ve said it. Perfect. Comedy and humanity, and he knew what he was talking about. Dead Souls is a masterpiece. I love Gogol’s great eye for idiot behavior. Gogol said that life is so tragic, so stupendously sad that we’d better laugh a lot and enjoy ourselves. You either get a sense of humor going or you go under.

And then there’s this great bit about language:

When I was a little boy, I thought when I grew up I would talk Yiddish, too. I thought little kids talked English, but when they became adults, they would talk Yiddish like the adults did. There would be no reason to talk English anymore, because we would have made it.

Now, would you care for a Raisinet?