languagehat.com

The phrase “needs must” popped into my head, and I realized it was so elliptical I had no idea how it worked grammatically or how it originated. Fortunately, the OED updated the entry needs adv. “Of necessity, necessarily, unavoidably” in 2003, so I can provide a satisfying answer. This is under II. “With the modal auxiliaries †mote and must, emphasizing the sense of the verb”:

II.4.b. needs must: it is necessary or unavoidable. Cf. needs must that needs shall at shall v. III.27c.
Apparently originally the impersonal use of must (see must v.¹ II.3c [“It behoves (or behoved), it is (or was) necessary to”]) with anaphoric ellipsis of the main verb; by the 19th cent. used in isolation (probably originally as a shortened form of needs must when the devil drives: see sense II.5). Now frequently taken to be a plural noun and verb.

1604 We beleeue them no more then needs must.
E. Grimeston, translation of True Historie of Siege of Ostend 195

1629 Her vnaduised sickle shall not thrust Into her hopefull Haruest, ere needs must.
F. Quarles, Argalus & Parthenia i. 36
[…]

1734 I shall stay no longer in Dublin than needs must.
G. Berkeley, Letter in Works (1871) vol. IV. 218
[…]

1821 I..would have no more of these follies than needs must.
W. Scott, Kenilworth vol. II. iv. 73

1839 ‘Faith, then, needs must,’ said the ensign.
W. M. Thackeray, Catherine vi. 112
[…]

a1902 Then needs must that Laura go with the cook to see if the range was finally and properly adjusted.
F. Norris, Pit (1903) ii. 51
[…]

1998 ‘I’m pleased you have adapted yourself to our work ethic so readily.’ Larkin shook his head. ‘Needs must.’
M. Waites, Little Triggers (1999) ii. 17

Here’s the section on the “devil drives” phrase:
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Jim Bisso posted to the Facebook group The Morphology of Peevology:

Code switching in Yiddish by a Chasid youth. So much English, Yinglish, what have you. Anyway, he went to Iran to find the tombs of Ester and Mordekay.

https://youtu.be/D5TZPlO4Se8?si=GOLMHQI8TesQjzZr

If you know even a tiny bit of Yiddish it’s well worth watching at least some of the 46-minute video; I’m in awe at the language-mixing. Description of the content:

I landed in Tehran and headed straight to Hamadan, where I spent the night. The next day, I explored the vibrant bazaar and visited the sacred Tomb of Mordechai and Esther. Then, I set off to the breathtaking Ali-Sadr Cave, an underground wonder with vast waterways and boat rides—an unforgettable experience.

A decade ago I posted about Eliot Borenstein’s decision to blog his new book, and I took great pleasure in reading the preliminary versions of Plots against Russia and his later Soviet Self-Hatred and Unstuck in Time. Then, alas, he quit:

This was for a number of reasons, but two of them stand out: first, I don’t think many people were actually reading the blogs, and, more important, I didn’t need the publication schedule to force me to write. Plus I was able to skip around from chapter to chapter, the way normal people do.

But now he’s back!

But I’m not ecstatic over my current writing situation. I’ve still been writing, but so sporadically that I find myself having to reread what I wrote in order to figure out what I’m doing. All I really want is to just keep these projects alive in my head, and move them forward at whatever pace ends up working.

Here’s where it gets ridiculous: I’ve written pretty significant chunks of three different book projects. This was the sort of thing that used to work really well for me, but now is a challenge. Still, I don’t want to give any of them up. So I’ve decided not to.

The plan is to serialize all three projects on a weekly basis. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, since, again, I have a backlog. And once I have to start writing new stuff rather than cleaning up old stuff, I have no doubt that my pace will fall back significantly. Which, again, is fine. I’ll put the posts up on my blog (eliotborenstein.net) and link to them on Facebook. At this point, all of these projects feel much more raw than their predecessors. If I get feedback, this will be extremely helpful, but I don’t have any illusions about getting a large readership. All I have to do is pretend that I have a readership.

On Mondays he’ll be posting Marvel Comics in the 1980s, on Wednesdays Unidentified Russian Objects: On Soviet Melancholy (the third and final installment in Russia’s Alien Nations, in case anyone besides me is keeping track), and on Fridays Reading the Superhero: Ethics, Crises, and Superboy Punches; if you have any interest in any of these topics, follow along (and maybe leave the occasional comment to let him know he does have a readership). As I said in a comment to that post: “I, of course, am looking forward to Unidentified Russian Objects. Soviet melancholy is the best melancholy!”
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From Muriel Rukeyser on “The Fear of Poetry“:

Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has—the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge—infinitely precious, time-resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry. […]

Poetry is foreign to us, we do not let it enter our daily lives. […]

In such a town, I spoke to a psychologist, a man who has made his work and his theme the study of fear, and the talk went well enough until poetry was mentioned. Then, with extreme violence, a violence out of any keeping with what had gone before, the psychologist began to raise his voice and cut the air with his hand flat. He said, his voice shaking, that he had cut poetry out of his life, that that was something he had not time for, that was something out of his concern.

From Samad Alavi’s World Literature Today review of Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora (edited by Christopher Nelson):

For me, though, I encountered the best surprises in poems like Reza Baraheni’s “Daf,” which plays with the form and sounds of the daf, a tambourine-like drum. Stephen Watts’s co-translation with the author struck me as itself untranslatable, the words melting into one another and reemerging transformed: “Now night will never sense silence again / and after these circles of turbulence / I’ll not sleep for a geology of un-numberable years / Here night swells on rim edges of drums and bells— / the daf’s white moon.” The impossibly poetic English of the translation sent me to the internet to discover what was going on in the Persian. There, I encountered several easily found videos of Baraheni performing the original poem and was amazed to hear just how closely the English follows the Persian in structure and form, even with all the inventiveness in translation. But you don’t need any knowledge of Persian to appreciate the sound qualities of Baraheni’s performance.

You can read the translation here; a brief excerpt:

Young youth
iris
throat that is kissable
you head beheader
it is the sound of the daf
that knocks off our heads
Are you struck dumb
are you headless
yet
The original:

آه، ای جوان!
ای ارغوان!
آن حنجره
بوسیدنی ست!
بوسیدنی!
سر میزنی!
شمشیر دفدفست كه سرهای خلق را
از بیخ میزند
دف میزنی؟
سر میزنی؟

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Laudator Temporis Acti quotes a passage from Leopardi that I like both for its main thought, which is a good one I don’t remember seeing elsewhere, and for the final sentence, a splendid example of how inescapable is our sense of “things ain’t what they used to be”:

I will say that by their own nature the writings which are closest to perfection normally bring more pleasure on the second reading than on the first. The opposite happens with many books that are written with no more than mediocre art and diligence but not without some extrinsic and apparent merit. These, once they are reread, are found to be much less valuable than at first reading. But if books of both kinds are read only once, they sometimes deceive even the learned and experts in such a way that the very best are rated below the mediocre. However, you must consider that nowadays even the professionals of literature have great difficulty deciding whether to read recent books a second time, especially those whose main purpose is to give pleasure. This was not the case with the ancients, due to the smaller number of books.

Dico che gli scritti più vicini alla perfezione, hanno questa proprietà, che ordinariamente alla seconda lettura piacciono più che alla prima. Il contrario avviene in molti libri composti con arte e diligenza non più che mediocre, ma non privi però di un qual si sia pregio estrinseco ed apparente; i quali, riletti che sieno, cadono dall’opinione che l’uomo ne aveva conceputo alla prima lettura. Ma letti gli uni e gli altri una volta sola, ingannano talora in modo anche i dotti ed esperti, che gli ottimi sono posposti ai mediocri. Ora hai a considerare che oggi, eziandio le persone dedite agli studi per instituto di vita, con molta difficoltà s’inducono a rileggere libri recenti, massime il cui genere abbia per suo proprio fine il diletto. La qual cosa non avveniva agli antichi; atteso la minor copia dei libri.

Yes, our forebears knew automatically whether a book was good or not — they didn’t have to bother with rereading! Because they had so few books! You’d think the thought of the Library of Alexandria might have occurred to him…

I enjoyed Merve Emre’s New Yorker piece “The History of Advice Columns” (archived), but first I had to get past my annoyance at its opening:

The word “advice” comes from two Latin words: the prefix ad, which implies a movement toward something, and vīsum, “vision,” a distinctly vivid or imaginative image. To ask for advice is to reach for a person whose vision exceeds yours, for reasons supernatural (oracles, mediums), professional (doctors, lawyers), or pastoral (parents, friends). It is a curious accident of language that “advice” contains within it the etymologically unrelated word “vice,” from the Latin vitium, meaning “fault” or “sin.” Yet the accident is suggestive.

Why do people feel the need to do this? The etymology of advice has nothing whatever to do with advice columns, it’s just being used as a catchy intro — which is fine as long as you get it right and don’t gussy it up the way Emre does. In the first place, there is no Latin “prefix ad” in the word; as Wiktionary says: “The unhistoric -d- was introduced in English 15c.” And vīsum is not “a distinctly vivid or imaginative image,” it’s just the past participle of videre ‘to see’ and thus means ‘something seen’ or, by extension, as the OED has it, ‘something that seems.’ Here’s the OED’s etymology (entry revised 2011):

< Anglo-Norman avise, avvis, avyse, avys, Anglo-Norman and Old French, Middle French avis, Anglo-Norman and Middle French aviz, also (with influence from classical Latin ad- ad- prefix) Anglo-Norman advise, Anglo-Norman and Middle French advis, adviz (French avis) opinion (c1139; slightly earlier in ce m’est avis: see below), prudence (1285), intention, plan (a1339), deliberation, reflection (c1350), counsel (mid 14th cent.), notice, announcement (late 14th cent.) < a (see a- prefix⁵) + vis (< classical Latin vīsum something that seems, use as noun of neuter past participle of vidēre to see: see vision n.).

Earliest in Old French in the phrase ce m’est avis it seems to me (c1135), developed from *ce m’est a vis, variant of ce m’est vis (late 11th cent. as ço m’est vis, with different pronoun), in turn after classical Latin vīsum est mihi it seems (good) to me.

Compare this nicely done etymological excursus in Ange Mlinko’s “Patterns of Uprooting” (NYRB, December 21, 2023 issue; archived), a review of books of poetry by Ida Vitale and Tomasz Różycki:

“Mystery,” my dictionary reminds me, also carries an obsolete English meaning of handicraft or trade. Vitale’s poems aren’t mystical effusions; they are made things. She may overstate it when she says that poetic devices “require more mental effort”; the key, rather, is openness to experience. I keep going back to her author photo, a modern sacra conversazione, with that one finger (dactyl) proffered for the bird’s (poetic) feet—encapsulating her plea for patient readers.

We discussed the two words mystery back in 2009; I find the play with finger/dactyl and the two senses of feet enjoyable and effective, and no linguistic facts were harmed in the process!

Amanda Gefter’s “Finding Peter Putnam” is one of the most remarkable life stories I’ve ever read; here’s a snippet to give you an idea of who he was:

His name was Peter Putnam. He was a physicist who’d hung out with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and Niels Bohr […] “Only two or three times in my life have I met thinkers with insights so far reaching, a breadth of vision so great, and a mind so keen as Putnam’s,” Wheeler said in 1991. And Wheeler, who coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” had worked alongside some of the greatest minds in science.

Robert Works Fuller, a physicist and former president of Oberlin College, who worked closely with Putnam in the 1960s, told me in 2012, “Putnam really should be regarded as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. Yet he’s completely unknown.”

His ideas, insofar as I understood them, do sound remarkable and prescient. But I’m bringing it to LH for this tidbit:

Just then, a perfect opportunity arose to present Putnam to the public. Wheeler was invited by the Neurosciences Research Program at MIT to speak at their March 1975 meeting on “reality and consciousness.” He insisted he could only do it as half of a pair. […]

I listened to the meeting, recorded on a reel-to-reel, stowed away in the archives at MIT. Here, finally, was Putnam’s chance to explain his ideas to the top neuroscientists of the time. I pressed the headphones tight against my ears.

Wheeler had just finished speaking about the observer in quantum mechanics and introduced Putnam with a warning. “Some terms Peter uses, one needs a glossary to translate.” Wheeler placed a transparency on the projector—he’d made an actual glossary of Putnam’s terms. The crowd burst into laughter. I didn’t have to see Putnam’s face to feel it growing hot. When he began to speak, he stuttered.

“You only perceive signals that are useful for shaping behavior … A game is a special kind of mathematics … But for a game you need a goal function … We’re suggesting that the category repetition is a candidate … You’re searching for rules of choice that allow a repeating or self-reproducing path … There’s a transcendental core to the laws of physics themselves …”

The crowd grew restless. Wheeler’s talk had gone long, and there wasn’t time for Putnam to finish. The neuroscientists headed out for lunch and the tape cut out.

There are probably quite a few people who would benefit from such a glossary when they give talks. Thanks, Nick!

Svenja Bonmann and Simon Fries, “Linguistic Evidence Suggests that Xiōng-nú and Huns Spoke the Same Paleo-Siberian Language” (Transactions of the Philological Society, 16 June 2025, open access):

Abstract

The Xiōng-nú were a tribal confederation who dominated Inner Asia from the third century BC to the second century AD. Xiōng-nú descendants later constituted the ethnic core of the European Huns. It has been argued that the Xiōng-nú spoke an Iranian, Turkic, Mongolic or Yeniseian language, but the linguistic affiliation of the Xiōng-nú and the Huns is still debated. Here, we show that linguistic evidence from four independent domains does indeed suggest that the Xiōng-nú and the Huns spoke the same Paleo-Siberian language and that this was an early form of Arin, a member of the Yeniseian language family. This identification augments and confirms genetic and archaeological studies and inspires new interdisciplinary research on Eurasian population history.
[…]

Conclusion

Our investigation has shown that (a) there are several Old Arin loanwords in Proto-Turkic and Proto-Mongolic, (b) the Jié couplet, Xiōng-nú titles and glosses betray Arin features and thus probably reflect an old form of Arin, (c) Hunnish personal names likewise seem to be Arin in origin ultimately and (d) the Yeniseian hydronyms and hydronym-derived toponyms along the westward migration route of the Huns are predominantly Arin suggesting a correlation between speakers of Arin and the Huns. In a variation of a word by the master detective Sherlock Holmes (in the short story ‘The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot’) it can therefore be established in our view that while each of these pieces of evidence are suggestive, together they are conclusive, because they independently corroborate the implications of each other.

It therefore seems an inevitable conclusion to us that Huns and Xiōng-nú both spoke the same early form of Arin that we have tentatively termed Old Arin here and that consequently the linguistic and thus most probably also the ethnic core of the Huns derived from the Xiōng-nú. These findings corroborate recent archaeological and genetic findings and show that the application of the methodology sketched out here can lead to substantial insights into the linguistic history even of regions such as Inner Asia that are at present underresearched and the history of which is much less perfectly understood than that of many other parts of the world such as Central Europe or the Mediterranean. It is to be hoped that future archaeological excavations may uncover autochthonous texts of the Xiōng-nú or the Huns (perhaps in the recently identified Xiōng-nú capital Lóng Chéng or in southeastern Europe) that allow for further testing of our Old Arin hypothesis. The synthesis of historiographical, archaeological, genetic and linguistic data and the continued application of the methodology presented here will then hopefully gradually lead to an ever deeper understanding of the linguistic history of Inner Asia and similarly underresearched parts of the world so that one day we can draw a consummate picture of the linguistic evolution of mankind.

Wikipedia has a pretty thorough article on Arin; Svenja Bonmann turned up on LH a couple of years ago in relation to the Kushan script. This is exciting stuff! Thanks go to Y, who sent me the link and added “So Turkish göl ‘lake’ is ultimately a Yeniseian loanword?”

Nick Jainschigg sent me a link to Jennifer Sandlin’s Boing Boing piece on a demon relevant to my interests:

The next time you make a mistake in your writing, or pick up something you’ve published and instantly spot a typo (argh!), don’t fret, it wasn’t your fault! Instead of taking on the shame of not proof-reading your work thoroughly enough, you can just point to Titivillus instead!

Who is Titivillus, you might ask? Well, he’s a demon who has long been blamed for, according to Princeton University’s Medieval Studies department, “slips and sins in song, speech, and writing.” In fact, Medieval Studies scholar Jan Ziolkowski, from Harvard University, traces his origins back to at least 1200, when he began showing up in paintings and sermons in medieval Europe and beyond. And he’s definitely got staying power, as he’s still beloved today in some circles. Princeton University provides this helpful overview of his origins and reach:

Thanks to today’s dominance of English, Titivillus is regarded as especially particular to medieval England, but he became commonplace far beyond the Continent and survived past the Middle Ages to appear in Rabelais, the earliest Slovak literature, Anatole France, Herman Melville, and W. H. Auden, before finally having a novel devoted to him in 1953. He remains unforgotten, a curio beloved among calligraphers and role-play gamers.

Historian Amanda Foreman, writing in The Wall Street Journal, further explains that Titivillus, the “medieval demon of typos” who likely inspired the phrase “the devil is in the details,” took typos very seriously. She recounts that medieval scribes were “warned that Titivillus ensured that every scribal mistake was collected and logged, so that it could be held against the offender at Judgment Day.” Yikes!

There is, of course, a Wikipedia article, which includes this tidbit:

Marc Drogin noted in his instructional manual, Medieval Calligraphy: Its History and Technique (1980), that “for the past half-century every edition of The Oxford English Dictionary has listed an incorrect page reference for, of all things, a footnote on the earliest mention of Titivillus.”

And that revealed to me that there’s an OED entry, itself of great interest; it’s s.v. Tutivillus:
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A piquant bit of anarcho-typographical history from Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist:

We started our printing-office in a tiny room, and our compositor was a man from Little Russia, who undertook to put our paper in type for the very modest sum of sixty francs a month. If he could only have his modest dinner every day, and the possibility of going occasionally to the opera, he cared for nothing more. “Going to the Turkish bath, John? “I asked him once as I met him at Geneva in the street, with a brown-paper parcel under his arm. “No, removing to a new lodging,” he replied, in his usual melodious voice, and with his customary smile.

Unfortunately, he knew no French. I used to write my manuscript in the best of my handwriting,—often thinking with regret of the time I had wasted in the classes of our good Ebert at school,—but John could read French only indifferently well, and instead of “immédiatement” he would read “immidiotermut” or “inmuidiatmunt,” and set up in type such wonderful words as these; but as he “kept the space,” and the length of the line did not have to be altered in making the corrections, there were only four or five letters to be corrected in such uncouth words as the above, and but one or two in each of the shorter ones; thus we managed pretty well. We were on the best possible terms with him, and I soon learned a little typesetting under his direction. The composition was always finished in time to take the proofs to a Swiss comrade who was the responsible editor, and to whom we submitted them before going to press, and then one of us carted all the forms to a printing-office. Our “Imprimerie Jurassienne” soon became widely known for its publications, especially for its pamphlets, which Dumartheray would never allow to be sold at more than one penny.

I’m reminded of the story of a compositor who set texts in some Near Eastern language flawlessly until he got curious and started trying to learn a bit of the language, after which he started making errors.