languagehat.com

Yesterday I got an e-mail from a a producer at KPCC, the NPR affiliate in Los Angeles, which said:

We are doing a fun, little segment inspired by this article in this month’s Atlantic called “In Praise of Fancy Words.” … I am wondering if you might be interested in coming on our show for a live, phone interview TOMORROW, DEC 4 between 2:40p to 3:00p EDT to talk about the topic. The conversation is going to be about the enjoyment of coming across and using big words, and what our culture of instant communication has done to our diction. Also, when we lose these vocabularies, what else do we lose along with them? [It will be] a call-in show and we are expecting the conversation with Mr. Bowden would generate a lot of listener comments on which their favorite fancy word is.

It looks like it’s going to happen; anyone wanting to listen can do so at KPCC’s website. Start time is 2:40 PM Eastern (US) Time, which is 11:40 AM on the West Coast; I’ll let you work out the appropriate time for wherever you are. Bowden’s Atlantic piece was linked and discussed at this recent LH post.

Update. Just finished the call-in show; it was a lot of fun, and I was delighted that Geoff Nunberg was the other talking head (if that term can be applied to the radio). I was surprised it was over so soon (subjectively). If I’d had a chance to say one more thing, it would have been: “Once again, I must disagree with the estimable Geoff Nunberg; he has no idea whether ‘sixty or seventy percent’ of English speakers know any given word. If there’s one thing I’ve learned running a language blog, it’s that intuitions on that are worthless; I frequently learn that something I thought was vanishingly rare is in fact quite common, and vice versa. I found an online post by somebody who thinks vex, sentinel, erudite, and loquacious are ‘archaic, unusual words.’ People should use the words they like and let the chips fall where they may!” Oh well, perhaps I’ll get another chance to bloviate on the air one day. The show should be available here by 2:00 PM PST (5 PM Eastern).

Gretchen McCulloch is a linguistics grad student at McGill University, and I have just discovered her delightful blog, All Things Linguistic (“All the linguistic things, all the time. Well, a lot of them, daily”). I discovered her via this MetaFilter post, which links to her post on “What makes an effective synonym for Benedict Cumberbatch?” and her article for The Toast on the same subject:

But how is a normal internet citizen supposed to know, when they hear someone say “I just can’t stop looking at gifs of Bombadil Rivendell” that this person isn’t talking about some other actor with a name and a voice and cheekbones? Or in other words, what makes for a reasonable variation of the name Bendandsnap Calldispatch?

I’m a linguist, and that means that I’m interested in the subconscious patterns that emerge from the way people use language. Based on the fact that fans tend to respond to synonyms of Anglerfish Gigglesnort with a laugh of recognition and not a blank stare, I think there are patterns here too, even if we’re not aware of them. So let’s approach this question scientifically, by generating a range of hypotheses from the general to the specific, and trying to disprove them.

Posts before that include A detailed explanation of Sonorants, Obstruents, and Sonority, Because Internet, and More on writing systems: Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, which will give you an idea of the range of topics discussed. I’m adding it to the sidebar forthwith.

(Warning for those who, like me, find Tumblr blogs mildly annoying: it’s a Tumblr blog. But the content is worth a little mild annoyance.)

C. Max Magee of The Millions has an annual tradition of asking people to talk about books they’ve read and enjoyed during the previous year, and he has once again begun the series with my contribution; here it is, featuring my recommendations of Tessa Hadley’s The London Train (P.S.), Karl Schlögel’s Moscow, 1937, discussed on LH here, and the Muireann Maguire books discussed here and here, along with a plug for my man Veltman. Check it out.

I am closing comments on all threads in preparation for moving LH to WordPress. I apologize for the temporary inconvenience, but I think you’ll like the results.

Update. Thanks to the devoted work of Songdog, we finally have a new, improved LH that (knock wood) won’t have a spam problem! For the moment I’m opening all posts to comments, so feel free to go through the archives and chat about old topics—your comment will show up on the spiffy new Recent Comments thingie. And of course let me know if there’s anything that needs fixing. Thanks to all of you for your patience, over the last year of ever-increasing spam and the long weekend of a frozen site!

A friend writes:

As a meta-observation, one of the reasons I enjoy writing to you so much is that I can use my inner language — which is a mixture of Russian and English. There is something very interesting (to me) in my code switching practice: when the switch occurs in the middle of the sentence, the resulting output has to be valid in both grammars. How my brain does that is the real question — do you know any book that deals with it?

I do not, and it’s an interesting question, so I pass it along to my readership. If you know of any good articles accessible via JSTOR, they’re welcome too.

A nice little piece by Mark Bowden for The Atlantic:

I have the old English major’s habit of never reading past a word I don’t know, and have worn out more than a few pocket dictionaries. There are certain kinds of books, generally high-toned novels, that you expect to give you a good lexical workout—Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, for example, which I read for the first time this year after watching the great HBO miniseries, or anything by William Faulkner.[…]

Here are some of the puzzlers in The Guns at Last Light, [Rick Atkinson’s World War II Liberation Trilogy]’s final volume: bedizened, biffing, cozenage, bootless, jinking, maledictory, spavined, tintinnabulation, anabasis, flinders. Some in that list may be more familiar than others, but speaking as someone who has been reading and writing for four decades, if a word stops me, it’s going to stop most people.

As I wrote Paul, who sent me the link (thanks, Paul!): “Frankly, I’m shocked that someone who has ‘the old English major’s habit of never reading past a word I don’t know’ and has ‘worn out more than a few pocket dictionaries’ wasn’t familiar with some of those words: really, he’d never seen bootless or spavined? (The ‘boot’ in the former, by the way, is an archaic noun meaning ‘deliverance,’ ‘avail,’ or ‘something to equalize a trade’; it still occurs in the phrase ‘to boot.’)”

An interesting Financial Times article by Lorien Kite (the FT Books Editor, who “worked at the OED as a keyboarder for a few months after graduating in the mid-1990s”—I am struck by the name Lorien, and can only assume his parents were Tolkien fans); it’s full of interesting tidbits (“the third edition is expected to have doubled in overall length”) and exciting prospects: Michael Proffitt, the new chief editor, talks “of the potential to embed OED content in ereaders so the meaning of a word such as ‘plisky’ (a trick or an awkward situation) in Wuthering Heights (1847), not found in most dictionaries of current usage, could be revealed to the reader as he or she went along.” I heartily agree with Charlotte Brewer, author of Treasure-House of the Language: The Living OED, who “is critical of a decision in 2010 to merge the dynamic third edition with OED2, obscuring the differences between the two. ‘Because [OED2] was electronically searchable it was a fantastic source for historical inquiry of every sort, not just linguistic scholarship, but they’ve pulled the plug on it,’ she says. ‘It makes you weep.'” That it does. Still a magnificent resource, though. (Thanks for the link, Paul!)

A correspondent writes:

I used to pronounce Gogarty‘s (Buck Mulligan) middle name as it’s spelled, til I’d heard “SIN-jin”.
In the James Bond movie, A View to a Kill, Roger Moore introduces himself to the villain (Christopher Walken) as “Somebody SIN-jin Something” and it finally occurred to me that written, it would’ve been “St. John”.
Is this an Irish thing? An English thing? A class thing? Is it exclusive or does it live, however uneasily, with the literal pronunciation?

Excellent questions all. As I responded, “It’s a UK/Irish thing, I think. I have no idea if it’s still a thing, though; every once in a while I discover that some traditional weird pronunciation (like ‘Rafe’ for Ralph) is now ancient history and nobody uses it any more. But yes, I say SINjn Gogarty because that’s how he and his contemporaries said it.” I welcome all input on the current status of this charming old pronunciation.

It suddenly struck me as odd that the words indolence and indolent have the meanings they do, since they’re transparently from Latin dolere ‘hurt’ (either transitive ‘give pain to’ or intransitive ‘feel pain’) and Latin indolentia does in fact mean ‘freedom from pain.’ I wondered if it was just English that had the sense development to ‘unwilling(ness) to exert oneself,’ but no, the cognate words mean the same thing in all the Romance languages. The OED entry (published 1900) doesn’t help; it just gives the senses “Insensibility or indifference to pain” and “Freedom from pain; a state of rest or ease, in which neither pain nor pleasure is felt” (both obsolete) and “The disposition to avoid trouble; love of ease; laziness, slothfulness, sluggishness” (first in 1710: R. Steele, Tatler No. 132 “Heavy honest Men, with whom I have passed many Hours with much Indolence”), without any explanation of the development. Then I checked with the Trésor de la langue française informatisé and found that the modern sense “Disposition à se donner le moins de peine possible” goes back to at least 1660, and wondered if it was the multivalence of the French word peine, which started out meaning ‘suffering’ and developed a range of senses including ‘trouble, pains’ (of the sort one takes if one is not indolent), that was responsible for the change, and it spread from French to other languages. In any case, I’ll be interested to see the updated entry when the OED gets around to revising it.

Stan at Sentence first has a good post about the Hibernian use of “haitch” for the letter most of the English-speaking world knows as “aitch.” I’ve always found it charming, and am amused by the example he provides of an issue of “the local freesheet Galway Advertiser” that in repeating a headline on the second page of a story has “a HSE” (i.e., Haitch Ess Ee) where the first version had “an HSE” (i.e., Aitch Ess Ee; see his post for screenshots). I was even more amused by the misguided historical analysis underlying the peevery cited at the end of this passage:

The history of h-dropping and h-adding at the start of various words is quite a tangle, made worse by the fact that people often feel their own version must be correct and others’ therefore can’t be. I’ve seen real fury directed at the American practice of muting the H in herb, from listeners probably unaware that sounding the H was a later convention.

He goes on to discuss the history of the name “aitch,” which goes back (via Old French ache) to “a late Latin *accha, *ahha, or *aha,” and ends with the extremely interesting information that “haitch” is spreading—see the telling graph from John Wells—and the following speculation: “I wonder whether aitching H correlates at all with the wine–whine merger – or, phrased another way, whether haitching H correlates with pronouncing wine and whine differently.” Lots of good stuff in the comment thread as well.