Frequent commenter Paul T. sent me a Michael Weiss piece on Andrea Pitzer’s recent The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov
“I was at Georgetown School of Foreign Service during the last years of the Soviet Union’s existence,” Pitzer told me in a phone interview. “One of the things I studied was nuclear negotiations and treaties. Reading Pale Fire, I recognized the terms from that ear and thought perhaps the book was more of a Cold War novel than I realized. […].”
Allan Metcalf has a Lingua Franca column laying out the history of the word dude, as discovered by Barry Popik and Gerald Cohen and presented in the latest issue of Comments on Etymology:
Thanks to Popik and Cohen’s thorough investigation, it seems almost certain that “dude” derived from “doodle,” as in “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” The original New England Yankee Doodle, Cohen notes, “was the country bumpkin who stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni; i.e., by sticking a feather in his cap, he imagined himself to be fashionable like the young men of his day known as ‘macaronis.’”
For some reason, early in 1883, this inspired someone to call foppish young men of New York City “doods,” with the alternate spelling “dudes” soon becoming the norm. Exactly what these fashionable fools were like unfolds copiously in the pages of Comments. Here there is room for just a small sample. […]
(He also mentions “dudine,” for which see this LH post.) By all means read the examples, and be grateful for the devoted burrowers in 19th-century newspapers who give us things like this!
Update (Dec. 2022). In a comment (see below), Stephen Goranson links to Anatoly Liberman’s blog post Dude: a long history of a short word reporting on Origin of the Term ‘Dude’, a book by Gerald Leonard Cohen, Barry A. Popik, and Peter J. Reitan; some excerpts:
Origin of the Word ‘Dude’ opens with the following dedication: “To the memory of Robert Sale Hill (1850-1922), whose January 14, 1883, poem ‘The Dude’ [in the New York City newspaper The World] introduced a word which instantly became one of the most popular items in the English slang lexicon.” Three earlier examples of dude are believed to exist, but the authors question the dating of those sources and insist that dude was Hill’s coinage. […]
Naturally, Cohen and his companions had to decide how Hill came up with that immortal monosyllable. But let me first quote the relevant lines: “Long years ago, in ages crude, / Before there was a mode, oh! / There lived a bird, they called a ‘Dude’, /Resembling much the ‘Dodo’.” […]
There can be little doubt that Robert S. Hill’s poem propelled the word dude into fame, but where did he get it? The book suggests two sources: the phrase Yankee Doodle (which, it has turned out, could also be used as a term to ridicule a dandy) and the British slang word fopdoodle “a silly-looking fop,” which Hill might know. Presumably, the word’s “offspring” doodle was later shortened to dude. Be that as it may, the crucial point is that Hill wrote a poem about dudes and launched the slang word into prominence. “The dudes of that era were young, vacuous, brainless, wealthy Anglomaniacs who drew widespread amusement and ridicule for their slavish imitation of British dress and speech” (page one). The authors state that the dude craze began immediately.
Dogged research pays off again!
I’ve finished the 1840 novel Герой нашего времени (A Hero of Our Time; see this LH post for leaf-rustling imagery in the novel and L’s poems). It is, of course, an amazing performance for an author in his mid-20s, but Hemingway was the same age when he wrote The Sun Also Rises, and of the two the latter is the more adult. Lermontov’s is very much a young man’s novel in its passions, its pretended world-weariness, and its impatience with detail (Nabokov, in his introduction to the novel, points out the heavy reliance on overheard conversations, important events glimpsed through chinks and bushes, and other such convenient coincidences); what makes it irresistible is its headlong storytelling, and what makes it endlessly rereadable (despite what Nabokov calls Lermontov’s “awkward and frequently commonplace style”) is the brilliant construction, starting out with secondhand accounts of Pechorin (the titular hero) by the narrator’s traveling companion Maksim Maksimych, moving on to the narrator’s brief encounter with Pechorin himself, and ending up with three stories presented as journal entries written by Pechorin (who left his writings with Maksim, who passed them on to the narrator). This provides endless material for comparison, not only between Pechorin’s actions in different sections (he treats poor old Maksim exactly as he had treated beautiful Bela) but between the views of Pechorin provided by Maksim, by the narrator, and by the hero himself. Lermontov clearly poured into this book everything he had been thinking and feeling, and it has the power of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, grasping you so that you cannot choose but hear.
But what kind of hero is Pechorin? Lermontov mischievously called him “a hero of our time,” explaining in the preface he added for the second edition that he was made up of “the vices of our entire generation in their full development,” a portrait of “contemporary man.” Besides providing fodder for the unfortunate vice of social-realist fiction which was to preoccupy Russian literature for the next century and a half, this is misleading in that (as Nabokov says) Pechorin is at least as much a copy of previous world-weary protagonists like Goethe’s Werther, Byron’s various Byronic heroes (not to mention the poet himself), and Pushkin’s Onegin as he is a portrait of anything contemporary. But if we are to try to bring him up to date, to make him comprehensible in cultural terms more present in our minds than Goethe and Byron, what can we compare him to? Certainly not to “hipsters,” pace this misguided attempt by Harry Leeds; hipsters (whoever they are) may be bored, but they don’t go around getting people killed. No, I think the closest comparison from post-WWII culture is Harry Lime, the dangerously attractive psychopath at the center of the classic 1949 film noir The Third Man (played unforgettably by Orson Welles). Pechorin, like Lime, doesn’t really give a damn about anybody but himself, and I can very easily picture him delivering Lime’s famous speech from the Ferris wheel (“Victims? Don’t be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?”). Such people can be fun to read about, but they are (as Lady Caroline Lamb said of Byron) mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
I’ll take the liberty of rendering one of Pechorin’s better bon mots (Russian below the cut) very freely, as part of the film noir script it would fit so well into: “If it’s time to die, well, I’ll die. It won’t be much loss for the world, and me, I’m bored. I’m like a guy at a dance hall who doesn’t go home to sleep just because he can’t get a ride. But here’s a taxi now. See ya, sweetheart…”
Brad Leithauser has a mostly useless New Yorker blog post about allegedly unusable words, half yawn-inducing roundup of the usual suspects (niggardly, awesome, inflammable), half desperate word-count-inflating expansions of random thoughts that floated through his brain (two paragraphs on puissant!). But he starts with an interesting point I’m fairly sure has never occurred to me, so I’ll pass it on here:
I was seeking a replacement for “unfathomable.” I thought of “depthless,” but, feeling a bit iffy about it, I consulted my old Webster’s Second. Yes, it was a synonym for “unfathomable” (“Of measureless depth … unsoundable”) but also for “fathomable” (“Having no depth; shallow”). The word was what I think of as an auto-antonym (a term that doesn’t appear in Webster’s Second): it’s its own opposite. Which is to say, it’s a mostly unusable word.
Suppose in a novel you encounter the phrase “Rick stared into Sheila’s beautiful, depthless eyes.” Rick has clearly met a babe—and she is either superficial or profound.
Note his coy suggestion that auto-antonym—a term that has its own Wikipedia entry and (per that entry) was originally coined by Joseph T. Shipley in 1960—might be his own personal word (“what I think of as”), and his use of the almost eighty-year-old Webster’s Second, which suggests that he might be one of those idiots who bears a grudge against the great Third
By which I mean frequenters of LH:
1) John Emerson is selling a bunch of Chinese and Buddhist books:
The majority of these books are excellent books which were part of reading projects I’ll never get to. A considerable proportion were bought in Taiwan in 1983, and the rest were bought since then. Some of the English language books are cheap Taiwan pirate editions. […] These books are priced to sell. With a few exceptions I have priced them at 75% or so of the cheapest price I can find on Bookfinder.com. The high-priced books listed are still as cheap as you can get them.
2) Jeremy Osner is selling his own poetry: “I have gone ahead and self-published a chapbook of my poetry […]: the book is on Amazon for a nominal fee if you’d like to drop a Tommy J. and read it on your kindle[…]; if you prefer to read on the computer or print it out (30 pp), you can download the pdf of it for free by clicking Analogies for Time.
I had meant to post this months ago, but it got lost in the shuffle: Lameen’s Reconstructing metaphors? (at Jabal al-Lughat) cites an interesting-sounding paper, Scott Ortman’s “Using cognitive semantics to relate Mesa Verde archaeology to modern Pueblo languages“:
Basically, the idea is that the favourite metaphors of a given culture will be reflected both in its language (notably by compounds, but also in semantic shifts) and in its arts. Thus, to quote one of his examples, in Tewa “roof” is literally “wooden coil-basket”, although modern Tewa roofs do not look much like that, while the roofs of Mesa Grande kivas were built to resemble coil baskets. He takes both to exemplify a metaphor BUILDINGS ARE CONTAINERS, which he takes to be supported not only by this case but by a number of other features, such as the use of pottery design motifs on walls and the polysemy of a word meaning “lake”, “ceremonial bowl”, and “kiva”.
Lameen says “I’m not sure how often this is likely to work in practice. For it to work, your metaphors have to be reflected in the kind of material culture that archeologists can dig up,” but that doesn’t seem that unusual a situation, and anyway it’s certainly stimulating to consider.
Frequent commenter Paul T. sent me a link to this Irish Times column by Frank McNally, which focuses on Irish as an allegedly underacknowledged source of English words. He cites an e-mail from a reader asking about whether the slang verb “to dig,” meaning ‘to understand or appreciate,’ could be related to the Irish verb tuig, which also means ‘to understand.’ Unfortunately, he spends much of the essay pretending that the crackpot ideas of Daniel Cassidy (see this LH post) have any relation to reality, but I’m linking it here for this admirable paragraph:
Many languages have influenced English. Irish is definitely one of them. It’s just that, in every vernacular, you could find phonetic coincidences with words spoken elsewhere. Unless you can also cite examples of where, when, and (ideally) why they jumped the species barrier, you can’t assume the coincidences are more than that.
I wish more newspaper columnists could get that idea through their heads.
Terrence Malick is an amazing director, and his films—though long, often hard to understand, and occasionally seemingly pretentious beyond necessity—are always worth seeing; he focuses on the beauty and mystery of existence more than any other contemporary filmmaker other than perhaps Kiarostami, and I commend to the attention of anyone with access to the LRB Gilberto Perez’s recent review article on him. But this is not a cinema blog, and I will quote a paragraph from the article to point out that the English language can make clarity difficult to achieve (Perez is discussing The Thin Red Line; I could have quoted less of the paragraph, but I like the point about unschooled philosophies and their “eloquent colloquial poetry” so much I wanted to share it):
Fear is as central to Jones’s novel as to Malick’s movie, the fear all soldiers feel and each in his own way tries to deal with. Unlike the novel, however (and like Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying or Absalom, Absalom!), the movie gives the characters not just sentiments and opinions but philosophies of life. These mostly unschooled, regionally accented, often ungrammatical and inconsistent philosophies, which some critics snobbishly belittle, are presented in the movie as an eloquent colloquial poetry we are to take quite seriously: living in the world, facing death in it, surely qualifies a person to express a worldview. In Malick’s introduction to his translation of Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons – Malick taught philosophy at MIT for a year before turning to the movies – he wrote that the world, in Heidegger’s sense, ‘is not the “totality of things” but that in the terms of which we understand them, that which gives them measure and purpose and validity in our schemes’; and he added that we ‘share certain notions about the measure and purpose and validity of things’ but ‘sometimes we do not, or do not seem to, share such notions.’ In The Thin Red Line the soldiers put forward several such notions, which they may or may not share among themselves and we may or may not share with them. A movie constructs a world, gives the things it depicts measure and purpose and validity in its schemes, but The Thin Red Line offers various worldviews without deciding for us which serves us best to understand things.
What I want to focus on is the first quote from Malick’s introduction to Heidegger. In the first place, it’s a slight misquote (as Google Books tells me); Malick did not write “that in the terms of which we understand them” but “that in terms of which we understand them,” which makes the sense a little easier to grasp. But either way, I think it’s harder than it would ideally be, because of the inherent ambiguity of that. In normal usage, that can be a stressed pronoun (“that’s him”), a stressed adjective (“that tree over there”), or an unstressed conjunction (“he said that he’d do it”). The construction “that which” is bookish but familiar. But once you separate that and which by a preposition, as here (“that in terms of which”), it tends to require rereading. And when you preface it with but, you add in a separate source of confusion, since “but that” brings to mind constructions like the fairly archaic “I do not doubt but that he will recover” and the more common “moral skeptics hold not that no truth is known but that no ethical truth is known.” All this makes “but that in terms of which” a nasty stumbling block; I imagine that in some languages—certainly conlangs built to be logical—one could express the thought in a straightforward way, but English is not such a language.
Amy K. Nelson’s Slate story (with video) about Holly Maniatty, “a self-described Vermont farm girl who holds degrees in both American Sign Language linguistics and brain science” and specializes in being a sign language interpreter for rock and rap concerts, is a fascinating read:
Signing a rap show requires more than just literal translation. Maniatty has to describe events, interpret context, and tell a story. Often, she is speaking two languages simultaneously, one with her hands and one with her mouth, as she’ll sometimes rap along with the artists as well. When a rapper recently described a run-in with Tupac, Maniatty rapped along while making the sign for hologram, so deaf fans would know the reference was to Tupac’s holographic cameo at Coachella, not some figment of the rapper’s imagination.
Maniatty, a first-degree black belt in taekwondo, also conveys meaning with her body, attempting to give her signs the same impact as the rapper’s spoken words.
Watching her work is an amazing experience.
Dr. Lameen Souag, at Jabal al-Lughat, has a post about “an unidentified Indic language in the Genizah collection”:
In 1896, Cambridge bought a huge archive of documents from a synagogue in Cairo, starting as early as the 11th century: the Genizah collection. Most of them are in Arabic in the Hebrew script – or just in Hebrew – but the rest cover a wide variety of languages. One of them should be an interesting puzzle for any readers familiar with South Asian languages: the fragment below is obviously in Devanagari or some derivative, but so far no one has been able to determine what language it is written in or what it says. Given the trade connections revealed by the letters, it would probably have come from Kerala, or maybe later on Bombay, but there are no guarantees…
If you know South Asian languages, see what you can do.
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