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A couple of years ago I posted about Keith Houston’s blog Shady Characters (“The secret life of punctuation”); now he’s written a book, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks, and he’s got a New Yorker blog post sharing some of his findings. He discusses the hashtag/octothorpe, the paragraphos/pilcrow, the ampersand, the manicule (see this LH post), and the diple:

Quite unlike the manicule, however, the diple underwent a rapid transformation from critical mark to authorial one: a scant few centuries after its creation, Christian writers began to use the diple to mark not noteworthy text but Biblical quotations in an era when Christian books outnumbered all other works four to one. Over time, a number of variations on the diple began to appear as citation marks: some writers added a dot between the wedge of their marks (featured here, in the margins of an eighth-century psalter), while French manuscripts from that period appear with the dotted diple rotated to create a “V”-shaped mark. By the end of the eighth century, the original diple had fallen out of use. Its final demise, like the manicule’s, was caused by the advent of the printing press. Type designers were strangely reluctant to cast the diple in lead, and almost overnight that mark, and its variations, were replaced by double commas (,,) hung in the margins around cited portions of text. The diple was dead, and the modern quotation mark was on its way.

Enjoyable reading, and the illustrations are gorgeous. Thanks, Terry!

I’m almost finished with Veltman’s Сердце и думка [Heart and head] (see this LH post), and I think I see why the young Dostoevsky liked it so much; not only does it show considerable psychological penetration, but this must have appealed to him: “из одного человека можно больше сделать, нежели из мильона голов; один в мильон раз лучше мильона” [you can do more with a single person than with a million; one person is a million times better than a million]. Of course, that is said by a demon to a witch, but that’s Veltman for you. At any rate, he refers a couple of times to тинтере [tintere], a card game apparently equivalent to кончинка [konchinka], and (according to that Wikipedia article) also spelled тинтерей [tinterei] and тинтерет [tinteret]. I presume it’s of French origin, given those spellings, and the stress is presumably therefore on the final syllable, but I’ve had no luck finding any mention of such a game outside of Russia. Anybody know what the origin might be?

Addendum. Franco Pratesi in Russian Card Games and Their Literature (pdf) describes the exiguous literature on the subject and gives a brief account of tenteret (as he spells it), beginning: “It is said to have an old French origin, to have been very much played at home, but to be at present almost forgotten. I could find no trace in French sources of this seemingly French name, nor of the game itself.” Pratesi also describes “babochka” and “konchinka,” if anyone needs to know about those games.

I’m reading Janet Soskice’s The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels, a gift from the learned and generous bulbul, and thoroughly enjoying it. I do have to complain, in the mildest of tones, about this bit from p. 79: “As one of Henry’s inner circle, Parker had been able ro take advantage of the king’s dissolution of the monasteries to snoop around their libraries and remove many of the choicest treasures (giving rise to the English expression ‘a nosey Parker’).” Anyone who frequents LH will probably have the same dismissive reaction I did on reading that parenthetical, and sure enough, a moment’s investigation is enough to dispose of it: The Phrase Finder says “Was the first Nosy Parker a real person and, if so, who? We don’t know”; the OED s.v. nosy parker (entry updated 2003) says “Apparently < nosy adj. + the surname Parker. Compare (especially earlier) allusive use as a proper name, apparently with reference to a (probably fictitious) individual taken as the type of someone inquisitive or prying.”

But I can’t blame Soskice, who had no reason to disbelieve what she read either at the Wikipedia article I linked to for Parker (I’ve just corrected the section on the phrase, and I hope nobody reverts it) or in the Wallechinsky Book of Lists the article cites or some other source repeating the same story; people love a good story, and it takes special training—training (to beat my favorite dead horse) that almost no one receives—to realize how unlikely this particular sort of story is. I’m just mentioning it in the hope of making a few more people think twice before accepting just-so stories about eponyms. And while I’m at it, the same goes for acronymic origins (port out starboard home, for unlawful carnal knowledge, et hoc genus omne). Accept no substitutes for scholarly etymologies!

By the way, does anybody happen to know the origin of the name Soskice? The BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names tells me it’s pronounced SOSS-kiss, but I can find no information about it in any of my surname references.

Reed Johnson has a New Yorker blog post about two Russian translations of The Catcher in the Rye, the classic one by Rita Rait-Kovaleva, called Над пропастью во ржи [Over the abyss in the rye], and the 2008 version by Max Nemtsov, Ловец на хлебном поле [The catcher in the field of grain], summarizing the differences by saying “Rait-Kovaleva has subtly shifted Caulfield’s speech into closer accord with good Russian literary norms, while Nemtsov’s Caulfield is both brassier and crasser, exaggerating his supposed iconoclasm”:

Here is how the protagonist of “The Catcher in the Rye” sounds in the original and the two translations—back-translated, of course, into English, which inevitably introduces its own distortions. I’ve tried to preserve the differences in tone, which are apparent from the very opening sentences of each of these works:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. (Salinger, “The Catcher in the Rye”)

If you truly would like to hear this story, first of all you will probably want to find out where I was born, how I spent my stupid childhood, what my parents did before my birth—in a word, all that David Copperfield rot. But truthfully speaking, I don’t have any urge to delve into that. (Rait-Kovaleva, “Over the Abyss in Rye”)

If you’re truly up for listening, for starters you’ll probably want me to dish up where I was born and what sort of crap went down in my childhood, what the ’rents did and some such stuff before they had me, and other David Copperfield bullshit, except blabbing about all that doesn’t get me stoked, to tell you the truth. (Nemtsov, “Catcher on a Grain Field”)

Michele Berdy, who sent me the link, feels that Johnson wasn’t hard enough on Nemtsov, and I have to agree with her response to the latter’s version: Bleah. She was also kind enough to send the Russian originals of the sentence quoted by Johnson in back-translation, which I have appended below the cut.

Addendum. I won’t make a separate post of it, but Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg has a WSJ piece about translations that’s worth a read; I particularly want to single out this quote from Richard Pevear:

“Most disagreements over words ignore the context, which is all important,” responds Mr. Pevear in an email. He says Tolstoy’s original word for the shoes, “porshni,” “is obsolete in Russian,” describing “primitive peasant shoes made from raw leather.” He says that is “rather close to the first meaning of brogues in the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘rough shoes of untanned hide.’ “

He is responding to Rosamund Bartlett, who said, quite correctly, that “brogues” “conjures up an image of ‘smart shoes with perforations.'” No English-speaker today [aside from John Cowan; see comment thread] thinks of brogues as “rough shoes of untanned hide” (and I might point out that the OED entry he cites hasn’t been updated since 1888). But never mind facts: the important thing is for Pevear to never, ever admit error.

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I found the most unhelpful set of definitions/equivalents yet in this New Great Russian-English Dictionary entry: “опалённый ppp of опалить; adust; sphacelate, deustate.” Now, if you look further down the page you’ll see that опалить means ‘to singe,’ and therefore its past passive participle must mean ‘singed,’ but the first thing your eye lights on is that forbidding sequence “adust; sphacelate, deustate.” There may be a non-empty set of “English-speakers to whom those words mean something,” but I have my doubts whether it overlaps with the set of “people who consult the New Great Russian-English Dictionary.” Just for kicks, I’ll explain them here.

You might guess that adust means ‘dusty,’ and in fact such a word exists, but this is a different adust, from Latin adūstus ‘burnt, scorched; dusky, swarthy, (of colour) dark,’ first used in English (c. 1400) to mean “Designating any of the humours of the body when considered to be abnormally concentrated and dark in colour, and associated with a pathological state of hotness and dryness of the body” (“Of the four humours, choler appears to have been the most often described as adust”); later senses were “having a melancholy character or appearance; gloomy; sallow,” ” Burnt, scorched; desiccated by exposure to strong heat; parched,” and “Of or designating a dark brown colour, as if scorched; (of a person) dark-skinned, tanned.” All are rare and/or obsolete.

The OED entry for sphacelate has not been updated since 1914; the adjective is called Obs. rare and defined as “Sphacelated,” and only two cites are given (1634 T. Johnson Wks. xxvi. xxxi. 1064 “Exhalations, lifted or raised up from any part which is gangrenate or sphacelate”; 1785 T. Martyn Lett. Elements Bot. xxvi. 392 “Having a cylindric..calyx, with the scales sphacelate or seeming mortified at top”); sphacelated means “Mortified, gangrened” and has a fair sprinkling of cites from 1639 (J. Woodall Surgeons Mate 387 “They used to take of the Sphacelated member”) to 1877 (F. T. Roberts Handbk. Med. I. 393 “The sphacelated portion is expelled”). Both are from the verb sphacelate “To affect with sphacelus; to cause to gangrene or mortify” or “To become gangrenous or mortified,” from a medieval or modern Latin borrowing of Greek σϕάκελος ‘gangrene.’

As for deustate, it clearly has the same Latin ūst- root as adust, but I regret to say it is unknown to the OED; Google Books turns it up in A Glossary of Mycology (1971) by Walter Snell and Esther A. Dick: “deustate, deustous. As if scorched. [< L. deurere to burn up.]” How the compilers of the New Great Russian-English Dictionary got hold of it, god only knows.

Anne Curzan at Lingua Franca has an interesting investigation of the phrase “in [my, etc.] wheelhouse”:

The Oxford English Dictionary dates the word wheelhouse, referring to the pilothouse on a boat that contains the wheel, back to 1835. And for over 100 years, from what I have found, all written references to people “in the wheelhouse” describe the person’s physical location in the wheelhouse of a boat. The OED does not yet have a definition for the metaphorical extension of the word, from the place on the boat where one is in control to other sweet spots (assuming this is the metaphorical extension).

Baseball holds the key to the transition from boats to areas of personal strength.[…]

The earliest baseball reference she found was from 1964; in an Update she credits Ben Zimmer with finding examples back to 1959 in Paul Dickson’s The Dickson Baseball Dictionary. I’ve always liked the phrase, which I learned as a young baseball fan, and always wondered how it got to mean “in the area where a hitter likes to hit a ball.”

I’m reading Сердце и думка [Heart and head], an 1838 novel by Veltman (and one of the young Dostoevsky’s two favorites, the other being Narezhny’s Бурсак—see this LH post), and I’ve just gotten to a scene where a magpie transforms itself into a young woman carrying milk into Moscow because magpies are not allowed in the city (Veltman’s novels aren’t like anybody else’s). At that point we get a tumultuous description of the big city that begins (Russian below the cut):

She found herself in the middle of a street full of carriages, a street that it is impossible to describe, where today is unlike yesterday and tomorrow will be entirely new: signs and goods, exterior and interior, names and appellations, color and form; in place of uniformity, diversity; in place of length, width; in place of merino, Thibet and Terneau; in place of manteaus, cloaks; in place of N, ci-devant N; in place of a shop, a store, and in place of the store, a kaleidoscope…

The ever-changing metropolis! But in my edition, the annotator has misunderstood “si devant N” and explained that it refers to an incorrect pronunciation of the French nasal vowel. I guess knowledge of French among educated Russians is not what it was in the early nineteenth century.

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David Crystal and his son Ben, an actor who studied linguistics in college, discuss how Shakespeare works in original pronunciation in this ten-minute video, which I found very enlightening (I wouldn’t have guessed that “from hour to hour” was pronounced the same as, and intended to suggest, “from whore to whore”). I found it at David Beaver’s Log post, where the comment thread includes at least one of the usual suspects who, never having considered the issue before and knowing nothing about it, nevertheless feel free to come up with some invented problem off the top of their head and then complain that “There is however no hint that this was respected in the reconstruction.” Ah, internet! Ah, humanity!

Stan at Sentence first has a post about an informal Irish usage, give out, meaning ‘complain, grumble, moan’ or ‘criticize, scold, reprimand, tell off’:

I think this give out comes from the Irish tabhair amach, same meaning. It’s intransitive, and often followed by to [a person]. People might give out to someone for some character flaw or oversight, or about politics, the weather, or the state of the roads. Or they might just give out in an unspecific or habitual way.

There are plenty of juicy quotes (“Giving out to him the whole time: ‘I’ve hated you for years, you old fecker, so take this'”), and I recommend reading the whole thing. But I’m bringing it here because of this remark at the end: “On Twitter recently, Oliver Farry said ‘people in Kansas and Missouri use “give out” in much the same way as Irish people do’. This was news to me, and I’d be interested to hear more about it.” So would I!

As Wikipedia says, “The printed Russian alphabet began to assume its modern shape when Peter I introduced his civil script (гражданскій шрифтъ[…]) in 1708″ (though I don’t know what they mean by the following sentence, “The reform was not specifically orthographic in nature”: isn’t any change in how words are written orthographic in nature?). Thanks to the World Digital Library (see this LH post), you can leaf through Civil Alphabet with Moral Teachings on your own computer (rather than having to go to the Russian State Historical Archive in St. Petersburg), and see letters and symbols not to be used in printing civil books crossed out in Peter’s own hand! And it ends with a list of Roman numerals, which surprised me although I knew Latin had a strong presence in the curriculum back then. (Thanks, Jeff!)