languagehat.com

I was reading a lively piece by Rory Sutherland about how speed shouldn’t always be prioritized when I was stopped in my tracks by the parenthetical in the following passage:

Someone I know who is an expert at Transport for London found out that quite a lot of people, quite a lot of the time, actually enjoy commuting. They enjoy the commute home much more than the commute to work. Men enjoy it a bit more than women. (That’s because men are a bit like Sky Boxes—we’ve got a standby mode. We like a bit of staring. If you look at coarse fishing, 95% male. Why is that? Because coarse fishing is basically staring with equipment.)

I was so unfamiliar with the phrase “coarse fishing” that I thought maybe “coarse” was a typo for “course” (though I had no idea what “course fishing” might be either). But lo and behold: “Coarse fishing (Irish: garbhiascaireacht, Welsh: pysgota bras) is a phrase commonly used in Great Britain and Ireland. It refers to the angling for rough fish, which are fish species considered undesirable as food or game fish.” I presume my UK and Irish readers are familiar with the term; how about the rest of you? Is this one of those Gobsmacked! terms that’s started to percolate out into the wider world, or is it (like Marmite) largely confined to the home islands?

Namwali Serpell (what a great name!) has a NYRB piece (archived) about the perennial issue of whether women’s writing might have a distinctive “style” (as she puts it). She has a lot of interesting things to say, and I approve of her take on it, but I’m just going to quote the first few paragraphs because I like the word she builds them around:

I learned a new word the other day: clocky. It describes someone who doesn’t pass as their (chosen) gender. It originated in the trans community and comes from the idea of “clocking” or recognizing something. Its use can be dysphoric or derogatory, a way to express the disappointment of missing the mark or to throw an insult back at transphobes. But lately, as the gender spectrum expands to include more ambiguous varieties, clocky has become a bit of a compliment. What a great word! I thought. It rolls off the tongue. It’s tongue-in-cheek. It has a little bite. Plus it rhymes with cocky—which makes for a lucky pun whichever way you spin it.

Clockiness has been on my mind because of a tidbit of literary history I also recently learned. In 1857 three stories about Anglican clergymen were published anonymously in Blackwood’s Magazine. The next year they were collected and republished as a book called Scenes of Clerical Life under the then unknown name George Eliot. The publisher, William Blackwood, sent copies to select members of the British literati, including Charles Dickens. Dickens knew of Marian Evans, the assistant editor of the Westminster Review who had scandalized London by living with a married man. But he had no idea that Evans had taken on a male pen name to publish Scenes of Clerical Life. He sent a letter to the writer via Blackwood, with a sly guess:

I should have been strongly disposed, if I had been left to my own devices, to address the said writer as a woman. I have observed what seem to me such womanly touches, in those moving fictions, that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me even now. If they originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself mentally so like a woman since the world began.

When I read this, I of course immediately wanted to know: How did Dickens clock her? What was the tell? Most readers at the time took the male name on the cover in good faith, so much so that some rube who happened to live near the town on which the setting in Scenes of Clerical Life was modeled started going around taking credit for it.

I am, of course, reminded of Robert Silverberg’s less successful attempt at gender analysis (the subject was James Tiptree, Jr.): “It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing.” (He later said, very graciously, “She fooled me beautifully, along with everyone else, and called into question the entire notion of what is ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ in fiction. I am still wrestling with that.”)

Oh, OK, I can’t resist quoting a little more (she’s discussing Judith Butler):
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Dave Wilton has a Big List entry on the word nimrod; as he says, “In current usage, nimrod is often used as a disparaging term for an inept or foolish person, but its original and basic meaning is as a term for a hunter.” That basic meaning derives (as any fule kno) from the biblical figure Nimrod, described as “a mighty hunter before the Lord”; Dave says “The name is probably a variant of Ninurta, a Mesopotamian god of war and the hunt.” The OED (entry revised 2003) has the following senses (I’ve given the first citation for each):

1. † A tyrannical ruler; a tyrant. Obsolete.
?1548 The boystuouse tyrauntes of Sodoma wyth their great Nemroth Winchester,..wyll sturre abought them.
J. Bale, Image of Bothe Churches (new edition) i. Preface sig. Bᵛ

2. A great or skilful hunter (frequently ironic); any person who likes to hunt. Also figurative.
1623 The Nimrod fierce is Death, His speedie Grayhounds are, Lust, Sicknesse, Enuie, Care.
W. Drummond, Flowres of Sion 20

3. North American slang. Usually with lower-case initial. A stupid or contemptible person; an idiot.
1977 Heard you are a Philly fan. What more can you expect from a nitwit, nimrod, R.O.T.C.
Connector (University of Lowell, Massachusetts) 19 April 12/5

Dave quotes the biblical name from the Old English translation of Genesis: “An þære wæs Nenroth; þe Nemroth wæs mihtig on eorþan.” He then gives a very interesting description of the progression of senses in English, with citations from Chaucer (“ne Nebrot, desirous/ To regne, had nat maad his toures hye”), John Bale (“The boystuouse tyrauntes of Sodoma wyth their great Nemroth Winchester”), and Looney Tunes (specifically, the 1948 animated short What Makes Daffy Duck: “Precisely what I was wondering, my little nimrod”). What interests me is the variety of forms; early texts have Nenroth, Nemroth, Nembrot, Nemeroth, and the like; I can’t help finding the modern Nimrod flavorless by comparison. And I note that Russian had Нимврод, Неврод, and Немврод before settling on Нимрод; in fact, in the same Shaginyan mock-poem I quoted here, we find:

Не царь, не бог, не падишах,
Не древних мифов порожденье,
Марс иль какой-нибудь Немврод, —
Сам комиссар за загражденье
Загнал державный свой народ!

Not king, not god, not padishah,
Not any fruit of ancient myths,
Mars or some Nembrod or other —
The commissar drove his mighty people
Beyond the barrier himself!

Bring back Nembrod, say I; besides being more impressive, it will remove any possibility of confusion with the modern slang term.

Occasional commenter and full-time beerologist Martyn Cornell, aka Zythophile, has a long post that begins:

It’s a claim you will find repeated in dozens – possibly hundreds – of places: that the so-called “Hymn to Ninkasi”, a poem in the Sumerian language to the goddess of beer, at least 3,900 years old, known from three fragmentary clay tablets found in and around the ancient city of Nippur, which stood between the Euphrates and the Tigris, is “effectively a Sumerian recipe for brewing beer”, “the oldest beer recipe in history”, with a description of “the detailed brewing process” that “modern researchers have used to recreate Sumerian beer.” The Hymn to Ninkasi, according to one American publication, “served not only as spiritual homage but also as detailed brewing instructions for the beverage that came to be known as beer.”

Unfortunately, that is all total steaming nonsense.

I can’t do justice to it here, but I’ll quote a few excerpts:
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Dmitry Pruss sent me a link to “Consonant lengthening marks the beginning of words across a diverse sample of languages” (open access) by Frederic Blum, Ludger Paschen, Robert Forkel, Susanne Fuchs, and Frank Seifart (Nature Human Behaviour [2024]); the abstract:

Speech consists of a continuous stream of acoustic signals, yet humans can segment words and other constituents from each other with astonishing precision. The acoustic properties that support this process are not well understood and remain understudied for the vast majority of the world’s languages, in particular regarding their potential variation. Here we report cross-linguistic evidence for the lengthening of word-initial consonants across a typologically diverse sample of 51 languages. Using Bayesian multilevel regression, we find that on average, word-initial consonants are about 13 ms longer than word-medial consonants. The cross-linguistic distribution of the effect indicates that despite individual differences in the phonology of the sampled languages, the lengthening of word-initial consonants is a widespread strategy to mark the onset of words in the continuous acoustic signal of human speech. These findings may be crucial for a better understanding of the incremental processing of speech and speech segmentation.

It sounds plausible; I wonder what the assembled Hatters think. (Thanks, Dmitry!)

Stephen Akey writes for the Hedgehog Review about life at the telephone reference desk back in the day:

How do you find the life expectancy of a California condor? Google it. Or the gross national product of Morocco? Google it. Or the final resting place of Tom Paine? Google it. There was a time, however—not all that long ago—when you couldn’t Google it or ask Siri or whatever cyber equivalent comes next. You had to do it the hard way—by consulting reference books, indexes, catalogs, almanacs, statistical abstracts, and myriad other printed sources. Or you could save yourself all that time and trouble by taking the easiest available shortcut: You could call me.

From 1984 to 1988, I worked in the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library. My seven or eight colleagues and I spent the days (and nights) answering exactly such questions. Our callers were as various as New York City itself: copyeditors, fact checkers, game show aspirants, journalists, bill collectors, bet settlers, police detectives, students and teachers, the idly curious, the lonely and loquacious, the park bench crazies, the nervously apprehensive. (This last category comprised many anxious patients about to undergo surgery who called us for background checks on their doctors.) There were telephone reference divisions in libraries all over the country, but this being New York City, we were an unusually large one with an unusually heavy volume of calls. And if I may say so, we were one of the best. More than one caller told me that we were a legend in the world of New York magazine publishing. […]

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Joel at Far Outliers has been posting excerpts from From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly, and I thought this one was of Hattic interest:

Universities were a target because of the new nationalist fraternities, the Burschenschaften, where students, some veterans of the fighting at Leipzig, committed themselves to the German nation, sang the poetry of Arndt, and immersed themselves in the cult of the lost empire, meeting yearly in torchlight at the Wartburg, the medieval castle above Eisenach where Martin Luther had translated the Bible. What is less known in this familiar story is that the participants of these events were not only German. Jena’s faculty included Protestant theologians who attracted students from across Europe, including dozens from the Slavic lands of the Habsburg Empire.

Yet these young speakers of Slovak and Czech proved receptive to Herder’s ideas in a way that English or French intellectuals of that time were not. Indeed, Goethe had been shocked in the 1820s to learn that Herder’s thought was all but unknown in France. The reason was partly practical: French intellectuals did not need linguistic nationalism. French kings had established the boundaries of France generations earlier, and there was no doubt about where France lay, who its subjects or citizens were, or what language they should speak. The national struggle was instead about whether kings or people would rule French territory. In England, the logic of nationalism was similar.

But these Habsburg Slavs were even more insecure about their nations than were German intellectuals living in the shadow of France. […] At Jena, the young Slavic theologians had arrived at the center of Herder’s teaching. The patriotic historian Heinrich Luden, editor of Herder’s History of Humanity, gave lectures so popular that students listened from ladders at open windows. He said that history, properly understood, should awaken active love for the fatherland. He also held that non-German peoples had a right to national development and, astoundingly, denounced the suppression of the Czechs after the battle of White Mountain. Weimar, where Herder had lived and preached for decades and had many friends, was an easy afternoon’s walk away, and the young theologians gained access to the deceased philosopher’s personal circles.

Among their number, four became gifted poets, linguists, and historians, and they proved to be crucial for the history of East Central Europe: Ján Kollár, Ján Benedikti, Pavel Šafárik, and Juraj Palković. Kollár and Palković wrote poetry that is still read in Slovak schools, and Šafárik became one of the most influential geographers of the nineteenth century. All were of modest backgrounds: Palković and Kollár from farm families, Šafárik and Benedikti from the households of clergymen. Šafárik had upset his irascible father and was forced to live as beggar student, a “supplikant,” who spent holidays soliciting money from a list of donors supplied by school authorities. At first, none had a particular attachment to the national idea, and in keeping with the practices of the time, they enrolled in Jena according to the old sense of natio: they were “Hungarians.” Of the thirty or so students from Northern Hungary, Kollár later recalled, only he and Benedikti initially showed any interest in Czecho-Slovak literature. Later, most of the cohort Magyarized completely.

Well, that’s a partial explanation of why there are Hungarians everywhere you look.

Ben Yagoda’s post on nosh makes interesting reading; he begins with his response to an interviewer who “mentioned she is married to a British person, and thus has been exposed to Britishisms like ‘posh’ and ‘nosh’”:

I immediately corrected her, saying that “nosh” is Yiddish.

Well, I was right, but she was right, too.

The word derives from the German naschen, meaning to nibble. It shows up in English as a verb in the late 1800s, and shortly after that as a noun, meaning a snack. I was familiar with both forms in my Jewish-American boyhood in the 1960s, and recall going to a Miami Beach restaurant called La Noshery (“noshery” or “nosherie” is an establishment where one noshes).

But Ngram Viewer reveals that, at least until quite recently, “nosh” was significantly more popular in the U.K. than the U.S. […] There are also specifically British variants, including (along the lines of “fry-up” and “cock-up) the noun “nosh-up”; a line in Irvine Welsh’s Filth (1998) is, “I’ll give the auld doll this: she always made a good nosh-up.” And I’ll note that one difference in American and British use of the word is that here, it’s mainly a snack, while there, it can be a full meal.

In addition, Green’s Dictionary of Slang reports, “nosh” in the U.K can refer an act of fellatio. That particular meaning led to a notorious email that restaurant reviewer Giles Coren wrote to his editors at The Times, and what was subsequently leaked to The Guardian.

I urge you to go to the link to read Coren’s anguished e-mail (which ends “You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, fucking christ, don’t you read the copy?”), but what struck me was the ‘fellatio’ sense, of which I had no idea. I might have thought it was exaggerated, but a comment by Nick L. Tipper (reproduced at the Facebook post Ben made about it) says:

The sharp turning point shown in Ben’s Ngram of GB usage of ‘nosh’ appears to be about 2010. At that time, I was heavily criticised – and ridiculed – by a colleague for using ‘nosh’ as a reference to food. In his mind, the word had only one meaning – the oral sex one which ‘gobble’ has acquired – and nosh meaning ‘food’, ‘meal’ or ‘eat’ was an archaic usage.

(Cue rant about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket and people today can only think about sex.)

At the request of Yamnaya fans, herewith a new catchall everything-paleogenetic thread! Have at it, DNA lovers…

Jason Koebler of 404 Media tells a tale of our times (archived):

The creator of an open source project that scraped the internet to determine the ever-changing popularity of different words in human language usage says that they are sunsetting the project because generative AI spam has poisoned the internet to a level where the project no longer has any utility.

Wordfreq is a program that tracked the ever-changing ways people used more than 40 different languages by analyzing millions of sources across Wikipedia, movie and TV subtitles, news articles, books, websites, Twitter, and Reddit. The system could be used to analyze changing language habits as slang and popular culture changed and language evolved, and was a resource for academics who study such things. In a note on the project’s GitHub, creator Robyn Speer wrote that the project “will not be updated anymore.”

“Generative AI has polluted the data,” she wrote. “I don’t think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans.”

See the link for details and a complaint about “the terrible behavior of generative AI companies”; the piece ends:

“Information that used to be free became expensive,” Speer wrote. She closed the note by saying that she wants no part of the industry anymore. “I don’t want to work on anything that could be confused with generative AI, or that could benefit generative AI,” she wrote. “OpenAI and Google can collect their own damn data. I hope they have to pay a very high price for it, and I hope they’re constantly cursing the mess that they made themselves.”