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My wife and I decided to return to Trollope in our nightly reading and are well into Barchester Towers, which we last read back in 2015. At that time I marked the following sentence with a marginal arrow, apparently intending to post about it; having neglected to do so then, I remedy the omission now: “Her unfortunate affliction precluded her from all hope of levanting with a lover.” Levanting — what a great word! The OED (entry from 1902) says:

1. intransitive. To steal away, ‘bolt’. Now esp. of a betting man or gamester: To abscond.

1797 She found that the sharps would dish me, and levanted without even bidding me farewell.
M. Robinson, Walsingham vol. IV. xc. 284

[…]

1848 One day we shall hear of one or other levanting.
W. M. Thackeray, Book of Snobs xxxix. 152

1863 The clerk had levanted before his employer returned from America.
M. E. Braddon, Eleanor’s Victory vol. III. xix. 289

[…]

1912 F. had carefully studied Anna Karenina, in a sort of ‘How to be happy though livanted’ spirit.
D. H. Lawrence, Letter c5 November (1962) vol. I. 154

1912 I am the fellow she livanted with.
D. H. Lawrence, Letter c5 November (1962) vol. I. 154

2. † transitive. Only in levant me!, a mild form of imprecation. Obsolete.

1760 Levant me, but he got enough last night to purchase a principality.
S. Foote, Minor i. 31

I note that Lawrence both liked the word and spelled it idiosyncratically; also, I shall have to start saying “Levant me!” The etymology is:

? < Spanish levant-ar to lift (levantar la casa to break up housekeeping, levantar el campo to break up the camp), < levar < Latin levāre to lift.

This sentence in the following paragraph has another savory expression: “She had lived out her heart, such heart as she had ever had, in her early years, at an age when Mr. Slope was thinking of the second book of Euclid and his unpaid bill at the buttery hatch.” OED s.v. buttery hatch (entry revised 2018):
[Read more…]

Back in 2019 I expressed “a combination of irritation and admiration when it comes to John H. McWhorter”; now the admiration has evaporated and the irritation has condensed into something more like rage. As it happens, I wondered about the origin of the given name of Ketanji Brown Jackson; that Wikipedia article doesn’t explain it, but I found a site that quoted her as follows: “When I was born here in Washington, my parents were public school teachers, and to express both pride in their heritage and hope for the future, they gave me an African name; ‘Ketanji Onyika,’ which they were told means ‘lovely one,’ she said.” Fine, but what kind of “African name”? I was stymied until I ran across the 2022 podcast “Where Is the Name Ketanji From?” by John McWhorter. Hey, he has his faults but he knows something about African languages, thought I, and hit Play. I didn’t understand why it would take over 38 minutes to answer the question, but hey, he’s a wordy dude; as long as he tells me, I won’t regret the investment of time! Once he started talking about how people don’t grasp how varied African languages are and began describing some, I sped it up to 150% and skipped chunks where he went on long divagations or played random songs he happened to like. He mentioned that people who speak Twi, Yoruba, and Igbo are said to be particularly good at learning Chinese (and provided a long comparison of Yoruba and Chinese); he said there was an Ijaw-based creole in South America; he explained why Swahili was chosen as the language to learn if you wanted to learn an African language. I got more and more aggravated. Finally, in the last 30 seconds, he said he had called a friend who knew about West African languages and who said that Ketanji “sounds like it might be Atlantic”: maybe Fula? maybe Wolof? That feels right to McW!

So after wasting a ridiculous amount of time I was left as ignorant as before, and I am making this post to let off steam and because hope springs eternal: perhaps some learned Hatter will be able to do better than the loquacious JMcW. Does something like Ketanji Onyika actually mean ‘lovely one’ in some actual language?

Back in 2005 I mentioned the private language of Maurice Baring and his family, which “in the course of two generations […] had developed a vocabulary of surprising range and subtlety”; now, thanks to Laudator Temporis Acti, I can provide an example, though it’s not clear to me if these words are from the general family language, “The Expressions,” or from a childish offshoot thereof (the quote is from Baring’s 1923 The Puppet Show of Memory):

We, of course, shared the night nursery, and we soon invented games together, some of which were distracting, not to say maddening, to grown-up people. One was an imaginary language in which even the word “Yes” was a trisyllable, namely: “Sheepartee,” and the word for “No” was even longer and more complicated, namely: “Quiliquinino.” We used to talk this language, which was called “Sheepartee,” and which consisted of unmitigated gibberish, for hours in the nursery, till Hilly, Grace, and Annie could bear it no longer, and Everard came up one evening and told us the language must stop or we should be whipped.

1) Dmitry Pruss sent me a link to The Speakers of Indo-European and their World: With interesting abstracts from most likely upcoming publications, which features “On the Evidence for the Tocharian Second Hypothesis,” “The Indo-European origins of Persephone and the Albanian goddess Premtë,” “Towards New Stories: Bringing Archaeological and Archaeogenetic Information Together to Reconstruct Migrations from the Steppe to Southeastern and Central Europe,” “Proto-Indo-Iranian and Proto-Iranian: Different Worlds?” and “Shining in the distance – PIE colour terms revisited.”

2) Slavomír Čéplö (bulbul) posted on Facebook a link to Code-switching and code-mixing in the conditions of Slavic-Slavic language contact: Vershina – a unique Polish language island in Siberia, by Michał Głuszkowski (open access).

If any of that seems interesting, click on through!

I was reading a New Yorker piece in which “tasseography” was used as if it were a perfectly normal word (no explanation provided); having never seen it before, I doubted that, and did some research. The Wikipedia article begins:

Tasseography (also known as tasseomancy, tassology, or tasseology) is a divination or fortune-telling method that interprets patterns in tea leaves, coffee grounds, or wine sediments.

The terms derive from the French word tasse (cup), which in turn derives from the Arabic loan-word into French tassa, and the respective Greek suffixes -graph (writing), -mancy (divination), and -logy (study of).

OK, in the first place, it’s an ill-formed word: -graphy/-mancy words need Greco-Latin bases, not modern French ones. In the second place, I can’t trace it back beyond the 1970s, which of course isn’t to say it doesn’t occur before then — to have a real idea about that, I’d need to consult an OED entry, but there isn’t one, which is another nail in the coffin. No, I don’t like this alleged word. Why not just say “tea-leaf reading” and “reading coffee grounds,” as our revered ancestors did?

Furthermore, “the Arabic loan-word into French tassa” is a bizarre little handwave at an etymology; Wiktionary tells us:

From Arabic طَاس (ṭās) (a shortening of طَسْت (ṭast)), from Middle Persian tšt’ (tašt), ultimately from the past participle of the Proto-Iranian verb *taš- (“to make, construct; to cut”), from Proto-Indo-Iranian *tā́ćšti, from Proto-Indo-European *tḗtḱ-ti ~ *tétḱ-n̥ti, from *tetḱ- (“to create”).

Much more interesting, if true!

Eleanor Pringle in Fortune writes about Jodie Foster’s annoyance with millennials; after the standard complaints (“They’re like, ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10:30 a.m.’”), she turns to language:

However Foster was also critical of Gen Z’s attitude at work, saying: “Or, like, in emails, I’ll tell them, ‘This is all grammatically incorrect. Did you not check your spelling?’ And they’re like, ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

Again Foster may be picking up on a wider generational shift being observed by scholars. On Medium, linguistics professor Matthew Veras Barros wrote, “A common misconception about language is the idea that kids, these days, are ruining English or ‘dumbing it down.’” He added: “Gen Z is indeed changing English, but it is also very much a misconception that this constitutes a degradation or ruination of the language. Throughout history, it has always been the younger generations that drive language change, and then grow old enough to complain about kids in their own time.”

On top of that, Foster might also be witnessing friction with younger peers on account of the medium itself: email. Gen Z simply doesn’t email said Thierry Delaporte, CEO of IT firm Wipro, at Davos last year: “They’re 25—they don’t care. They don’t go on their emails, they go on Snapchat; they go on all these things.” Instead Delaporte uses Instagram and LinkedIn to speak to staff.

In September last year a study from Barclays also found Gen Z are almost twice as likely (49%) to utilize work instant-messaging platforms as those over 55 (27%), with 97% of respondents between ages 18 and 24 saying they want to show off their personality through office interactions.

I’m glad I’m no longer in the workplace, because I would be strongly tempted to make similar complaints, and I really don’t want to be Grandpa Simpson. At any rate, the stats are interesting, though I personally am not sure what “show off their personality through office interactions” means. (Thanks, cuchuflete!)

A stern statement by Macrobius (Saturnalia 5.14-15) on what it takes to appreciate Vergil:

Has it been proved to you that Vergil cannot be understood by someone who is ignorant of the sound of Latin and is equally distant to one who has not drunk Greek learning deep with the fullest thirst? If I did not fear making you antsy, I could fill huge volumes with the material he translated from the most obscure Greek teachings. But these assertions are enough to support the thesis I have proposed.

probatumne vobis est Vergilium, ut ab eo intellegi non potest qui sonum Latinae vocis ignorat, ita nec ab eo posse qui Graecam non hauserit extrema satietate doctrinam? nam si fastidium facere non timerem, ingentia poteram volumina de his quae a penitissima Graecorum doctrina transtulisset implere: sed ad fidem rei propositae relata sufficient.

Yes, “these assertions are enough to support the thesis I have proposed” would get him an F in a logic class. But he’s right — you can’t appreciate great poetry without the necessary background, although you can enjoy some pleasant sounds and noble thoughts. (Also, I like “make you antsy” for fastidium facere.)

Andrew Coletti writes for Gastro Obscura about Why Italy Fell Out of Love With Cilantro; the culinary history is interesting (in a nutshell, “when a distinct Italian culinary identity emerged with the unification of the modern nation in the 19th century, long-abandoned coriander was not revived, but left behind”), but what brings it to LH are these passages:

Native to Europe, Asia, and North Africa, coriander has a long and widespread history of human cultivation. Latin coriandrum, the source of many modern names for the plant, was borrowed from the Ancient Greek koriandron or koriadnon. The Romans developed a taste for the ingredient through the extensive Greek influence on their cuisine.
[…]

Coriander leaf was already mostly absent from Italian cuisine by the Renaissance, but the seeds continued to be used as a spice. They were also coated in sugar to make confetti, or “comfits” in English. These were chewed at banquets as an after-dinner mouth freshener and digestive, similar to mukhwas, the mixture of sweetened whole spices chewed in South Asia today for the same purpose. At festive celebrations, coriander comfits were thrown and scattered, giving rise to the English word “confetti” for the paper particles that later replaced them. In modern Italy, paper confetti is still called coriandoli, meaning “coriander seeds,” while confetti usually refers to a different kind of comfit, the sugared almonds given out at weddings and communions.

I had no idea about the origin of confetti! (That last link goes to Italian False Friends by Ronnie Ferguson, which looks like a useful book; we discussed coriander/cilantro back in 2004.)

This is another of those questions so niche I can’t even believe I’m asking it, but Hatters have come up with some pretty recherché answers before, so here goes. I was looking up the credits for Raymond Pellegrin (who’s in Le deuxième souffle, which I recently watched as part of my Melville mania) when I noticed a weird entry: “Dtàt lìam pét (1971).” Of course I had to find out more, so I googled it and discovered it’s a Thailand/Hong Kong coproduction also known as H-Bomb and Scramble Operation Alpha. (Christopher Mitchum’s Wikipedia page, which IDs it as H-Bomb, also says 1971, but IMDb says it’s from 1976 and this site says 1977!) I think the title Dtàt lìam pét is Thai, but I have no idea what it means and no way of finding out, since that transliteration only gets me the movie and I don’t have it in the Thai alphabet. And Thai Wikipedia (Google translate) calls it “Diamond cut” (and says it’s from 1975)! I don’t expect anyone to be able to clarify the dating, but if anyone knows Thai and can tell me what the title actually means, I’ll be grateful.

I was reading Blake Morrison’s LRB review (archived) of a couple of books by recent Nobelist Jon Fosse when I noticed that his translator, Damion Searls, renders the name of the Norwegian city Bergen as Bjørgvin, presumably reproducing the form in the original text. The Wikipedia article explains:

The Old Norse forms of the name were Bergvin [ˈberɡˌwin] and Bjǫrgvin [ˈbjɔrɡˌwin] (and in Icelandic and Faroese the city is still called Björgvin). The first element is berg (n.) or bjǫrg (n.), which translates as ‘mountain(s)’. The last element is vin (f.), which means a new settlement where there used to be a pasture or meadow. […] In 1918, there was a campaign to reintroduce the Norse form Bjørgvin as the name of the city. This was turned down – but as a compromise, the name of the diocese was changed to Bjørgvin bispedømme.

(Why [w] for v in the Old Norse forms?) Oddly, there are both a Bjørgvin Prison and a Bergen Prison, right next to each other. This passage from the review is of Hattic interest:

Fosse writes in New Norwegian, Nynorsk, one of Norway’s two written forms (Bokmål is the other), most common in western Norway. The fidelity of Damion Searls’s translation is impossible for an outsider to judge but it reads very fluently; it seems Searls is to Fosse what Anthea Bell was to W.G. Sebald, the best possible intermediary. There’s such carry in the prose that you quickly stop noticing the lack of full stops, though if you pause to examine the resources Fosse uses to move things along from one observation to the next it’s striking to see the alternatives he finds to the ever dependable ‘and’ and ‘but’. On one page I counted ‘I think’ more than a dozen times and – perhaps with a nod to Molly Bloom – there’s many a ‘yes’, as in ‘yes, maybe yes, yes maybe it’s a distance, he thinks, and now he has to go pour himself a little drink’. Joyce had fun with sentencelessness and so more recently did Mike McCormack in Solar Bones and Lucy Ellmann in Ducks, Newburyport. But Fosse’s way with it is more inward and incantatory.

I’ve heard good things about Fosse, but eight hundred pages of “smallish print and narrow margins” with “no paragraphs or full stops” sounds daunting. Maybe in another lifetime.