languagehat.com

As a card-carrying AI hater, I feel it my duty to point out when it’s actually useful, and Dan Cohen presents such a case:

“All goes in the usual monotonous way.” That is the depressed sigh of George Boole in a letter to his sister Maryann in 1850. It was the spark for my book Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith. Boole, the English mathematician who gave us the logic at the heart of the digital device you are reading this on, was teaching in Cork, Ireland at the time. On a cold December day, he wrote to Maryann about his feelings of profound loneliness. In a city that was on edge from religious strife and famine, he played piano at home to an empty room, and took long walks by himself. At the end of the day, he retreated to his equations, which seemed to transcend the petty differences of humanity.

But before developing my thesis about the fervent emotions behind Boole’s seemingly cold mathematical logic, I first had to read his damn handwriting. Talk about monotony! There were hundreds of letters and notebooks in his drifty scrawl. In retrospect, Boole’s handwriting is actually not that bad; I’ve encountered far worse since reading his in Cork. And it helped that I had taken a brief course on paleography, the art of deciphering handwritten historical documents. But it would have saved me a lot of time getting to the interesting interpretive phase of my research if a computer could have converted his handwriting into machine-readable text, as it already could for typeset text through a process called optical character recognition (OCR).

Since I wrote that book, university and industry labs have been trying to solve the incredibly difficult problem of handwritten text recognition (HTR). OCR quickly approached 99% accuracy for digitized books, whereas even the best HTR systems struggled to reach 80% — two incorrect words out of every ten. The issue is obvious: unlike the rigorous composition of books, handwriting is highly variable by author, and words are often indeterminate and irregularly arranged on a page.

He uses George’s letter to Maryann as a test, which most approaches fail; then he hits the jackpot:
[Read more…]

From Pablo Scheffer’s “Among the Rabble” (LRB, Vol. 47 No. 20 · 6 November 2025; archived), a review of The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages by Shane Bobrycki:

In Crowds and Power (1960), Elias Canetti drew a distinction between what he called ‘open’ and ‘closed’ crowds. Open crowds are what we tend to think of when we speak of crowds: spontaneous occasions where people come together with a shared if hazy purpose, temporarily suspending the normal order of things. Closed crowds, by contrast, are planned gatherings with a fixed motive. They solidify rather than disturb existing social hierarchies. One of the reasons the early Middle Ages tend not to feature in histories of the crowd, Bobrycki suggests, is that gatherings in this period were overwhelmingly closed. […]

Early​ medieval speakers of Latin inherited a trove of words to describe different types of crowd: populus, caterva, vulgus, conventio, tumultus, societas, contio, grex. Caterva and grex were both used to describe troops of men, but caterva originated as a military term referring to a band of barbarian soldiers, while grex, which had pejorative undertones, had been a word for a flock or herd of animals. In the early seventh century, Isidore of Seville expounded on the distinction between a ‘multitude’ (multitudo) and a ‘crowd’ or ‘rabble’ (turba). The former was defined by numbers, the latter by space: ‘For a few people can make up a turba in narrow confines.’ These nuances were being abandoned, however. Some writers were using turba not just for disorderly rabbles, but for hosts of angels and gatherings of monks; military terms such as legio and cohors lost their specificity and became synonyms for ‘many’. Even plebs came to be used simply as an alternative to populus.

As gatherings became more organised affairs, new words were needed. Germanic languages had inherited the word ‘thing’ (ding in German and þing in Old Norse), which originally referred to a local assembly – the kind where disputes were settled and collective decisions reached – but evolved to include the time or place of these assemblies, the discussions held and the agreements made. A thinghûs (‘thing house’) came to be anything from a legal court to a theatre; a thingâri (‘thing doer’) could just as easily be a preacher or a litigant. The noun thingatio even entered Latin through Lombard law, where it denoted public legitimisation.

Gotta love thingatio. (We discussed caterva in 2017; Y said “What an odd word, caterva. De Vaan’s dictionary doesn’t get very far with an etymology.”)

Via chavenet’s MetaFilter post, Daiz’s indignant Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles for no good reason:

Since the beginning of the Fall 2025 anime season, a major change has started taking place on the anime streaming service Crunchyroll: the presentation quality for translations of on-screen text has taken a total nosedive compared to what has been on offer for many years, all the way up until the previous Summer 2025 season. […]

In these new subtitles, translations for dialogue and on-screen text aren’t even separated to different sides of the screen – everything is just bunched up together at either the top or the bottom with only capitalization to distinguish what’s what, leading to poor readability. In addition, lots of on-screen text is just left straight up untranslated.

If you care about these things, you’ll want to click through for the details and the very enlightening screenshots; I agree with the MeFi commenter who said “The Kill la Kill fan subs shown in the article are both amazing from a technical point of view, and beautiful to look at.” (We discussed fansubbing in 2021 and earlier this year.)

And happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it! I’ll be away feasting at my sister-in-law’s for much of the day, so try not to wreck the furniture while I’m gone.

Anatoly at Avva has an interesting post; I’ll translate from his Russian:

1. Why exactly is it “часовые любви” (‘the sentries of love’ [title of a Bulat Okudzhava song]) but “квартира Любови Павловны” (‘the apartment of Lyubov Pavlovna’)? What caused this difference in declension [genitive lyubvi vs. Lyubovi], how did it develop?

2. Is there a name for this phenomenon (what is initially the same word gets declined/conjugated differently depending on the meaning), and what other interesting examples are there?

One of his commenters says that the word Любовь as a female name must somehow be distinguished from любовь as a feeling, but this of course is simply a rationalization parallel to “we have to spell its and it’s differently to avoid ambiguity.” At any rate, I thought the question about other examples (in languages that decline their words) was worth thinking about.

My grandson James, who has the family trait of insatiable curiosity and knows where to turn for inquiries about linguistic matters, asked me why poaching an egg is called “poaching.” The answer is interesting enough I thought I’d share it here. The OED (entry revised 2006) defines it as “To cook (an egg) without the shell in simmering, or over boiling, water; to simmer or steam (an egg) in a poacher” (first citation c1450 “Pocched egges,” earlier than I would have guessed); the etymology:

< Middle French pocher to cook (an egg) without the shell in simmering, or over boiling, water (1393; earlier in Old French as past participial adjective pochié: see poached adj.¹) < poche (see poke n.¹).

Notes
French pocher, in sense 1a, is usually explained as referring to the enclosure of the yolk in the white as in a bag.

The “put yolks in the pockets formed by the whites” derivation is plausible and satisfying, and if you know French (poche ‘pocket’) is easy to remember. And poke ‘bag’ (from Anglo-Norman poke, northern Old French poque, pouque) is a nice doublet. As for the other poach (‘to steal game’), well, it’s complicated; OED (entry revised 2006) says:

Origin uncertain. It is also uncertain whether the material below shows the development of a single word or of two or more, and whether (if a single origin is assumed) the original meaning should be taken to be ‘to shove’, ‘to poke’, ‘to thrust’, ‘to trample’, or ‘to thrust into a bag’. Branch I [‘shove, poke, thrust’] perhaps shows a variant (with palatalized consonant) of poke v.¹, but if so sense I.1b [‘thrust at or poke out (the eyes)’] must be of independent origin, < Middle French, French pocher to poke out (an eye) (1223 in Old French; specific use of pocher poach v.¹, perhaps arising originally from an analogy between the empty eye socket and a bag or pocket); with the early uses at sense I.1a, and perhaps also with branch III [‘take game, etc., unlawfully’], perhaps compare also French pocher poach v.¹ in the sense ‘to put in a bag’, although this sense (although apparently a primary one) is not recorded in French until later (1660, unless implied slightly earlier by the idiom recorded by Cotgrave in quot. 1611 at sense III.8a) and is apparently rare at all times. Perhaps alternatively compare poke v.² [‘put in a bag or pocket’], of which the present word could perhaps show a variant (perhaps compare early forms at pouch n.).

I had just assumed that the ‘steal’ sense was straightforwardly from ‘put in your pocket,’ but the history of words is rarely straightforward.

While not one of my core concerns, typography has long been an interest of mine (LH: 2003, 2010, 2017), and I couldn’t resist Ugonna-Ora Owoh’s Meet the Nigerian graphic designers bringing African expression to typography:

Contrary to what might be known, type design has always had a quiet but steady presence in Nigeria’s visual culture. Long before digital fonts and design software, lettering thrived on the country’s streets: hand-painted shop signs, market boards, danfo buses, and film posters all carried unique typographic expressions that reflected regional dialects and everyday aesthetics. These vernacular letterforms, often created by self-taught sign painters, formed the foundation of a distinctly Nigerian typographic identity, one rooted in improvisation, and storytelling. But they weren’t widely appreciated or respected, so gradually, these vernacular letterforms began to find themselves amidst imported Western forms which slowly blurred their identity.

However, the good news is a growing number of Nigerian designers are returning to the craft, building on both digital innovation and traditional sensibilities. These type designers are experimenting with indigenous scripts to craft fonts inspired by street typography, and they are even redefining what Nigerian type can look like. And the beautiful thing is, this is finding its way into global design conversations.

I really like the examples and I hope the designers continue their work and thrive. (Via MeFi.)

LH fave Ben Yagoda has posted an expanded version of a piece he published last week in the Forward, and it provides a convincing answer to a frequently asked question. He starts with a joke his mother liked to tell, the one about the kid whose mother calls him “bubele” so constantly that when she asked him what he learned on his first day in school, he says “I learned my name was Irving.” He continues:

Years ago, I reviewed Margaret Drabble’s novel The Ice Age, which begins with an epigraph from a William Wordsworth poem, “London 1802”: “Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour.” I opened the review by quoting the line and saying it was “not, as you might expect, the plaint of a Miami Beach widow.”

The humor in both cases, such as it was, rested on “Irving” and “Milton” being stereotypical American Jewish names. The stereotype is accurate. It is easy to think of examples (Irving Berlin, Irving “Swifty” Lazar; Milton Berle, Milton Friedman), and there’s also data to back it up. In a 2016 MIT study, researchers ingeniously culled data from Jewish U.S. soldiers in World War II (median birth date: 1917) and found that Irving was the single most common given name; Milton was 13th. Those scholars, and others, have briefly commented on the popularity of those two names and some others that made the top-thirty list for Jewish G.I.s: Sidney, Morris, Stanley, Murray, and Seymour.

But the comments have missed an important point about the phenomenon, which I call “My name is Irving” (MNII). It even slipped by the late Harvard sociologist Stanley (emphasis added) Lieberson, who wrote frequently and perceptively about the factors that go into parents’ naming decisions. In his 2000 book A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change, Lieberson mentioned his own first name, plus Irving and Seymour, and described them as attractive to Jewish parents because they were “names that [were]… popular with fellow Americans.”

[Read more…]

Joel is still posting excerpts from Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (see this LH post), and in RLS First Tries Writing Fiction I was struck by this tidbit:

The term “short story” seems to have been used for the first time in 1884 by the American critic Brander Matthews, to describe a distinct kind of condensed and focused narrative, as opposed to a tale that merely happens to be short.

Naturally, I wanted to find out more. Sure enough, Wikipedia says:

In 1884, Brander Matthews, the first American professor of dramatic literature, published The Philosophy of the Short-Story. During that same year, Matthews was the first one to name the emerging genre “short story”.

Which is referenced to the Britannica article “Brander Matthews | American writer,” but that doesn’t mention either the book or his alleged invention of the term. So I turned to the OED, whose entry was revised just this year:

A prose work of fiction, typically able to be read in a single sitting, and (in later use) frequently conceived as a means of exploring a single incident or sequence and evoking a particular emotional response in the reader; (with the) this as a literary genre. Cf. novella n., novelette n. 1.
The proliferation of literary magazines and periodicals in the first half of the 19th cent. afforded more opportunities for self-contained, relatively short works of fiction to be published. In the Anglophone literary tradition, the artistic possibilities of this form of writing were explored and discussed by a number of writers in the mid 19th cent. (including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe), leading to its recognition as a distinct genre by the late 19th cent. Cf. Compounds C.1, Compounds C.2 for a reflection of these developments.

1822 The author of these ‘Lights and Shadows’..has published a volume of short stories, chiefly of a rural kind.
Scots Magazine July 59/2

1843 If I were writing a novel, this would be thought a great fault, but as it is only a short story, perhaps I shall be forgiven.
Ladies’ Cabinet August 115

1877 His various books have been eminently readable, in the highest sense of the adjective, and some of his short stories have been almost without a flaw in their glittering beauty.
Independent 17 May 9/2

1896 The novelist who works on a large scale..is seldom master of the art of the short story.
Publishers’ Circular 25 April 447/3

1923 Mr H. G. Wells’s definition of the short story as a fiction that can be read in a quarter of an hour.
J. M. Murry, Pencillings 82
[…]

You will notice there’s no mention of Brander Matthews, and I’m guessing his role has been exaggerated. But the question of how to tell a mere “prose work of fiction, typically able to be read in a single sitting” from the putatively more advanced version “exploring a single incident or sequence and evoking a particular emotional response in the reader” is a nice one, and I’m not sure how one could be sure which one the citations from 1822 to 1877 were using. For that matter, I’m not sure whether I myself could tell one from the other. But then I’m not a professor or a literary critic, just a humble blogger.

It’s taken me over a month — twice as long as it should have — to finish Mikhail Shishkin’s Письмовник, literally “Letter-Writing Manual” but translated by Andrew Bromfield as The Light and the Dark. It’s the most recent of his four novels, all of which I’ve now read (LH: 1, 2, 3), and much as it pains me to say it, I hope he doesn’t write any more of them. He’s probably come to the same conclusion, since it’s been fifteen years since this came out; the fact is that he’s a good writer but a bad novelist, and he’s surely clever enough to have realized it.

Why, you ask, did I plow through all 376 pages if it wasn’t working for me? Two reasons: in the first place, I figured I might as well have read all his novels so I could talk knowledgeably and fairly about them and him, and in the second, I’d already bailed out of several novels and was starting to feel like a slacker, so I called on my inner Stakhanovite and got the job done. (Also, I was curious about how he’d end it.) The basics are soon told: it’s an epistolary novel alternating between letters by Alexandra (“Sashenka” or “Sasha”) and those by Vladimir (“Volodenka” or “Volodya”), who may or may not be writing to each other. They are love letters (often containing clichéd and increasingly embarrassing avowals of over-the-top emotion) but are stuffed with details of daily life and of early memories, both usually grim. If you want more (and aren’t worried about spoilers), there’s Mia Couto at The Modern Novel (cautiously approving), Phoebe Taplin at the Guardian (a rave: “The breathlessness of Maidenhair becomes, in The Light and the Dark, a more measured brilliance”), and Carla Baricz at Words Without Borders (an even more enthusiastic rave). I’ll quote the end of the Baricz review to give you an idea:

Both of Shishkin’s books, like his other works, return obsessively, with tenderness and with great brutality, to the question of whether individual moments of existence add up to more than the sum of minutes we are given to live, and whether and how they may be salvaged through language. Shishkin’s incandescent Russian undertakes this redemptive project, rendering translation a Sisyphean task. One cannot translate Shishkin, in fact; one can only attempt to find an adequate equivalent in the target language. Andrew Bromfield works very hard to do so with The Light and the Dark, and it pays off. In English, his Shishkin becomes, to quote Shakespeare’s Ariel, “something rich and strange.”

The Light and the Dark is a sentimental book, but only because it takes as its subject matter human love, in all of its infinite varieties and with all of its bitter complications—its indefinite hopes, its moments of transcendence and grotesqueness. Which is to say, as Volodya does, that this narrative is a story about death. Death, however, is never the end of the story. In language, we are always in the eternal present, so that, in one of his last missives, Volodya can whisper: “After all, I’m alive, Sasha.” Death belongs to time, and time wavers in this remarkable narrative and finally folds in on itself: “They write from Gaul that in the evening, in the dense rays of the sunset, a fine skin grows on the cobblestones of the street. They write from Jerusalem. [. . .] As the years go by the past does not recede but moves closer.” Of course, language cannot make up for loss: “I want everything alive, here and now. You, your warmth, your voice, your body, your smell,” Volodya cries. But Shishkin holds to the idea that, despite what mortality may take from us, language can nevertheless redeem the ephemeral moment, capturing it and returning us to its present. In letters, he seems to say, we are always the people we were when we wrote them—we are always young, we are always in love, we are always reaching across the dark, like “flies in amber.” The sheer beauty and power of his prose makes us believe that, indeed, as he writes, “it’s going to be the word in the beginning again.”

The thing is that all of that is Literature 101: yes, life is suffering, we’re all going to die, and love and language are important counterweights to the bad stuff. This is what Shishkin has been saying his entire career, and it’s wasted effort, because the only point to writing is to (as my man Ezra said) make it new, and he doesn’t do that, he just retails the same old bromides. His novels are full of little slices of life that should be affecting but aren’t because they’re just narrated flatly rather than seen in their individuality, and because they don’t happen to people but to cardboard characters. See the end of this post for a more extended riff on that subject; I’ll just add that if you value ideas over people you should write essays rather than novels, and Shishkin does that well. Philosopher, stick to thy lasting values and leave messy humanity to people like Dostoevsky!

Exploring Ephemera is “The official blog from Ephemera Society”; from the About page:

Founded in 1975 by the designer, photographer and writer Maurice Rickards (1919-1998), the Ephemera Society champions the very special contribution made by ephemera to an understanding of our past. Dedicated to the collection, conservation, study and educational use of ephemera, the society’s fairs, journal, blogs and website provide opportunities for collectors and researchers to share their expertise and enthusiasm. […]

Our Pepys logo pays tribute to the celebrated diarist, Samuel Pepys (1633-1703). Probably the first ‘general ephemerist’, Pepys included in his collection trade cards, board games, labels, ballads and other street literature. The Society’s Pepys medal, for excellence in ephemera studies, has been awarded to 16 recipients.

Just scroll down the main page and you’ll see all sorts of intriguing posts, like “Undies Without Coupons” (“Who would have thought that a wartime parachute could find a second life as nightwear?”); there are more at the MeFi post where I got the link.

And if you don’t care about ephemera, try John R. Gallagher’s The Curious Question of AI-written Lists: Or, LLMs are Genre Machines; it’s full of useful observations, like:

A good way to think about the output of LLMs is not an instance. It’s not actually a concrete piece of writing. The sentences aren’t sentences. This is a fundamental misinterpretation of what LLMs are doing. LLMs, as genre machines, produce the most abstracted patterns of genre signals possible. Then they write out that abstraction as a set of sentences. That abstraction, when you just glance at it, when you just skim it, feels fine. But when you stare at it with intent, when you close read it, you realize there is nothing there but signals that require interpretation.

Thanks, Leslie!