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We’ve discussed Anthony Burgess before (e.g., Burgess’s Slang), but I thought this bilious and detailed passage from the Roger Lewis biography was worth sharing:

Burgess’s idea of order, and his mental make-up, is signified by his fancy for the discipline and formality of grammar and linguistics. Language, in Burgess, creates the content. His information about his ancestors is divulged in terms of how they spoke and sounded, and by the Lancashire hotpot they ate: speaking and swallowing. And of course he can’t mention Manchester speech without having a go at the ‘centralizing linguistic culture’ of London and the south, which ironed out regional dialects – yet where did his own sonic boom come from? Elocution lessons? ‘We provincials have suffered in forcing ourselves to conform,’ he announced in 1987, writing from 44 rue Grimaldi, Monaco. One of Burgess’s biggest inadvertent jokes was to call a book Language Made Plain, because he makes it complicated, in my view. When he talks about substituting ‘an alveolar nasal for a velar one’ or of ‘palatizing his unvoiced alveolar fricatives’, I haven’t a clue what he means – except that he is showing off and being boring. He can’t have friends or cronies at school – they have to be persons ‘true to the etymology khronios’; even as a hungry baby he was like the vociferously verbose Leonard Sachs, compère of The Good Old Days, the music-hall show broadcast from the City Varieties, Leeds. Instead of crying for more milk, it’s a question of ‘the lactal ducts never refilling fast enough’. With Lynne dead in her hospital bed at the Central Middlesex, all he can think about is that the origin of the word acites, one of her symptoms (a distension of the abdomen), is the Greek askos, a wineskin, and that one of her last acts had been to rebuke a Singapore nurse in fluent Mandarin Chinese, ‘astonishing me with a sleeping knowledge of the language I never knew she had’.

Clamour and confusion are concealed by language, and for Burgess living details become a literary process. He reminds me, therefore, less of any modern (or Modernist) artist, where the many-sidedness of existence is acknowledged and presented in a multitude of experimental ways, than of a late Victorian or Edwardian man of letters – his equivalent in painting being William Powell Frith, whose vast, thronging canvases of Ramsgate Sands, Derby Day or railway-station platforms and booking halls prompted Wilde to enquire innocently whether it was really all done by hand? Such, too, are Burgess’s modes of exaggeration – the bejewelled vocabulary, the polishings of his prose – the effect, though picturesque, is that the books are assembled by clockwork. His love of words is robotic.

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Bruce Allen sent me a link to an article in Antigone by Harry Tanner, “Beyond LSJ: How to Deepen Your Understanding of Ancient Greek.” It begins by describing how Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott created “one of the world’s most famous ancient Greek dictionaries” using “a team of students who painstakingly recorded words encountered, along with their contexts, on index cards”:

Very little is known about the criteria by which Liddell and Scott decided what each word meant; there is no preface, no introduction, no explanation about the methods by which these scholars arrived at their conclusions and – more to the point – their translations. This lack of explanation perhaps reflects a more generalised self-confidence of scholars in the 19th century: as E.H. Carr said of historians of that era, “they believed [history’s] meaning was implicit and self-evident.”

Tanner proceeds to the meat of the essay, the issue of what we mean by the meaning of words:

One of the key problems with dictionaries lies in how we tend to think about words, not least words in ancient Greek. We tend to think of them as existing somewhere in the mind with a definable, clear meaning — as if a word like “beauty”, or “mellifluous”, or “carrot” had a home, a clear piece of real estate in the mind, a mental dictionary entry. This limiting idea is far from new. In Plato’s Laches, Socrates asks, ​​πειρῶ εἰπεῖν ὃ λέγω, τί ἐστιν ἀνδρεία (try to articulate what I am saying, what is andreía?) (Laches 1[9]0e). What ensues is an attempt to define the word — to say what it properly means. The assumption at the heart of this dialogue, as well as at the heart of LSJ, is that words have true meanings which exist independently of the contexts in which they are found. It’s as if there is some mental catalogue in which we might look up a word and learn all there is to know about its meaning. But, of course, words are never that simple, and to pretend that they are risks missing out on all the polysemy and multivalence inherent in poetic and creative language.

The word andreia, Plato assumes, has a pure, unadulterated meaning outside of context, and it is our job to find it. Similar attempts are made in the Charmides on the word sōphrosunē (σωφροσύνη). Dictionaries seek to capture that idée mère — to describe in sundry words what it means. Following suit, LSJ glosses σωφροσύνη as “soundness of mind” — another attempt to provide a glancing, unified definition which neatly captures all there is to know about the word. Unfortunately, such assumptions tend to deprive us of the chance to appreciate the beauty and poetry of words.

He explains some of the complex uses of σωφροσύνη, and continues:
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Another thought-provoking section of the introduction to How Literatures Begin (see this post):

If we focus on the cases where a new literature comes into view in response to new senses of group identity of one kind or another, we need to acknowledge that the petri dish in which this new set of reactions is cultivated almost invariably turns out to be an already multilingual and multicultural environment—cases such as premodern Japan, where virtually no one except immigrants spoke Chinese, are very rare, and even there a crucial factor in the development of the new literature was the arrival of a wave of refugees from the destruction of the Paekche state in Korea (chapter 2). To give just a selection of examples: later medieval Britain had a trilingual textual culture; mid-Republican Rome was home to speakers of Greek, Etruscan, and Oscan; the Swahili classic Al-Inkishafi came from a hybridized culture involving Arabic rulers and three competing Swahili dialects.

As a consequence, very strikingly, the beginnings of literatures are regularly venues for the transformative impact of interstitial figures, bilingual or trilingual intercultural actors, who become the catalysts for new forms of cultural expression. These individuals are often able to import into the target culture their expertise in an outside literary tradition (regularly from a cosmopolitan literature). Such entrepreneurial experts shuttling in between cultures are key figures in the beginning of literatures in Rome (Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and Ennius); Russia (Antiokh Kantemir [1709–44]); Japan (the refugees from Korea in the seventh century CE, especially Yamanoue no Okura [660–ca. 733], from a Paekche immigrant family); and India (Maulana Daud, the Muslim who in the 1370s composed the first Hindi work, the Candāyan). The bi- or trilingual individuals who must have been crucial in mediating the epics and songs of the Near East into the Greek-speaking sphere in the period before Homer and Hesiod are now lost to history. As with any feature of culture, all literary traditions interact and appropriate to one degree or another: in their initial phases, the splitting off of vernacular literatures from their parental cosmopolitan literatures will provide ready opportunity for such middle men and culture brokers.

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A few years ago, Princeton University Press published How Literatures Begin: A Global History, edited by Joel B. Lande and Denis Feeney; having had a chance to examine it, I find it a fascinating look at a phenomenon of great interest, and I’ll share some excerpts here, starting with the introduction:

Literatures are rather improbable things. While storytelling and myth making seem to be fixtures of human society, literatures are much more rare. After all, very few spoken languages ever developed a script, let alone enduring institutions of the kind surveyed in this volume. And in those instances where a literary tradition does take hold, survival is far from guaranteed. Literatures require technologies for their preservation and circulation, groups interested in their continuing production, audiences invested in their consumption, and so on. Literatures are sustained over time by diverse practices. But much like individual lives or entire cultures, they also experience birth and death, periods of florescence and of decay, migration from one place to another, and transformation from one shape into another.

With all the specialized interest in individual literatures, in addition to the widespread use of big-picture categories like postcolonial and world literature, one can easily lose track of just how strange it is that literatures exist in the first place. This book embraces such strangeness, asking how an array of literatures, extending across time and space, came to be. By examining the factors that have brought forth and kept alive various literary traditions, the case studies presented here provide the occasion to rethink many of our most basic assumptions about literature in the singular and literatures in the plural.

It is not hard to recognize the risks built into such a project. Neither the concept of literature, nor that of a beginning, can be taken for granted. There are, to be sure, intrinsic difficulties in translating the concept of literature from one idiom to another, especially because of the term’s modern European provenance. Using the term literature universally, that is, runs the risk of projecting a historically and culturally specific set of textual practices and aesthetic values onto times and places that worked very differently. Along the same lines, the search for beginnings can easily be construed as the attempt to uncover a single pattern or a uniform set of enabling conditions, common to each of the case studies included here. In reflecting on processes of literary beginning, it is all too easy to impose a hegemonic mold that all examples either manage or fail to live up to.

I normally bristle when I read the word “hegemonic,” but here it’s used sensibly and imparts an actual meaning. A later passage:
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My wife asked me (she knows I love these out-of-the-blue language questions) where the word parlous was from, and I said confidently that it was a variant of perilous showing the same sound change as parson (< person) and varsity (< university). But then I thought I’d check the OED for details, and was surprised by the order of senses:

1. Of a person or his or her attributes, behaviour, etc.: keen, shrewd, esp. dangerously cunning or clever; mischievous; capable of harming; malicious. Also (in positive sense): extraordinary, excessive, wonderful. Now rare (in later use colloquial or English regional).

c1390 Whon þeos perlous [variant reading parlous] prestes perceyued hire play.
Pistel of Swete Susan (MS Vernon) 53

1584 O you whose noble harts cannot accord, to be the sclaues to an infamous lord: And knowes not how to mixe with perlous art, the deadly poyson with the Amorus dart.
T. Hudson, translation of G. de S. Du Bartas, Historie of Judith v. 71
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1696 Parlous, a kind of made Word, signifying shrewd, notable.
E. Phillips, New World of Words (new edition)
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2.a. Perilous, dangerous, precarious; desperate, hazardous, dire. (Now the usual sense.)

c1425 Ful perlous is displese hem or disturbe.

J. Lydgate, Troyyes Book (MS Augustus A.iv) ii. 2273 (Middle English Dictionary)

I don’t think I’d run across the ‘dangerously cunning or clever’ sense before. Perilous itself only goes back to c1300 (“He nolde lete for no-þing þene perilouse wei to wende”); both words, of course, are based on peril, from Latin perīculum, which I hadn’t realized was “< an unattested verb only recorded in the compound experīrī to try, make trial of (see expert adj.¹) + ‑culum ‑culum suffix.” AHD has it under per-³ ‘to try, risk’ in the Appendix of Indo-European roots.
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Alexis Soloski has an entertaining piece in the NY Times (archived) about how to pronounce the name of the titular (though absent) character of one of the most famous of plays; of course, the idea that there is one “correct” way to say it is silly, but it’s fun to see how various actors have dealt with it. It starts:

Godot is a big name in theater. How do you say that name? Depends.

The actor Brandon J. Dirden articulates a variation on the word Godot at least a dozen times a night in the current Broadway revival of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” As he speaks, vowels and consonants dance around in his mouth, emerging as Godet, Goday, Godan, Godin, Gahdeh.

Dirden plays Pozzo, an aristocratic man who chances on two tramps, Didi and Gogo, played by Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves. When told that they are waiting for a man named Godot, Dirden cheerfully massacres the name, accenting a French pronunciation (Beckett wrote the original in French) with a viscous Southern twang.

“As if this play wasn’t confusing enough,” he said in a recent phone interview.

Here’s a particularly annoying quote:

In 2009, Anthony Page, the British director of a Broadway revival starring John Goodman and Nathan Lane, told The New York Times: “GOD-dough is what Samuel Beckett said. Also, the word has to echo Pozzo. That’s the right pronunciation. Go-DOUGH is an Americanism, which isn’t what the play intended.”

I fart in his general direction; his mother was a hamster and his father smelt of elderberries.

An ABC news story by Scout Wallen and Monty Jacka about a Tasmanian woman selling a 1937 edition of The Hobbit is interesting on a number of counts (there were two impressions of the 1937 first edition, and the second, with color illustrations, is worth a lot less; also, if you suspect you have a rare book, why would you throw out the dust jacket?), but the linguistic hook is the phrase I’ve bolded here:

Renee Woodleigh says she bought the book — which she says is a first edition copy — at the St Vincent de Paul op shop in Huonville, south of Hobart.

I had no idea what an op shop might be, but Wiktionary enlightened me:

(Australia, New Zealand) A shop, usually operated by a charity, to which new or used goods are donated, for sale at a low price.

It’s a contraction of opportunity shop, which makes sense but which I would never have guessed.

Also, I have to register my objection to the fact that among the illustrations of the book in question they include a film still with the caption “The Hobbit was adapted into a series of films by director Peter Jackson. (Warner Bros Pictures).” Gee, thanks for that extremely relevant information.

Josephine Quinn’s “Insider and Outsider” (NYRB November 6, 2025; archived) is a favorable review of Augustine the African, by Catherine Conybeare; here are some bits of Hattic interest:

He was baptized by the militant bishop Ambrose of Milan in 387, seven years after the Edict of Thessalonica attempted to enforce Christianity on all Rome’s subjects and five years after the emperor Theodosius launched a new campaign of persecution against Manichaeans. In another change of heart, Augustine gave up his imperial sinecure to return to North Africa, though not to his former companion: now he was committed to chastity. Monnica died on the way back, but Augustine finally arrived home after five years overseas in 388. After that he never left Africa again.

At first he settled in his hometown of Thagaste, where more grief awaited him with the loss of his beloved son at the age of sixteen around the year 390. The following year he was seized by the local congregation on a visit to the port of Hippo and ordained a presbyter, or priest. […] In 395 he was promoted to the unusual position of coadjutant bishop with the incumbent Valerius, a native Greek speaker who needed the support, and finally became sole bishop on Valerius’s death in 396. This prompted him to write his Confessions, an autobiographical account of his spiritual journey and his first work of real brilliance. […]

Conybeare focuses throughout on the ways in which Augustine’s developing theology and theological self-positioning were “inflected by his view from Africa.” One example is his interest in Punic, a western form of the Phoenician language originally introduced to African coastal areas by Iron Age Levantine settlers. It had been adopted by local communities and even kings by the third century BCE, seems by the third century CE to have entirely obliterated the “Libyan” languages previously used in the area, and was still widely spoken across northwest Africa in the early fifth century, alongside Latin. Punic was the first language of many African Christians, and though Augustine wasn’t fluent he seems to have had a functional understanding of it and a good sense of its importance to the Christian mission in the region. Much of our evidence for its continuing popularity comes from Augustine himself, as he renders words and phrases into Punic and back for his own congregation and finds translators, interpreters, and even a Punic-speaking bishop for others.

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The always interesting Public Domain Review has a post about a striking medieval manuscript:

As the seventh, final seal is opened during the Book of Revelation, unlocking the scroll that John of Patmos envisions in God’s right hand, a silence breaks out in heaven for half an hour. For centuries, artists have avoided depicting this apocalyptic caesura by focusing instead on the action-packed aftermath: thunder and lightning, the seven trumpets, hail and fire mingled with blood. From John Martin’s 1837 mezzotint of cataclysmic crags above turbulent seas back to Albrecht Dürer’s noisy 1511 woodcut of flames engulfing life like tinder, the “silence in heaven about the space of half an hour” is absent, implied only apophatically, as the converse of the chaos that now reigns over, and rains down upon, the earth.

This is not the case for a miniature from the twelfth-century Silos Apocalypse (British Library Add MS 11695, fol. 125v), a codex copy of the Tractatus de Apocalipsin, eighth-century Spanish theologian Beatus of Liébana’s commentary on the Book of Revelation. Here sonic absence is visualized, and it is yellow. Just as silence blankets the ears, in this manuscript, a monochromatic rectangle “serves as an effective screen that blocks the beholder’s gaze”, writes art historian Elina Gertsman. Auditory interruption gets transposed onto the textual plane, as the rectangle veils the ruled lines it floats above. “It’s not that yellow as a color ‘stands for’ silence according to medieval symbolic logic”, argues scholar Vincent Debiais, “it’s that the colored area on the page opens a visual moment, a space of silence within the manuscript itself.” The effect becomes all the more palpable when we consider that the manuscript may have been read aloud.

It can be tempting, despite scholarly reservations, to view this yellow silence as an early precursor to the color field abstractions and monochromatic paintings that preoccupied the mid-twentieth century. Rather than claiming that the Silos Apocalypse prefigures works like Mark Rothko’s Orange and Yellow (1956) or Yves Klein’s “Untitled Yellow Monochrome” (1956), it would be more productive (and interesting) to ask how those modern investigators of the chromosphere approached a type of representation that converged with medieval forms of contemplation. As Debiais writes, “It’s important to challenge the common idea of an almost evolutionary procession, where modernist abstract art is somehow the climax, a new and perfectly original approach to the visual world, absolutely different from all that preceded it.”

Links and (of course) an image of the miniature itself at the PDR post. The Wikipedia article on Beatus of Liébana’s work has Commentaria in Apocalypsin, which strikes me as better Latin than “de Apocalipsin,” but I Am Not a Latinist.

Mignon Fogarty, online as Grammar Girl, interviewed Ben Zimmer for her podcast; I link to the transcript, which is what I require as a text-based person. Fogarty starts out:

So it turns out one of the many things you’re known for is antedating words, finding earlier usages than those published in dictionaries. After I had a show about the word “scallywag” recently, you pointed me to an antedating you’d done on it. And it’s a great story.

It is indeed; I posted about it here. She goes on to discuss “Ms.” (LH) and “jazz” (LH); just when I was thinking I’d heard it all before, she got to “the Big Easy,” a nickname for New Orleans:

Ben Zimmer: Today, it’s great how sometimes these are kind of ongoing stories and, like, sometimes what I’m doing in my columns is just trying to capture the research for something like that. As it’s going, you know, as people are trying to piece it together. And so, the Big Easy is one of those as the sort of label for New Orleans that people were like, it was very hard to tell exactly how far back it went. And so, there was one researcher named Barry Popik, who’s done a lot of research on a lot of these terms, is one of the sort of foremost people for figuring these things out. Because he, once he gets on a particular word or phrase, whether it’s Big Apple for New York or Big Easy for New Orleans, he’ll just sort of keep digging and seeing what he can find. And so, Barry Popik had found out that there was a name of a dance hall across the river in Gretna, Louisiana, that was called the Big Easy as early as 1910.

But I mentioned another one of these researchers, Fred Shapiro, who is the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations. And he is, he’s always looking to see, well, what new resources are out there that we can look at? And he brought something to our attention that there’s a digital library called JSTOR, and that they added this collection of American prison newspapers. And so, yeah, these are newspapers that were published in prisons for inmates. And this was this whole kind of trove of material that really had never been looked at before in any serious way. And if you look in that database that’s now available on JSTOR to search through, you can find one particular newspaper from the Louisiana State Penitentiary. That penitentiary was sort of known as Angola, and so their newspaper edited by inmates there was called “The Angolite.” And so it turns out, if you look up Big Easy, you will find these references going back to 1957 about the Big Easy, where they’re talking about, oh, they wanna get out so that they can go to the Big Easy, meaning New Orleans.

And so, that was way earlier than anyone had found previously for that phrase referring to New Orleans. It would eventually get sort of more famous. You might remember, in the 1980s, like there was a movie called “The Big Easy” in 1986 with Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin. And so, things like that it sort of got more national attention, but that’s a case where it’s like, yeah, I mean, you know, just thanks to this sort of prison newspaper database, we were able to sort of fill out this history about, you know, how it first got used, and otherwise we wouldn’t have known because it wasn’t showing up in just sort of more, you know, mainstream sources, newspapers, and so forth.

She continues with “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” (LH), another great excavation, and finishes up with an interesting question:
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