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A couple of years ago I wrote about Mikhail Gronas’s superb book Cognitive Poetics and Cultural Memory: Russian Literary Mnemonics; now the Pushkin Review has published an article of his on a subject perhaps of more specialized interest, Who Was the Author of the First Book (or Rather Booklet) on Pushkin? Spoiler: he thinks it was Faddey Bulgarin (aka Jan Tadeusz Krzysztof Bulharyn), a nasty piece of work who had a grudge against Pushkin and no scruples about scurrilous anonymous attacks. But the fun is in the details, and anyone interested in early-nineteenth-century Russian literary life should enjoy it. And for what it’s worth, he convinces me. (Russian translation here.)

Frequent commenter Paul Ogden has created a Wikipedia article for what sounds like a wonderful thing, the Historical Dictionary Project for Hebrew. That second link is from the official site of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, which sponsors the project; they say:

The overarching goal of the HDP is to present the history and development of the Hebrew lexicon, from the earliest occurrences of words down through their most recent documentation. Whereas similar historical dictionary projects in Europe merely brought citations from texts of recent centuries, the Academy’s HDP is based upon Hebrew texts up until 1100 CE, and large selections of literature from the periods thereafter until the founding of the State of Israel. It was decided to begin with texts from the post-biblical period, and thus the database reflects more than 2000 years of Hebrew writing.

The Wikipedia article adds that “The complete lexical archive will contain at least 25 million quotations.” In short, a Hebrew OED. Every language needs one!

For those of you who might be wondering about the progress of my march through Russian literature, it has taken a sudden swerve. I had gotten up through the year 1968 (I enjoyed the Strugatskys’ Сказка о Тройке [Tale of the Troika], but it was essentially a rather silly satirical fantasy, not on the level of their great, somber sf novels) when I suddenly decided to reverse course and go back to the beginning of modern Russian literature (arbitrarily taking that to be the Tale of Frol Skobeev, a delightful piece of roguery which I enjoyed as much as Turgenev did). There were several motives coalescing in this decision, but probably the most basic was a desire to get to Dostoevsky sooner rather than later. After Frol Skobeev I read Mikhail Chulkov‘s 1770 Пригожая повариха [The Comely Cook], an early Russian picaresque novel which Prince Mirsky called “a sort of Russian Moll Flanders“; it too was very enjoyable, though pure fluff. Now I’m most of the way through Radishchev‘s famously controversial Путешествие из Петербурга в Москву [Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow], a brave manifesto against serfdom and arbitrary rule which got its author exiled to Siberia; alas, it’s not particularly enjoyable, and in places almost as unreadable as the second appendix to War and Peace. Long stretches of it are of the form “O my compatriots! can you really feast in comfort on your imported delicacies while your brothers groan under the yoke of serfdom, while your sisters are forced into unsuitable marriages? can you not see how much better it is to earn your bread by honest toil, rather than to live off the dishonestly acquired fruits of the labor of men placed under you by unjust laws…” (That’s a pastiche, not a quote, but you’d have to be a dedicated Radishchev scholar to tell the difference.) I’m reading it because it influenced everybody from Pushkin to Venedikt Erofeev, but I’ll be glad to put it aside and move on to Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, which I’m reading because it influenced everybody from Pushkin to Shklovsky. Then it’s on to Karamzin‘s 1792 story «Бедная Лиза» [Poor Liza], which comes highly recommended by its heroine’s namesake Lizok.

I must say, reading eighteenth-century prose is a lot easier for me now, with the internet handy (and of course a lot more Russian under my belt), than it was when I bought my copy of Radishchev in Prague in 1998; I remember struggling with the archaic vocabulary and the recondite allusions. Now I can find pretty much anything I want, from the location of Sofiya (the first stop on the journey, which turns out to be essentially a suburb of Tsarskoye Selo that had only recently been founded by Catherine the Great and was to be rejected, like most of her initiatives, by her awful son Paul), to the majestic but impenetrable (and misquoted) epigraph from Trediakovsky, which turns out to have its own Russian Wikipedia entry. It’s a good time to be alive and reading Russian literature.

Mark Liberman made a Log post a while back in which he discussed the phrase “all in all”:

It’s not syntactically or semantically transparent — we don’t say “some in all” or “some in some” or anything else remotely close. The fact that “in all” also exists helps a bit, but it’s still pretty opaque. And when I looked it up in the OED, I discovered that the only meaning offered there for all in all is “All things in all respects, all things altogether in one”…

He distinguishes three senses of the phrase, exemplified by the quotes “Is God my all in all?,” “He was a man, take him for all in all,” and “It was, all in all, the most ubiquitous feature of the landscape,” and tracks their changes in relative frequency over time, finding (unsurprisingly) that the first two declined steadily over the first half of the twentieth century while the third shot up like a rocket. His conclusion:

So “all in all”, in the meaning “Generally, all things considered”, increased just about as rapidly as “at the end of the day” did, a century later. The result is arguably ungrammatical and illogical except as an idiom. It displaced an older, arguably useful version of the same phrase meaning “all things to a person, or all things desired”. But as far as I can tell, no one ever complained. Go figure.

I think it’s worth emphasizing that last bit: no peevers have arisen to smite this new, illogical distortion of a fine old phrase, hallowed by usage. The inescapable conclusion? Peevery is personal and random. If Fowler or Strunk had happened to notice the phrase, think about it, and decide to attack it in print, it would be as “skunked” as sentence adverbial hopefully and all the other dreary shibboleths. But the lightning struck (or strunk) elsewhere, and we all use it without fear.

I ran across the Spanish word rueca ‘distaff’ and (as is my wont) wondered where it had come from. That turns out to be a more difficult question to answer than one might think. I first turned to the Diccionario de la lengua española, which said laconically “(Del germ. *rŏkko).” With that to go on, Google Books got me a view of p. 110 of Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, by James Mallory and D. Q. Adams, with the entry:

*ruk- ‘over-garment’. [IEW 874 (*ruk(k)-); Wat 55 (*ruk-)]. Olr rucht (< *ruktu-) ‘tunic’, MWels ruch(en) (< *roukkā) ‘cloak’, OE rocc ‘over-garment, rochet’, OHG rocko ‘distaff, Goth *rukka (borrowed into Italian rocca ‘distaff’) (< Gmc *rukkōn). An isogloss of the western periphery of the IE world.

Which sounded reasonably convincing, except that I wasn’t sure why a word for ‘over-garment’ would turn into one for ‘distaff.’ Investigating further, I learned there was an archaic English word for ‘distaff,’ rock, first attested in the fourteenth century (a1325 in G. H. McKnight Middle Eng. Humorous Tales (1913) 23 “Wit my roc y me fede; Cani do non oyir dede”), whose entry, happily for me, had just been updated in June 2010. The long etymology says everything that can be said at present about the history of this difficult word:

Either cognate with, or perhaps borrowed < one of, Middle Dutch rocke, (in late sources, probably from inflected forms) rocken (Dutch rokken, †rok), Middle Low German rocke, Old High German roc, rocco, roccho, rocho (Middle High German rocke, German Rocken), Old Icelandic rokkr, Norwegian rokk, Old Swedish rokker (Swedish rock), Old Danish rooc (Danish rok), all in sense ‘distaff’; further etymology uncertain and disputed (see below). Compare Old Occitan roca (c1250), Spanish rueca (13th cent.), Portuguese roca (15th cent.), Italian rocca (a1321).

The dominant view is that the Romance words represent early borrowings from the base of the Germanic words, more specifically, from an unattested Gothic form *rukka (which would have diffused with the Visigoths in Italy and Spain). However, while this view poses no phonological problems for the Occitan and Italian words, it encounters difficulties with regard to the Spanish and Portuguese words, since these presuppose a common ancestor with open o (which regularly diphthongized in Spanish), which is difficult to reconcile with the suggested Gothic etymon, and equally difficult to explain as a borrowing from West Germanic. It has been suggested that the different vowel quality in Spanish and Portuguese (which is paralleled outside the Iberian peninsula by Rhaeto-Romance) might be explained by influence of the classical Latin synonym colus (see colulus n.). In addition, if the word is held to be originally Germanic, its further etymology is unclear, as no fully convincing cognates have been found for the Germanic words (a connection with the Germanic words cited at rochet n.1 has sometimes been suggested, but is very doubtful). See further J. Corominas Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico (1981) at rueca, with detailed discussion.

An alternative etymology derives both the Germanic and the Romance words from an unattested post-classical Latin form *rotica , a derivative of classical Latin rota wheel (see rota n.) or rotāre rotate v., the distaff being so called on account of its rotating motion. However, this etymology is not generally accepted.

There is a set of obsolete English names for more or less the same post-Christmas day [thanks, iakon!]: Rock Day was “the day after Epiphany (i.e. January 7th)”; Rockfeast was (in Norfolk) “a festival following Epiphany, traditionally the day on which women resume their spinning and other tasks after the Christmas holidays”; and Rock Monday was “the first Monday after Epiphany, traditionally the day on which women resume their spinning and other tasks after the Christmas holidays, marked in certain parts of the country by various festivals and other customs.”

I might also point out the charming (and obsolete) Scots expression to come over with one’s rock, meaning ‘to make a social visit’: 1793 J. Sinclair Statist. Acct. Scotl. VII. 613 “When one neighbour says to another,..‘I am coming over with my rock,’ he means no more than to tell him that he intends soon to spend an evening with him.” (Note the masculine pronouns, striking in the context of the common use of distaff to refer to women and their concerns.)

My grandson was in a round robin baseball tournament (in which every team played every other), and someone asked me why it was called “round robin.” I didn’t know, and it turns out nobody really knows, but what astonished me when I checked the OED (where the entry was updated in March 2011) was the sheer variety of things to which the phrase has been applied. The first branch of senses falls under the general rubric “circular objects”; it is first attested as “a disparaging name for the consecrated Host at the Eucharist” (?1548 tr. J. Calvin Faythfvl Treat. Sacrament Pref. sig. Aiii, “Certeyne fonde talkers..applye to thys mooste holy Sacramente, names of despitte and reproche, as to cal it Jake in the boxe, & rounde Roben, and suche other not onely fonde but also blasphemouse names”), then as a type of small ruff (1642 J. Taylor Apol. for Private Preaching sig. A3, “King Arthur of Bradley, and his four hundred forty sixe Elders of the Round Table, the first men that ever wore Round-Robins”), as a rim or plate on a carriage axle (1795 W. Felton Treat. Carriages II. 232 (Gloss.), “Round Robbins, broad rims fixed to the ends of the axletree bed..for preventing dirt falling in to injure the arms of the axletree”), as a loop of leather or rubber through which passes a pole, spring, or other part of a carriage and by which it is suspended, and (in Devon) as a small pancake.

Branch II is oddly labeled “A person, fish, or plant,” encompassing a sense “Applied to a man (in various allusive uses)” (1591 R. Greene Notable Discouery of Coosenage f. 8, “There in faith round Robin his deputy, would make them like wretches, feele the waight of his heauiest fetters”); several kinds of fish—”a freshwater sunfish of eastern North America, either the pumpkinseed, Lepomis gibbosus, or the redbreast sunfish, L. auritus,” “Any of various marine fishes of the genus Decapterus (family Carangidae), characterized by a fusiform body almost circular in cross-section; esp. the round scad, D. punctatus, of Atlantic coastal waters, widely fished for food and as bait,” and (in Cornwall) “the anglerfish Lophius piscatorius“; and (in the southwest of England) “any of several hedgerow plants with pink flowers, esp. the red campion, Silene dioica.”

Branch III, “Other uses,” includes “a document (esp. one embodying a complaint, remonstrance, or request) having the names of the signatories arranged in a circle so as to disguise the order in which they have signed” (1698 C. Young in High Court of Admiralty Exam. & Answers (P.R.O.: HCA 13/81) f. 679v, “Some of them drew up a paper commonly called a Round Robin, and signed the same whereby they intimated that if the Captaine would not give them leave to goe a shore, they would take leave”), “a letter copied and sent to several recipients” (1871 Monthly Packet June 591 “Shall I send a round robin, telling them that you would not have time to write books if you answered all their questions?”), “a letter, piece of writing, etc., sent around the members of a group, and added to by each recipient in turn. Cf. chain letter” (1885 A. Baker More Half-hours with my Girls 204 “How can I write to you all? I must write a kind of round robin, to be sent to each in turn”), “a tournament in which every player or team competes once with each of the others” (1894 N.-Y. Times 28 Sept. 3/5 “A well-known player has proposed that the four players who reach the semifinals play a kind of ‘round-robin’ tournament”), “a group activity consisting of successive participation from each member of the group” (1915 Atlanta Constit. 7 Nov. 4 f/6 “Chairman of the entertainment committee, R. S. Wessels, is going to invoke what he says is a ‘Round Robin’ method of introducing them. Every man must rise in his place and introduce the member next to him.”), and “a wager consisting of three selections in different events, which are combined in various ways to produce ten individual bets (three doubles and a treble, and three pairs of ‘up-and-down’ bets)” (1944 G. Panetta We ride White Donkey 110 “‘Give me Fogoso, Doubt Not, and Chop Suey’ I said, ‘two dollars each in a three-way round robin.’”).

The etymology basically throws up its hands:

The senses at branch I. all denote things which are circular, and those at branch II. are connected with simplex uses of robin n.1, while the senses at branch III. denote something which goes round or around. However, in no case is it entirely clear what determined the collocation of the words round adj. and robin n.1, except for alliteration. It is probable that the phrase became well established in one or more uses (perhaps originally sense 1, if the chronology implied by the attestations is correct), and then became extended to other things which were round, or went around, or were similar to things otherwise referred to as robin n.1 However, what the original motivation may have been remains uncertain.

In other words, “What can we tell you? People like to say it because it sounds good.”

A short TED talk by Mark Forsyth that starts with the fine old American slang word snollygoster ‘A shrewd, unprincipled person, esp. a politician’ (OED; 1895 Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch 28 Oct. 4/3 “A Georgia editor kindly explains that ‘a snollygoster is a fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnacy’”) and proceeds to a very interesting discussion of how George Washington came to be called “president” (a lowly title at the time, meaning simply ‘An appointed or elected head of any gathering’; it was used for such things as shire meetings and dinner parties). I like very much his final remark about reality changing words far more than words can change reality. Thanks, Sven!

Kory Stamper, the blogging Merriam-Webster lexicographer, has a wonderful post that starts with the poetry of the color entries in the Third International, so refreshing after spending your day “drowning in stuffy single-statement definitions”:

begonia n … 3 : a deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral (sense 3b), bluer than fiesta, and bluer and stronger than sweet william — called also gaiety

These, it turns out, are the product of a complicated history having to do with (inter alia) the chief color consultant for both the Second and the Third, Isaac H. Godlove; after recounting that history, she goes on to the problem of how to define colors in general. Well worth your while.

And while I have your ear, don’t miss that rarest of phenomena, a new post at Polyglot Vegetarian! This one, Truffle, was sparked off by a comment of AJP’s in this LH thread, two years ago. The mills of PolyVeg grind slowly, but they grind exceeding delicious.

In the Immensikoff thread, iakon mentioned that according to the Online Etymological Dictionary pediment is “apparently a dialectal garbling of pyramid.” If you had asked me where it came from, I would have said “I suppose a Latin pedimentum,” but as it turns out there is no such word in Latin. Here’s the OED’s etymology (updated September 2005):

Origin uncertain; perhaps alteration of pyramid n. (compare pyramid n. 3a), based on a colloquial or regional pronunciation of the word (compare forms s.v.), with assimilation of the final syllable to –ment suffix.
An alternative derivation as an aphetic form of operiment n. [“A covering,” from Classical Latin operīmentum covering, cover < operīre to cover] has also been suggested. In quot. 1592 at sense 1aα. [“The Coronices..were corrospondent and agreeing with the faling out of the whol worke, the Stilliced or Perimeter [Margin. A periment in corrupt English]”] the word is considered an alteration of perimeter n.; although supported by an isolated Middle English variant perimentre of perimeter n., the development is unlikely for semantic and phonological reasons.
The β forms [i.e., with ped- rather than per-] show assimilation of the first element to classical Latin ped- , pedi- […]; compare classical Latin pedāmentum stake or prop for vines and later pedament n., also Italian †pedamento foundation, groundwork, base, footing (1499, 1611 in Florio). The form pedament perhaps shows influence of Italian pedamento; the form piedment probably shows influence of French pied (see pied-à-terre n.).
The association of the first element with Latin ped- also influenced the semantic development (see sense 2). Compare pedestal n.

The first citation after the 1592 alteration of perimeter is from 1601–2 (“and for a periment in the middest of the same wanscott xxs”), and the first with the ped- spelling is from 1664 (J. Evelyn Acct. Archit. in tr. R. Fréart Parallel Antient Archit. 140: “Those Roofs which exalted themselves above the Cornices had usually in face a Triangular plaine or Gabel (that when our Workmen make not so acute and pointed they call a Pedament) which the Antients nam’d Tympanum”).
Such a simple-looking word to conceal such mysteries!

A NY Times story by Sarah Maslin Nir, “Among Readers in Polyglot New York, 50 Shades of Best Sellers,” points out the obvious fact that “literary tastes among immigrant cultures turn out to be as different as their cuisines.” But the fun is in the details:

In the Queens Borough Public Library system, the number of foreign-language books has doubled over the last decade and now includes Bengali, Croatian and multiple languages spoken in Afghanistan. The Brooklyn Public Library caters to cardholders in about 30 languages, according to its Web site, and has a special multilingual center at the main Grand Army Plaza branch.
As the compositions of the city’s immigrant populations have changed, so, too, have the books that are carried. Mr. Baumann increasingly buys books in French as the city’s population of Francophone Africans has increased. Harlequin Romances are their top request. A Lower East Side branch, once in the heart of Little Germany, has a longstanding endowment to buy books in German, now little used.

Of course, I particularly enjoyed this bit:

At Saint Petersburg Trade House in Brighton Beach, where each supermarket along Brighton Beach Avenue carries caviars from Russia’s Bering Sea priced by grade like gasoline, classical Russian literature, like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, in Russian are requested daily, said Violet Lazareva, 48, the store’s literary consultant. “All the parents teach their children that they should read Russian classics in Russian,” she said. “They’re better in Russian, really.”

Really, they are! (Thanks go to Eric for the link.)