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As I wrote here, Errol Morris has for the last few years been writing the occasional brilliant series of articles in the NY Times, and he’s got another one going now; this is the first installment, and I commend it to the attention of anyone interested in the influence on our thinking of things that you wouldn’t think should influence it. I kind of hate to reveal even as much as I do here, but it’s only a spoiler for the first section and the fun stuff comes afterwards; he links to this earlier piece, focused on a quiz about optimism and pessimism, then says:

Here is my confession. My quiz wasn’t really a test of the optimism or pessimism of the reader. There was a hidden agenda. It was a test of the effect of fonts on truth. Or to be precise, the effect on credulity. Are there certain fonts that compel a belief that the sentences they are written in are true?

For the exciting answer, read the essay (and I assure statistically minded folks in advance that the p-value for the main result is 0.0068). Oh, and there’s a nice bit on the Crimean War, too. Thanks, Nick!

I’m well into Slezkine’s Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (see this post), and I’ve encountered one of those impressive people I like to commemorate here occasionally: Lev (Chaim-Leib) Sternberg. I don’t have time to write much about him (and the Wikipedia article is terrible, focusing almost entirely on his political activity and prison sentences), so I’ll just say he was a founding father of Russian anthropology and ethnography with an admirably humanistic orientation; according to him:

The goal of ethnography was to study culture in general and the non-literate peoples in particular. It both included and was a part of history, sociology, archaeology, philosophy, folklore, linguistics, and the study of religion. Accordingly, along with various ethnology courses, the curriculum of Shternberg’s department included all of the above disciplines plus traditional Sinology, Egyptology, and Oriental studies. A convinced evolutionist and a believer in the “psychic unity of mankind,” Shternberg attributed backwardness to the environment. It was only natural, therefore, that his students were required to master the basics of physics, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, biology, and geology.

And he had a saying I like very much: “He who knows but one people does not know any; he who knows but one religion and one culture, does not know any.” [Кто знает один народ – не знает ни одного, кто знает одну религию, одну культуру – не знает ни одной.]

Kári Tulinius sent me some links about a wonderful, long-forgotten bit of slang, immensikoff, defined in the OED entry as “Jocular name for a heavy overcoat.” As Jonathon Green puts it in Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang, it was “coined by the music-hall star Arthur Lloyd (1840-1904), who called himself Immensikoff and appeared on stage in such a coat to sing, c.1868, his hit ‘The Shoreditch Toff.'” The name was briefly popular, being used for a very tall Russian woman, a character in Mary Gräfin von Bothmer’s 1871 novel Cruel as the Grave (“Prince Immensikoff admired and respected Mrs. Hamilton. He harboured no dishonourable thoughts or intentions regarding her”), and a song in an Oxford revue, “Acis & Galataea”—through the magic of Google Books, you can actually see the lyrics (“We’re well aware we are A 1, In fact — Immensikoff ! Immensikoff ! Immensikoff ! Who dares at us to laugh or scoff, His head we’d very soon take off, For we’re, you know, Immensikoff !”). I’ll have to start using it this coming winter, if global warming permits the use of an overcoat.

My wife and I have reached the twelfth book in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series, The Letter of Marque, whose title reminds me of a Poul Anderson story, “Marque and Reprisal,” which I read as a teenage sf fan in my favorite magazine, F&SF (you can see the Jack Gaughan cover here), and which taught me the magnificent phrase letters of marque and reprisal (“commissions or warrants issued to someone to commit what would otherwise be acts of piracy”). If I had ever looked up the archaic-sounding marque, I couldn’t remember doing it, so I checked the OED, which has an entry updated in December 2000 with the following etymology:

< Anglo-Norman mark, marke, marque, merche and Middle French marche, marque, merque right of reprisal (1339; French marque) < Old Occitan marca right of reprisal, seizure by way of reprisal, object seized (12th cent.) < marcar to seize by way of reprisal (12th cent.), probably < a Germanic cognate of mark n.1 and mark v., the likely sense being ‘to mark as one’s own, to claim’, though this is uncertain and disputed. Compare post-classical Latin marca (1313 in a Gascon source), marcha (1152 in a document from Toulouse), marchia (1318 in a Gascon source), marqua (1293 in a British source), mercha (1295 in a British source) all denoting goods seized by way of reprisal; compare also Middle French merquer (1389), Catalan marcar (13th cent.), post-classical Latin marcare, marchare, marchiare, marquare (13th and 14th centuries in British and continental sources) to seize by way of reprisal.
Occurs frequently in the collocation marque and reprisal(s) after Anglo-Norman legal use, e.g.:

1353 Rolls of Parl. II. 250/1 Nous eions la Lei de mark & de reprisailles.
1417 Act 4 Hen. V Stat. 2 c. 7 Que de toutz attemptatz faitz par ses ennemys..encountre le tenure daucunes Trieuves..en les quelles nest pas fait expresse mencion que toutz marques & reprisailles cesseront..nostre Signior le Roi a toutz qi lour sentiront en tiel cas grevez, voet grauntier marque en due forme.

With letters of marque compare Anglo-Norman lettres merches (1435), Middle French lettre de marque (1549), post-classical Latin litterae marquae (1410 in a British source), litterae de marqua (14th–15th cent. in a British source).

More complicated than I would have thought, and reading Anglo-Norman legal verbiage always makes me smile.

A wonderful story by Doreen Carvajal in today’s New York Times: “A Spanish Hat Factory Thrives on Orders From a Finicky Brooklyn.” The Fernández y Roche hat factory in Seville has survived the changing fortunes of hat-wearing by catering to a very specialized community, the Satmar Hasids of Jerusalem and Brooklyn:

The hats for the Orthodox Jewish market are not listed in any catalog or Web site. The three popular models make distinctive fashion statements summed up by their names: Bent Up, Snap Brim and the Clergy, which lacks a crease in the crown and is bound around the brim.

“It may seem like they are all very similar black hats, but actually this group has its own fashions,” Mr. García said. “Styles are constantly evolving with a crown that is higher or lower or a brim that is wider or narrower.”

Those barely perceptible differences in plain black hats are important markers, according to Ester Muchawsky-Schnapper, the curator of a popular exhibit that is drawing 800 people a day at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem on the lives and customs of Hasidic Jews, including the Satmar sect and their hats.

Some groups wear hats with satin ribbons around the crown that fold into a bow on the right side while others wear it on the left, said Ms. Muchawsky-Schnapper, adding that these differences reflect the choices of the groups’ leaders and members. Brims are a decisive feature.

“You can differentiate the different groups by their hats,” she said, noting that another Hasidic sect, the Lubavitchers, draws meaning from a triangle-shaped crease at the crown, which signifies “wisdom, knowledge and understanding.” The Satmars in Jerusalem wear a very flat hat of rabbit hair, which is more velvety than the Satmar hats in New York, she said.

I absolutely love this stuff (in which I was tutored by my late friend Allan Herman; see my earlier post on shtreimels).

Of interest on the “language” side of LH: the hat names biretta, saturno, and cordobés and the fact that the shortened form by which the hat maker is known, Roche, is similar to rosh, the Hebrew word for ‘head.’

I’ve started reading the introduction to Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North, by Yuri Slezkine (i.e., Юрий Слёзкин; his grandfather of the same name, Yuri Slyozkin, was a well-known writer before his death in 1947, but seems to have been pretty much forgotten), a book that comes highly recommended by slawkenbergius, and I just ran across one of those things I probably knew at one point but have forgotten. At the top of p. 4, Slezkine writes: “In the tundra the only mammal capable of supporting large predatory populations is the reindeer (known in North America as the caribou), and it is around reindeer — as prey and property — that most of the traditional economic activity of the Arctic is centered.” I looked up the words in AHD, and sure enough, under “reindeer” it says “Subspecies native to North America and Greenland are usually called caribou” and under “caribou” “Subspecies native to Eurasia are usually called reindeer.” I had known that reindeer was from Old Norse hreinn ‘reindeer,’ but not that caribou was from “Micmac ĝalipu (influenced by Canadian French caribou, also < Micmac), < Proto-Algonquian *mekālixpowa: *mekāl-, to scrape + *-ixpo-, snow.”

An interesting visual take on etymology from mkinde of Ideas Illustrated, Visualizing English Word Origins:

Using Douglas Harper’s online dictionary of etymology, I paired up words from various passages I found online with entries in the dictionary. For each word, I pulled out the first listed language of origin and then re-constructed the text with some additional HTML infrastructure. The HTML would allow me to associate each word (or word fragment) with a color, title, and hyperlink to a definition.

It produces some striking, if predictable, results. (Thanks, Paul!)

We were playing Scrabble with our eight-year-old grandson when he happened on the word vum in the Scrabble Dictionary (which we encourage him to use as he plays because it’s good for his vocabulary). It said “interj.—used to express surprise,” and we all thought this was hilarious and went around saying “Vum!” for a while. Of course I then had to research it, and found a good AHD entry:

interj. New England
Used to express surprise.
[Alteration of vow.]
Regional Note: New Englanders sometimes express surprise by saying, “Well, I vum!” This odd-sounding word is in fact an alteration of the verb vow that goes back to the days of the American Revolution. It is also heard simply as “Vum!” or as a sort of past participle: “I’ll be vummed!” A Southern equivalent is swan or swanny, also meaning “swear”: “Now, I swanny!” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word swanny derives from the dialect of the north of England: I s’ wan ye, “I shall warrant ye.”

Now, they say “express,” present tense, but I live in New England and I find it hard to believe it’s been used in living memory. Of course, my incredulity means nothing. Anybody know whether this ludicrous lexeme is still in use?

Readers have been very supportive of my translations from Mandelstam, especially John Emerson, who periodically demands more of them. So I decided to return from my LH retrospective with a translation of his longest poem, the 1923 “Нашедший подкову“: “He Who Found a Horseshoe,” “Whoever Finds a Horseshoe,” or—as I choose to call it—”The Finder of a Horseshoe.” This is a complex and difficult poem, modeled after the Pindaric ode (when it was first published, it had the subtitle “A Pindaric fragment”), but I think its imagery and rhythm (both of which I have tried to preserve) make their impact even if the “meaning” (what the poet is “trying to say”) is endlessly debatable. To show you how debatable, I’ll quote from three critics, each of whom devotes a long essay to this poem. Clare Cavanagh, in the fifth chapter of her Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition, takes the pessimistic view:

The reality Mandelstam evokes in his poems of [the early twenties] forms a grim counterpoint to the resilient, resolutely hopeful tone of the essays, as the glittering golden currency of “Humanism and the Present” turns up, tarnished and diminished, at the end of one of his greatest and most pessimistic lyrics, “The Horseshoe Finder” […] The essayist insists that humanistic values, now hidden underground, will return again as common currency. […] The poet, though, tells us something else again. The past, he says, is dead and gone, and no amount of effort—the poem itself is a series of such efforts—will suffice to bring it back to life. […] “The Horseshoe Finder” is finally a magnificent lament on the failure of the poet and his tradition to find their place in what seems destined to become the glorious world economy of the future.

Steven Broyde, in Osip Mandel’stam and his Age: A Commentary on the Themes of War and Revolution in the Poetry 1913-1923, takes an opposite view:

“Našedšij podkovu,” then, is a complex synthesis of much of what Mandel’štam has said in other contexts. Essentially, the poet here is concerned with history and art, and the relationship of one to the other. It is difficult to see how one critic could have said of this poem: “What despair in this equation of the world’s process and creative impotence.” Aside from the fact that there is no such “identification” here, it is clear that the poem asserts rather the opposite; the contrast is not in the impotence of art, but in its permanency, as opposed to history’s permutations. For it is, after all, the horseshoe that is found.

Finally, Diana Myers, in her essay “The Hum of Metaphor and the Cast of Voice: Observations on Mandel’shtam’s ‘The Horseshoe Finder'” (mentioned in this post), takes a middle path:

In the middle of the twenties it seemed to many poets that the end of Russian lyric poetry was imminent. An atmosphere had built up in which either one’s poetic voice had to be disciplined to write on topical themes, or one was consigned, still living, to the archives. Mandel’shtam indeed found himself in the position of an exiled Ovid among a ‘youthful alien tribe’ which could not understand his language, culture or values. And it is Ovid whose presence permeates the mood, imagery and subtext of the entire poem […] However, the very fabric of the poem seems to negate this. The richness of the subtext, which is permeated with references to the Classics, affirms once more the principles of Mandel’shtam’s poetics. And its fundamental message is that a poetic word, once pronounced, becomes part of the texture of the poetic language and is retained in the memory; transformed by memory it can take on new life in a new time and in a new space, albeit metaphorical.

So make up your own minds. Without further ado:

[Read more…]

And so we reach the present. I hope everyone has enjoyed the extended wallowing in the LH past as much as I have; I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the excellent people at Insider Hosting, who have kept this blog running smoothly since 2003—just today they saved me from a bandwidth overrun with impressive celerity. And of course many thanks to all of you, sine quibus non. I end with a mise en abyme.

X: 2011-12
Boym on Poshlost. An ever-fascinating concept.
Lipsi. An enjoyable discussion of Kindles, East German dances, and the Beatles.
The Petty Monarchs Within Us. A great quote and an interesting discussion of kinglets, with an excursus on Norwegian.
Barzakh, Hurqalya, Alam al-Mithal. Discussion of those obscure Arabic terms, plus an interesting back-and-forth about science and religion.
What I Think About Hofstadter. Thread features other people’s thoughts about Hofstadter, Wittgenstein, etc., not to mention jamessal’s colloquy with himself.
Der Alte Fritz on the Awful German Language. An enjoyable discussion of languages, verse, and Joseph Beuys.
Moot. From an ambiguous adjective to the vagaries of memory.
Ignorant Blathering at the New Yorker. Storms and tempests in teapots, the queen’s accent, Garrigus Carraig’s new monicker, and human relatedness, inter alia.
Ten Years of Languagehat: X. In which I end with a mise en abyme.