languagehat.com

1) Ben Zimmer has tracked down the history of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, which is a lot more interesting than you might think (there was a song called “Supercalafajalistickespialadojus” in 1949, and supercaliflawjalisticexpialadoshus was created—or said to have been created—by Helen Herman a couple of decades earlier); you can read all about it at Visual Thesaurus or the Boston Globe.

2) From an early story by Fazil Iskander (Russian below the cut):

[My crazy uncle] spoke mainly in Abkhaz, but he cursed in two languages, Russian and Turkish. Apparently, combinations of words were engraved in his memory according to their degree of incandescence, and one can conclude that Russians and Turks, in moments of wrath, emit expressions of approximately the same emotional saturation.

3. I was recently listening to Andrew Hill’s infectious tune “Catta” (here from Bobby Hutcherson’s great 1965 record Dialogue), and I discovered that Eric Thacker wrote in Essential Jazz Records, Vol. 2: Modernism to Postmodernism (which I would recommend to any jazz fan): “Commentators have made too much of Hill’s Haitian infancy (in fact he grew up in Chicago and learned his jazz there), but his title Catta – a Port au Prince dialect – is his own acknowledgment of origin.” But I can find no indication that there is any such dialect; of course, Thacker might have meant “dialect word,” but that doesn’t get me anywhere either. So if anyone can provide further information, please do so. [It turns out it’s a Haitian drum; see Jeff’s comment below.]

The original Iskander quote:

Говорил он в основном по-абхазски, но ругался на двух языках: по-русски и по-турецки. По-видимому, сочетания слов в память ему врезались по степени накала. Отсюда можно заключить, что русские и турки в минуту гнева выдают выражения примерно одинаковой эмоциональной насыщенности.

Still reading Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child (see here and here), I’ve come across a word that is vanishingly rare—so rare, indeed, that it’s not in the OED (though it will presumably be added when the third edition reaches V). Hollinghurst’s sentence is “I have forgotten the volume, but will always remember the sentence: ‘Its want of volitary powers led inevitably to its extirpation,’ the subject being, I believe, the Giant Moa.” Needless to say, I looked up the odd word (derived from Latin volito ‘to fly,’ though there is no Latin volitarius), and on not finding it I formulated a tentative hypothesis that he had made it up. But of course I didn’t stop there, and a Google Books search quickly turned up what must be his source, from Joel Samuel Polack‘s 1838 New Zealand; Being a Narrative of Travels and Adventures during a Residence in that Country between the Years 1831 and 1837 Vol. I, p. 346: “Many of these petrifactions had been the ossified parts of birds, that are at present (as far as is known) extinct in these islands, whose probable tameness, or want of volitary powers; caused them to be early extirpated by a people, driven by both hunger and superstition (either reason is quite sufficient in its way) to rid themselves of their presence.”

But what really delighted me was finding this further hit for the word in a review of Polack’s book:

We have already commended the vivacity and general truth of Mr. Polack’s volumes. His language is occasionally extremely ambitious, and he coins words with a boldness which will scare not a few of his readers. He talks of hederaceous, oerementous, and tophaceous soils; of volitary birds, subsultive fishes, — nay, he rivals the inimitable Mrs. Malaprop herself; and describes a native chief “who squinted with an obloquy of vision, little short of caricature.” Such faults, however, are easily pardoned in one who has a brisk flow of spirits.

The word is actually attested earlier (e.g., in The Works of Ezekiel Hopkins, Arranged and Revised, with a Life of the Author, by J. Pratt [1809], p. 468: “if a vain thought, that is such a fleeting and volitary thing, breathes a kind of contagion and taint upon the heart…”), but it’s something that anyone with a knowledge of Latin and a brisk flow of spirits might come up with, regardless of prior art.

I wrote about the idiotic prejudice against modal hopefully here, and now I get to link to Geoff Pullum’s ‘Hopefully’: Five Decades of Foolishness, in which he lays out the history of the prejudice. I had no idea it was invented by one man, Wilson Follett, who without any foundation in fact called the use “un-English and eccentric”; the interesting thing is that the peevers leaped hungrily on this new opportunity to lambast ordinary users of the language (E. B. White “altered his revision of William Strunk’s The Elements of Style by adding a paragraph of self-contradictory and absurdly overwritten rant about hopefully“). As Pullum says, the opposition peaked long ago, and frankly I thought it was moribund, but apparently not:

With truly extreme caution, the AP Style Guide nonetheless waited a decent further interval: Its editors let more than a quarter of a century go by before they finally risked accepting what had now been normal Standard English usage for a lifetime. On April 17, 2012, they announced correctly that the modal-adjunct use of hopefully not a grammatical error.

And people acted as if the sky was falling. “The barbarians have done it, finally infiltrated a remaining bastion of order in a linguistic wasteland,” wrote an overheated (and since then, overquoted) Monica Hesse in The Washington Post on April 18.

Well, no one ever went broke overestimating people’s need to feel superior to other people.

Update. The commenter edricson (at Taceo’s Journal, a Russian LJ blog) has found citations with modal hopefully from 1917 and 1918, striking antedates that hopefully the OED will take note of.

“Chrestomathy,” by Anatoly Belilovsky (from the speculative fiction magazine Ideomancer) takes a counterfactual—what if Pushkin had survived that duel?—and runs with it; it’s a clever collection of imaginary writings, prominently featuring “The Reluctant Revolutionist,” by Vladimir Nabokov (St Petersburg, 1937—the city name and the date combine to produce a frisson all by themselves). You needn’t accept the plausibility of his speculations (Dred Scott went the other way! there was no Civil War!) to enjoy the pastiches and the general fun. Of course, Belilovsky is not the first person to have had that idea, and if you visit the MetaFilter thread where I found the link, you will find a comment by me quoting a chunk of Nabokov’s greatest novel, The Gift, in which he takes the conceit to a much higher level.

Incidentally, while investigating something else entirely I happened on an 1828 issue of The Foreign Review, and Continental Miscellany that contained a thirty-page review essay, starting on p. 279, of “Opŭity Kratkoi Istorii Ruskoi Literaturŭi, &c. A Sketch of Russian Literature. By Nicholas Ivanovich Grech. 8vo. St. Petersburg, 1822.” The anonymous but well-informed reviewer [apparently William Henry Leeds—thanks, MMcM!] has taken the opportunity to provide a splendid tour d’horizon, starting out with a plea for the importance of the subject (“At the present day her literature is but imperfectly known to her immediate neighbours, and still less in this country; — yet a language spoken by nearly forty million of people, containing upwards of eighty thousand printed works, may reasonably be supposed to deserve some attention, and to possess some treasures for the reward of the diligent student”) and making a comparison with German (“Had any one, half a century ago, inquired whether the Germans possessed a literature, he would probably have been told, either that ‘High-Dutch’ was the most barbarous and dissonant of modern idioms, utterly incapable of eloquent or elegant expression ; or that their only writers were dull commentators, and insufferable pedants — for the very idea of German poetry was an absurdity”) before going on to discuss the early annalists, Prokopovich, Kantemir, Lomonosov, Sumarokov (“one among the few poets of Russia whose names were known to foreigners”), Kheraskov, Derzhavin (of whom “it is almost impossible to speak too highly”), Karamzin, Krylov, and Batiushkov. Then:

After the foregoing names, we may justly place the author of ‘Ruslan and Liudmila.’ Whilst yet a youth, Pushkin exhibited in that delightful poem, in six cantos, powers of description, and a rapidity and brilliancy of narrative, which have obtained for him the appellation of the Northern Ariosto. In this production he transports us into the fabulous era of Russian history, rife with prodigies and enchantments. [There follows a detailed description of the poem, with a number of translated excerpts.] Such is a brief outline of this romance, which is related with a grace and felicity that would do credit to the author of the ‘Bridal of Triermain.’ We have dwelt upon it at some length, as it is one of the most celebrated productions of the later literature of Russia. Pushkin’s ‘Prisoner of the Caucasus,’ although a sketch, exhibits perhaps still higher powers, and delineates with an energy, which frequently reminds us of Byron in his ‘Corsair,’ the wild scenery and the bandit manners of the robber-hordes of that district, relieved by softer pictures, full of pathos and passion. […] To this succeeded his ‘Fountain of Bakhchisarai,’ which, for eloquent poetry and depth of feeling, is even superior. Among the other points of this poet’s resemblance to Byron may be mentioned his facility of composition, and variety of subjects; his ‘Eugenius Onægin,’ which, like ‘Beppo,’ is designed as a satire on the follies of the fashionable world, is not only curious as a picture of the manners of the higher classes in Russia at the present day, but also attractive for the touches of loftier poetry, and the warmth of feeling which it occasionally displays. Like ‘Don Juan,’ this production has been published piecemeal, and is not, we believe yet completed, so that we cannot judge sufficiently of the plan to express any opinion of its merits.

The reviewer goes on to discuss “The Gypsies” and “Vadim: A Novgorodian Tale,” then applies a touch of the lash: “instead of sending forth so many slight compositions, we should be better pleased to find him applying his talent to some work of varied and sustained interest, worthy his powers, and redeeming the promise of excellence given in his Ruslan and Liudmila.” He discusses many other authors, ending by saying “for the future [Russian literature] is full of hope and promise.” I must say I’m astonished that such an affectionate and comprehensive survey was available to the English reading public in 1828; the reviewer certainly has no reason to feel abashed if he’s sitting on a cloud somewhere looking back at his work sub specie aeternitatis. And there you have Pushkin, with eight years still to live, in which he would apply his talent to works of varied and sustained interest, worthy his powers, and redeem the promise of excellence he had given. I’m glad I found it. (Heck, it was worth it just for “Eugenius Onægin”!)

I also found a 1916 Foreign Book List of the American Library Association, which lists with brief but informative descriptions a great many recent publications in Russian, then finishes up with an astonishing few paragraphs beginning “The names of several widely read writers of modern Russian fiction […] have been omitted as being unsuitable for public library use” and ending “They belongs [sic] to the decadent school, which will probably be short lived, and are entirely unsuitable to put into the hands of immigrant people.” You can read the whole thing here, and I’ll paste in a hotlinked image for those of you who can see it:

Thank goodness that kind of open snobbery and contempt is pretty much gone from the printed page, if not from the human heart.

A correspondent writes: “I’ve been looking into the word ‘gaffle.’ It’s used in the Bay Area to mean to steal, to scam, or to arrest, but it doesn’t look anything like most of our slang. With the aid of Google, I managed to find the world defined in a few dictionaries, but they all attributed it to the North-East…” He quotes a number of books saying things like “Unique to Maine” and “Used chiefly in northern New England”; I looked it up in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang and found two definitions: 1. “Esp. Maine. to seize; take hold of, esp. for oneself; (hence) to steal. Also gaffle onto” (first cite 1900), and 2. Und. to take into custody, apprehend” (from 1954). My correspondent says: “I’m really curious about the current distribution of this word (I can’t believe it’s known only in rural New England and urban California) and what definitions other people use and have heard,” so I pass along the query to you, Varied Reader. Do you know this word, and in what part of the country have you heard it?

Still reading Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child (see this post), I’ve just hit a passage with a word I cannot identify:

Just beyond the whited boundary lay the slipcatch, mown all around, but little used, tall grass growing up through its silvery slats. Peter liked the shape of it, like some archaic boat, and sometimes on evening walks by himself he lay down in it and blew cigarette-smoke at the midges overhead. … Paul had found a cricket ball in the long grass, and stepping back a few yards he threw it swerving through the dip of the slipcatch and up into the air, where no one of course was waiting to receive it—it bounced once and ran off quickly towards the old parked roller, leaving Paul looking both smug and abashed.

It would seem to be a cricket term, and the OED indeed has an entry for “slip-catch”—but there it clearly means a way of catching a ball rather than a piece of terrain (1903 S. L. Jessop in H. G. Hutchinson Cricket v. 119 “This range [of hits for practising catches] will include different kinds of chances, from ‘slip’ catches to catches in the long field”). The very few other Google Books hits seem to have entirely different meanings (“On Bob’s belt was a set of keys hanging from a belt loop by one of those slipcatch hooks with a ring on it”; “he drew back the slipcatch of the garden door and opened it”; “By means of a slipcatch it holds the line firmly”; etc.). Anybody know what it means here? Is it simply a slip on the author’s part?

I’m still reading Гадкие лебеди (The Ugly Swans; see here), and I’ve gotten to a great set-piece of grammar peevery. The depressed middle-aged protagonist, Victor, is talking to his young daughter Irma, whom he has just pulled off the rainy street and into his car (original below the cut):

“Irma,” he said wearily, “what were you doing there at that crossroad?”
“We were thinking fog,” answered Irma.
“What?”
“Thinking fog,” she repeated.
“About fog,” Victor corrected.
“Why ‘about’?” asked Irma.
“‘Think’ is an intransitive verb,” Victor explained. “It needs an object. Did you study intransitive verbs?”
“It depends,” said Irma. “Thinking fog is one thing, and thinking about fog is completely different… and why anyone would want to think about fog I don’t know.”
Victor pulled out a cigarette and lit up.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “‘Think fog’—people don’t say that, it’s illiterate. Some verbs are intransitive: think, run, walk. They always need a preposition. Walk along the street. Think about… something.”
“You can think nonsense,” said Golem.
“Well, that’s an exception,” said Victor, a little flustered.
“Walk quickly,” said Golem.
“‘Quickly’ isn’t a noun,” said Victor heatedly. “Don’t confuse the child, Golem.”
“Papa, could you please not smoke?” asked Irma.
[A white wall of fog appears as they approach their destination.]
“There’s fog for you,” said Victor. “You can think it. You can also smell, run, and walk.”
Irma wanted to say something, but Golem interrupted her.
“By the way,” he said, “the verb ‘think’ can be transitive in complex sentences as well. For example: ‘I think that…’ and so on.”
“That’s completely different,” objected Victor. He was fed up. He wanted very much to have a smoke and a drink.

[Read more…]

As longtime readers will know, I am extremely fond of the poetry of David Jones (see here, here, and here), so I was delighted to come across the latest post at Bebrowed’s Blog (“writing about writing (and reading)”), David Jones’ “The Fatigue”; the blogger feels as strongly about the oblivion into which Jones has fallen as I do (“I cannot understand why a poet of Jones’ talent and originality should be known more for his work as an artist than as one of the great modernist poets of the last century”), and I recommend his discussion of Jones and his work. I’ll just mention a word both he and I had to look up in the line “It’s whoresons like you as can’t keep those swivel eyes to front one short vigilia through as are diriment to our unific and expanding order”; according to the OED, diriment means “That renders absolutely void; nullifying; chiefly in diriment impediment, one that renders marriage null and void from the beginning,” and it’s from Latin dirimĕre ‘to separate, interrupt, frustrate’ (there is an even more obsolete and much rarer adjective dirempt “Distinct, divided, separate”). The blogger says he is “now of the view that we ought to make much more use of” diriment, and I can’t say I disagree. Caviar to the general, of course, but a splendid specimen of Latinity. “That admission, sir, is diriment to your entire line of reasoning!”

There’s an interesting post at Christopher Culver’s Linguistics Weblog [later replaced by Eurasiatica] about a typology developed by Leonard Talmy that opposes satellite-framed languages, in which “the direction of motion must be expressed by a particle or prefix and not the verb itself,” to verb-framed languages, in which “the direction of motion is encoded in the verb” and “manner of motion must be expressed by another component, i.e. an adverb or a gerundive.”

The difference between the two categories can be exemplified by an identical sentence in English and Spanish. English the bottle floated out has manner expressed through the verb root (float) and the direction expressed by an adverb (out). In Spanish, on the other hand, la botella salió flotando the bottle exit-3SG.PRET float-GERUND has the direction conflated into the verb root (salió) and manner must be expressed by the accompanying gerund (flotando).

As he says, “this kind of categorization of languages ought to be brought into everyday language teaching.”

I was taken aback to discover that the word changeling does not mean at all what I thought it did, at least according to the dictionaries. The American Heritage Dictionary can stand in for all the rest, since they all have these three senses in one or another order: “1. A child secretly exchanged for another. 2. Archaic A changeable, fickle person. 3. Obsolete A person of deficient intelligence.” To my wife and me, it means something entirely different: in the words of Wiktionary, “An organism which can change shape to mimic others” (and believe me, I was glad to find that there, proving my wife and I were not completely bonkers). Does anybody know the history of that sense (which presumably the OED will document when it gets around to the C’s)? And which senses are you familiar with?