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My wife and I are on the tenth of the Aubrey/Maturin novels, The Far Side of the World, and last night we hit a term unfamiliar to us: Jack Aubrey gives the instruction “Do not forget to gackle your cables, Mowett,” and mentions “gackling cables” several times in the following pages. Well, it’s no surprise to run across unfamiliar nautical terms in O’Brian, but this one wasn’t in Dean King’s useful but maddeningly incomplete A Sea of Words, nor—much more surprisingly—was it in Admiral Smyth’s usually reliable The Sailor’s Word-Book (see this LH post). It bothered me enough that I remembered to research it this morning, and my suspicion was confirmed: O’Brian made it up. [It turns out he didn’t actually make it up; see below.] It would have been impossible to verify this before the internet and Google Books, but now it’s easy as pie; it simply doesn’t exist outside his novels. Well, with one exception, as we learn here: “except for this from The Observant Voyage: A Parody, by Owen Brian Patrick : ) ‘Well Sir, to begin, Sir, as you know I did indeed gackle my cables as you ordered, Sir…'”

POB must have derived a good deal of private amusement from his little invention, and I share that amusement; I also hope this post will save other devotees of his wonderful novels from tearing their hair out over this un-look-up-able word.

Update. As mollymooly explains below, it’s actually a variant of an established word variously spelled keckle, cackle, kaicle, or kecle. That’ll teach me to make over-hasty assumptions!

The Economist has a Q&A with Geoffrey Nunberg in which the linguist discusses things he’s learned “by using big data techniques like Google’s Ngram viewer to analyse the word usage and track how language evolves”:

“Words don’t fly individually—they fly in flocks,” says Geoffrey Nunberg of the University of California Berkeley’s School of Information in an on-stage interview with Jeff Hammerbacher, a big-data engineer and the co-founder of Cloudera, during The Economist’s Ideas Economy: Information 2012 conference on June 5th in San Francisco (full video above).

As he explains it, society sees concepts emerge and dissipate over time, reflecting people’s views. So groups of words like “yuppie” and “sensitive type” and “sense of entitlement” all appear (and go out of favour) at roughly the same time, just as the dawn of the 19th century saw the birth of the “-isms” like liberalism and socialism and the rest.

For more on Ngrams, see this LH post.

I’m already halfway through Privy Seal – His Last Venture (see this post)—old Fordie does know how to keep you reading—and I’ve run across one of those etymologies that make me goggle in wonderment. (As always these days, I must add the proviso that I’ve probably seen it before and forgotten all about it.) One of the bombastic characters (there was a lot of bombast in the sixteenth century) says, “No pothicary had done it better nor Hercules that was a stall groom and cleaned stables in antick days.” Surely he means “antique,” thought I, and then it came to me: antic must be derived, somehow, from antique. I looked it up, and so it was; here’s the (still unrevised) OED explaining how:

Etymology: apparently < Italian antico, but used as equivalent to Italian grottesco, < grotta, ‘a cauerne or hole vnder grounde’ (Florio), originally applied to fantastic representations of human, animal, and floral forms, incongruously running into one another, found in exhuming some ancient remains (as the Baths of Titus) in Rome, whence extended to anything similarly incongruous or bizarre: see grotesque n. and adj. Compare Serlio Architettura (Venice 1551) iv. lf. 70 a: ‘seguitare le uestigie de gli antiqui Romani, li quali costumarono di far..diuerse bizarrie, che si dicono grottesche.’ Apparently, from this ascription of grotesque work to the ancients, it was in English at first called antike, anticke, the name grotesco, grotesque, not being adopted till a century later. Antic was thus not developed in English < antique adj. and n., but was a distinct use of the word from its first introduction. Yet in 17th cent. it was occas. written antique, a spelling proper to the other word.

Having finished Ford Madox Ford‘s The Fifth Queen; And How She Came to Court (see this recent post) with great pleasure, I’ve moved on to the sequel, Privy Seal (1907; Gutenberg text), and have run across a conundrum. One of his characters, Nicholas Udall (or “Magister Udal,” as Ford calls him), is in Paris learning about the latest developments from an innkeeper who gets all the gossip, and he thinks (in free indirect speech) the following: “Out of all this holus bolus of envoys, ambassadors, cooks and prisoners one thing appeared plain to view: that, for the first time, a solis ortus cardine, Cromwell had loosened his grip of some that he held.” The Latin phrase (and I must say, it’s odd that I’ve now titled three LH posts in a row with Latin phrases without premeditation) is the title of a poem (and hymn) and means ‘from the region of the rising of the sun,’ and I can’t imagine what it’s doing here, where we might expect something like Deo gratias (‘thank God!’) or haud credo (‘I can hardly believe it!’). Now, Fordie (as Pound called him: “Old Fordie saw more than we gave him credit for”) was surely enough of a Latinist to know what the phrase meant, and he’s putting it in the voice of one of the most learned Englishmen of his day (who is terribly offended that Thomas Cromwell has forced him to write “a play in the vulgar tongue. Me, a master of Latin, to write in English!”), but I can’t make out what the purport of the phrase is here, so I turn to the Varius Lector for ideas.

Allan Metcalf tells the sad tale of “Professor William Merrill, a distinguished scholar who is said to have read almost everything extant in classical Latin,” who made a schoolboy howler in an inscription for a bridge: “Hanc pontem dono dedit classis studentum quae in anno MDCCCCX foras exiit ne memoria sua apud posteros pereat” has the feminine hanc instead of the correct masculine hunc. “And once the arch was up, it didn’t take long for someone to notice. According to Professor Joseph Fontenrose in his memoir Classics at Berkeley: The First Century 1869-1970, ‘At once his error was pointed out, and someone said that this was the only feminine bridge in the world.'” But “Merrill defended the gender as written, having found feminine pons in some late ancient or early medieval writings (perhaps in Hisperica Famina, which has female bridges).” For the exciting conclusion to the story, visit Metcalf’s post!

I’d seen this poem years ago and forgotten about it, so I was glad when a reader (thanks, Griffin!) sent me the link: Forked Tongues (at Futility Closet):

From the New Englander and Yale Review, January 1843: “The great etymological affinity between Italian and Latin, is illustrated by the following lines addressed to Venice, by a citizen of that republic before its fall, which read equally in both languages”:

Te saluto, alma Dea, Dea generosa,
O gloria nostra, O Veneta Regina!
In procelloso turbine funesto
Tu regnasti secura; mille membra
Intrepida prostrasti in pugna acerba.
Per te miser non fui, per te non gemo;
Vivo in pace per te. Regna, O beata,
Regna in prospera sorte, in alta pompa,
In augusto splendore, in aurea sede.
Tu serena, tu placida, tu pia,
Tu benigna; tu salva, ama, conserva.

If you go to the link, you can also see a poem presented as being “at the same time Latin, Italian, and Portuguese”; I have no idea whether that’s accurate now, or was then, but it’s an enjoyable conceit.

A nice National Geographic piece by Russ Rymer that asks the question “What is lost when a language goes silent?” As Paul, who sent me the link (thanks, Paul!), said, there’s no breaking news here, but there are some interesting observations (along with the by now obligatory mention of Pirahã and its lack of numerical terms). Here’s a bit on the Seri language of northwestern Mexico:

What modern luxuries the Seris have adopted are imported without their Spanish names. Automobiles, for instance, have provoked a flurry of new words. A Seri car muffler is called ihíisaxim an hant yaait, or into which the breathing descends, and the Seri term for distributor cap associates it with an electric ray that swims in the Gulf of California and gives you a shock. Such words are like ocotillo canes stuck into the sand: The Cmiique Iitom lexicon is alive, and as it grows, it creates a living fence around the culture.

Sitting in the shade of an awning in front of his house, René Montaño told me stories of an ancient race of giants who could step over the sea from their home on Tiburon Island to the mainland in a single stride. He told me of hant iiha cöhacomxoj, those who have been told about Earth’s possessions, all ancient things. “To be told” entails an injunction: Pass it on. Thanks to that, we have all become inheritors of the knowledge enshrined within Cmiique Iitom. Folk sayings and often even single words encase centuries of close observation of species that visiting scientists have only begun to study in recent decades.

I know some people think it’s silly to try to preserve endangered languages, but I’m not one of them, and I always enjoy reading accounts like this.

XIX век has an occasional series of posts headed “Words new to me,” and I thought I’d borrow it because in my reading of Ford Madox Ford’s The Fifth Queen; And How She Came to Court (1906; the first of the Fifth Queen trilogy) I keep coming across such words. Here are the ones I’ve noted so far:

aumbry (OED s.v. ambry), “A repository or place for keeping things; a storehouse, a treasury; a cupboard (either in the recess of a wall or as a separate article of furniture); a safe; a locker, a press” (from Latin armārium)

balinger “A small and light sea-going vessel, apparently a kind of sloop, much used in the 15th and 16th centuries” (“Its nature was already forgotten in 1670, when Blount could only infer the meaning of the word from old statutes”; from Old French baleinier ‘whale-ship,’ from baleine ‘whale’; “afterwards employed generically”)

anan (pron. /əˈnæn/, with the stress on the second syllable), a variant of anon: “orig. in response to a call = ‘In one moment; presently; coming!’; hence a waiter’s response to express that he was paying attention, or awaiting commands; thence a general mode of expressing that the auditor was at the speaker’s service, or begged him to say on; and in later use, a mode of expressing that the auditor has failed to catch the speaker’s words or meaning, but is now alert and asks him to repeat; = I beg your pardon! What did you say? Sir? Eh?”

tulzie (OED s.v. tuilyie) “A quarrel, brawl, fight; a noisy contest, dispute” (from Old French tooil, touil, tueil, ‘contention,” and thus a doublet of toil)

An interesting phrase and institution: Augmentation Court, “a court established by 27 Hen. VIII, for determining suits and controversies in respect of monasteries and abbey-lands; so called because, by the suppression of monasteries, it largely augmented the revenues of the Crown.”

Addendum. Two more:

springald (OED s.v. springal(d, n.²) “A young man, a youth, a stripling”; “attrib. as adj. Youthful, adolescent.” “Of doubtful origin; perhaps a formation < spring v.¹ suggested by springal(d n.¹ In very common use from c1500 to 1650; in 19th cent. revived by Scott.”

craspisces This one is so obscure it’s not in the OED; I take this explanation from Annals and Magazine of Natural History (Taylor and Francis, Ltd., 1857):

“I met with,” says he, “an Inspeximus of a grant made by Henry the 3rd, wherein is granted to the Bishop of Exon and his successors for ever omnes decimas Craspesiorum within Cornwall and Devon, and is confirmed to them by Edward the 2nd. This without doubt was of value, otherwise the Bishopps would not have been solicitous to have had a confirmation of itt, But it is a question of what it is, the word not being to be found in any of the Glosaryes, And I have asked many persons whose business lyes among the old Records, who never remember that they mett with any such word, But I think that I have since mett with the meaning thereof in the Patent Rolls of R. 2, wherein are those words de piscibus regalibus vocatis whales sive Graspes, from which word I suppose like Lawyers they make Craspesiorum, But if it only extended to such great fishes, it will be of no great value. — The word Craspisces is used in Bracton, not only for Royall fishes, but for any big fish whatever, And I take the word in the Grant to be of the same signification. Oct. 10, 1700.”

From the Wise Guys, a song (in German; they’re from Cologne) about the glories of being good at Latin. The lyrics are below the image on the YouTube page; here’s the first version of the chorus:

Er war der Beste in Latein,
der Allerbeste in Latein
Wie er die Verben konjugierte
Substantive deklinierte –
das konnt’ nur er allein …

(Thanks, Nick!)

I’m still reading Russia’s Steppe Frontier (see yesterday’s post), and I’ve developed the habit of looking up the peoples he mentions in my well-thumbed copy of Wixman’s The Peoples of the USSR: An Ethnographic Handbook. So when he mentioned the Kumyks, who “were organized into the largest principality in the North Caucasus under their ruler, the shamkhal (shevkal),” who “had a residence in the town of Tarki,” I went to Wixman and found:

The Kumyk are Turkified (Kypchak) Caucasic peoples of northern Dagestan. They were formed by the assimilation of these Caucasians by the Kypchaks. This process of assimilation was strong well into the mid-20th cent., and many Dagestani peoples (Dargins and Avars in particular), Chechens, and Nogai have shifted over to the Kumyk language. The Kumyk language and culture became very influential among the eastern North Caucasians (Chechen, Avar, Andi-Dido people, Dargin, Kaitak, Kubachi, and Nogai) because the Kumyk controlled the lowland winter pasture areas used by these mountaineers and the main cities in which they found winter employment [Khasavyurt, Buinaksk, and Makhachkala (Temir Khan Shura)] were in Kumyk territory. Even though numerically small their cultural, linguistic, political, and economic influence was great. Kumyk also served as a lingua franca for all eastern North Caucasians.

Who knew? I just got finished learning about the similar status of Polish in early modern Eastern Europe in The Reconstruction of Nations; I guess every corner of the world has had its lingua franca. (Wixman goes on to describe the language, religion, and location of the Kumyks in similarly compendious manner; his book is really extraordinarily useful and has a nice section of maps that shows where all the various peoples live.)