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I’ve never watched Doctor Who, though it seems like something I would have enjoyed had I grown up with it; this comment by Ray Girvan (on Mark Liberman’s Log post about the show) makes me feel that even more strongly:

I particularly liked the running joke in The Fires of Pompeii, where the English of the Doctor and Donna (Catherine Tate) was changed to Latin via the TARDIS’s translator, but if they actually spoke Latin, the Romans perceived it as Welsh:
Doctor: “Ah, well. Caveat emptor.”
CAECILIUS: “Oh, you’re Celtic. (Welsh accent) There’s lovely.”
Doctor: “Ipso facto.”
Caecilis: (doubtfully) “Look you.”
Doctor: (as guards draw swords): “Oh, morituri te salutant.”
Dextrus: “Celtic prayers won’t help you now.”

I’ve always found it interesting that there are two substantially different interpretations of the adjective moot, most commonly found in the phrase “a moot point.” One takes it as meaning ‘debatable, arguable,’ and the other ‘academic, not worth taking seriously.’ The AHD has a good summary of the history in its usage note:

The adjective moot is originally a legal term going back to the 1500s. It derives from the noun moot in its sense of a hypothetical case argued as an exercise by law students. The noun moot in turn goes back to an Old English word meaning “a meeting, especially one convened for legislative or judicial purposes.” Consequently, a moot question is one that is arguable or open to debate. But in the mid-1800s, people also began to look at the hypothetical side of moot as its essential meaning, and they started to use the word to mean “of no significance or relevance.” Thus, a moot point, however debatable, is one that has no practical value. A number of critics have objected to this usage, but in our 2008 survey 83 percent of the Usage Panel accepted it in the sentence The nominee himself chastised the White House for failing to do more to support him, but his concerns became moot when a number of Republicans announced that they, too, would oppose the nomination. This represents a significant increase over the 59 percent that accepted the same sentence in 1988. Writers who use this word should be sure that the context makes clear which sense of moot is meant. It is often easier to use another word, such as debatable or irrelevant.

Gabe Doyle at Motivated Grammar has a new post on the topic in which he presents it as a US/UK difference, saying “It seems that moot means something different depending on which side of the Atlantic it’s being used on” and calling the sense “a point that was just generally open for debate, whether or not it had practical consequences” the “British usage.” But in the comments, Kemp says “I’m British, and I’ve never heard of what you refer to as the British meaning of the word. Maybe it’s our exposure to American TV and movies, but I’ve always known moot to refer to a point that, debatable or not, has no real impact on anything,” and dw concurs: “I spent the first 20+ years of my life in England, and, like Kemp, I am only familiar with the ‘American’ meaning of the word.” Then Flesh-eating Dragon weighs in with a complaint from Down Under: “For some reason Australian dictionaries generally record only the ‘debatable’ sense (at least in pocket editions) which is odd because in my experience that sense is not used here — we only use the ‘academic’ sense.” All this roused my curiosity, so I turn the floor over to the Varied Reader: are you familiar with both senses, and which do you use yourself? Obviously it would be useful to add which variety of our far-flung common language you speak.

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Another word whose etymology I had always vaguely wondered about but never investigated beyond the immediate source is meltemi, borrowed from Modern Greek and meaning ‘etesian (annual) summer wind in the Mediterranean’ (or “Etesian,” as Merriam-Webster would have it for some unknowable reason—it’s not from a proper noun but from an ordinary Greek adjective, etesios ‘annual’). I looked it up in the OED and found an interesting speculation:

Etymology: < modern Greek μελτέμι Etesian wind and the related Turkish meltem offshore breeze, of uncertain origin. Compare Italian meltem (19th cent.).
A possible etymon for both the Greek and the Turkish words (which are probably loanwords) is Italian maltempo bad weather.

I’d be interested to know why they think maltempo is a more plausible etymon than it looks at first glance, but an interesting speculation is better than a void.

Once again, Studiolum at Poemas del río Wang has a post I can’t resist calling attention to: My homeland, about a song that served as a tearjerker for Russians both outside and inside their homeland:

The Leshchenko Cabaret, dubbed even in Paris as “the Maxim’s of the East”, was one of the most fashionable places of entertainment in the Bucharest of the thirties. In addition to the metropolitan elite and the foreign aristocrats, its regulars also included those Russian emigrants, aristocrats, White officers and middle-class people, who during the war and the civil war managed to get through to Bessarabia, annexed to Romania. For them was written by the leader of Leshchenko’s orchestra, the Izmail-born George Ipsilanti, the song Тоска по родине, “Homesickness”, which regularly featured in Leshchenko’s repertoire. A recording, however, was made only in the 1940s with Ipsilanti’s wife, the Chisinău/Kishinev-born Anna Bayanova. The song, which was banned in the Soviet Union, spread across the country via the smuggled copies of this disc, and Homesickness, written by Bessarabian Romanian singers and a Greek composer, became a kind of an unofficial Russian anthem.

…The native land, however, waited in vain. The emigrants did not see it any more. On the contrary, the Soviet Union marched into Bucharest. Leshchenko was arrested by the Romanian secret police and he died in the prison of Târgu Ocna in 1954. Bayanova was imprisoned during the war by the Romanian police for singing in Russian. After her release she was condemned to silence, and only in the 1960s she was allowed to leave for the Soviet Union. Ipsilanti managed in time to flee to America, and he died in Los Angeles in 1994. And the hopeful and nostalgic hymn of the emigrants to their homeland became a labor camp song expressing the reality of the same homeland with the title Не печалься, любимая, “Don’t worry, my beloved”, as we can hear in Dmitry Astrakhan’s film Всё будет хорошо, “Everything will be all right” (1995).

Go to río Wang for texts, musical clips, and evocative pictures; the excerpt from the Astrakhan film choked me up, and it’s not even my homeland.

On a different plane, and nothing to do with río Wang: Russia Football Chants and Songs.

The indefatigable Paul has sent me a thread from Project Wombat (mentioned in this LH post) about a vulgar expression that I had somehow managed to miss until now. It started with this posting:

I used to work for a harpsichord builder who, whenever something went absolutely perfectly, would say, “like shit through a tin horn.” The only other time I have encountered this expression was in a novel by William Boyd. Both these guys have strong British connections, so I suspect the expression is British. I have my own fantasies about the meaning, mostly having to do with the plumbing arrangements on early railway cars: I can remember how the metal bowl of the toilet opened to flush right onto the track, making a pretty exact enactment of the expression. Does anybody have any ideas about the origin of this very evocative saying?

There are some fairly irrelevant responses, after which John Cowan writes:

Dorothy Parker once tried to use this expression in the form “like shot through a goose” (birdshot, I suppose), but Thurber doesn’t say (in _The Years With Ross_) whether it got printed or not.
In any case, George S. Patton’s famously profane Speech to the Third Army contained both expressions: “We are going to go through [the enemy] like crap through a goose; like shit through a tin horn!” I can hardly think of anyone less likely to be influenced by British English than Patton.
The phrase is still current, too: see http://shitthroughatinhorn.com , an epitome of all craptastic websites.

Message 14 from Garson O’Toole is very helpful indeed:

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Jerome Herrera sent me a link to his blog, Bien Chabacano, about what Wikipedia calls the Chavacano language, and I thought I’d pass it along; here’s his About statement:

Said in Spanish, bien Chabacano means very rude and of bad taste. However in the Chabacano de Zamboanga, it simply means very Chabacano. In this context, bien Chabacano is something that you would call a person who speaks Chabacano very fluently and uses deep Chabacano words. I am by no means bien Chabacano, but I certainly am bien orgulloso of the Chabacano de Zamboanga.
I started to take interest in my mother tongue when I began to learn Spanish and I discovered the many glaring similarities between the two languages. This led to a journey of discoveries, a journey filled with awe as I learned how different languages, time, and people shaped the modern Chabacano de Zamboanga language. I hope that you will join me in this rediscovery of the past as we look forward to a better future.

There’s a lot of interesting material about language and culture; here, for example, is “Chabacano Food and Kitchen Vocabulary” from January. (Warning: may make you hungry.)

A correspondent (thanks, Paul!) sent me a link to the online Chin English Dictionary created by David Van Bik; I thought it was pretty neat, but it bothered me that when I entered “chin” I only got one translation, khabe, presumably the anatomical term. “What’s the word for Chin in Chin?” I wondered, and naturally went straight to Wikipedia, where entering “Chin languages” got me redirected to Kukish languages, which was the first startlement. The introductory paragraph made me blink:

The Kukish languages, also known as Kuki-Chin (Kuki/Chin) and Mizo–Kuki/Chin, are a family of fifty Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in eastern India and Burma. Most speakers of these languages are known as Kukī in Assamese and as Chin in Burmese; some are also identified as Naga, though the Mizo (Lushai) are also ethnically distinct.

There follows a list of dozens of Karbi and Kukish languages, none of which I’d ever heard of. In hopes of elucidation I turned to Andrew Dalby’s wonderful Dictionary of Languages: The Definitive Reference to More than 400 Languages, where the entry on “Kuki-Chin and Naga languages” started:

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Stan Carey has a nice post on standard English and “bad grammar,” in which he explains that “The particular English dialect that began to be adopted as standard more than half a millennium ago came from the UK, mostly the region encompassing London, Oxford, and Cambridge” (blame William Caxton, who used the speech of the London area “as the basis for his translations and spelling”), discusses the rise of prescriptivism, and has nice quotes from Joseph M. Williams (“we ought to rethink the widely shared notion that every feature of standard English has some kind of self-evident, naturally determined ‘logic’ that makes it intrinsically superior to its corresponding form in nonstandard English…. Until we recognize the arbitrary nature of our judgments, too many of us will take ‘bad’ grammar as evidence of laziness, carelessness, or a low IQ. That belief is not just wrong. It is socially destructive”) and Geoff Pullum. And in the comment thread, John Cowan links to Views of Standard English, a useful collection of links on the topic.

Scott Laming’s AbeBooks page Jokes, Hoaxes & Other Literary Frauds has a brief description of a few famous literary hoaxes (Thomas Chatterton, Howard Hughes’s “autobiography,” Adolf Hitler’s “diaries”) and a useful collection of examples with pictures (and ABE links); the one that most intrigued me was Feodor Vladimir Larrovitch: An Appreciation of His Life and Works, “A book written about an author who did not exist designed to teach a know-it-all a lesson”; a little googling got me to the relevant passage (starting on page 23) in Books in Black Or Red, by Edmund Lester Pearson (Ayer, 1923):

The authors and scholars who joined in celebrating the Larrovitch Centenary were so numerous that the resulting volume is probably unique. One or two originated the hoax, but a large group carried it on and perfected it. Designed at the beginning, I think I have heard, to rebuke the painful omniscience of one enthusiast in Russian literature, this little tribute is called “Feodor Vladimir Larrovitch; an Appreciation of his Life and Works.” The editors are William George Jordan and Richardson Wright; it was published by the Authors Club of New York in 1918. To this volume Clinton Scollard contributed a sonnet, and there are scholarly essays and personalia about the great Russian by Professor Franklin Giddings and Dr. Titus Munson Coan. The bibliographies add to the charm of the book, but perhaps the most touching thing of all is the picture of “a pressed flower” from the grave of Larrovitch at Yalta, which is preserved and framed on the walls of the Authors Club. As with “Spectra,” the hoax was inspired by a pose, a form of literary affectation; it cleverly satirizes the tendency in England and America to accept any Russian writer at whatever estimate some chortling enthusiast likes to put upon him. Max Beerbohm’s “Kolniyatsch,” in his book “And Even Now,” is an earlier essay upon the theme. Kolniyatsch, the last of a long line of rag-pickers, acquired a passionate alcoholism at the age of nine, murdered his grandmother when he was eighteen, and spent the rest of his life in an asylum, writing poems and plays. His friends and relatives, as well as the officials, adopting the world’s timid philosophy, called him insane, but Max Beerbohm, who was able to read his works in the original Gibrisch, would make no such clumsy classification.

I love the phrase “acquired a passionate alcoholism.” Thanks, Paul!

Last October I posted about the impending completion of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE); the completion has now taken place, and to celebrate, the University of Wisconsin–Madison has created a fine website, where you can see words from your state, hear informants read material for the survey, and take a quiz, among other things. And as much as I revile Simon Winchester, I have to admit that his essay on DARE (from Lapham’s Quarterly—see this LH post) makes an enjoyable read despite the absurd flourishes of his prose:

Three improbably large numbers are critical to any appreciation of the linguistic component of the study, and what it eventually accomplished: 1,002, 2,777, and 1,847. The Madison volunteers fanned out to 1,002 carefully chosen communities (selected for being generally stable, old, and variegated) across the country. There they interviewed, and at length, 2,777 people—most of them middle-aged or older, assumed thereby to have a greater familiarity with the lexical history of their communities, and the greater proportion of them (chosen for the same reason) long-term residents. And—though one may gasp at the impertinence, the cheek, the brass neck, and the chutzpah of it all—the eighty youngsters who made the study presented each of these 2,777 old-timers in the 1,002 chosen communities with a list of no fewer than 1,847 questions. Three hundred twenty-five pages worth of interrogation—no census taker or pollster or focus-group leader of today could hardly hold a candle to the soldiers in Fred Cassidy’s dictionary army.

With 1,847 questions, each interview would take as much as a week to complete—a testament, perhaps, to the lazier tempo of the times, or else to the pertinacity of those whom Fred Cassidy selected to do his lexicographic heavy lifting.[…]

Winchester concludes with the melancholy reflection that “the five volumes of DARE seem more like tombstones, works of great scholarship and high purpose, but at the same time a record of a language that is slowly being preserved in amber, while dying out from under-use and fading away”; he compares it to University of Chicago’s Assyrian Dictionary, finished just last year. (Thanks, Henry!)