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A Boston Globe article by Ben Zimmer traces the word “jazz” back to a Los Angeles Times story from 1912. It starts:

One hundred years ago, a hard-throwing but erratic minor league pitcher named Ben Henderson was getting ready for his opening day start for the Portland Beavers against the Los Angeles Angels. Henderson had pitched well for the Beavers the previous year, but he began the 1912 season with a well-earned reputation as an unreliable drunk.
Henderson gave a Los Angeles Times reporter a preview of what he had planned for the game. “I got a new curve this year,” he explained, “and I’m goin’ to pitch one or two of them tomorrow. I call it the Jazz ball because it wobbles and you simply can’t do anything with it.” The headline for the item, from April 2, 1912, was simply “Ben’s Jazz Curve.”

Ben goes on to describe how the term spread after that. A nice read in this spring training month.

Several people have sent me links to Tom Bartlett’s Chronicle Review piece on Daniel Everett’s attempt to demolish Noam Chomsky’s hegemonic linguistic theory and the messy academic battle that has ensued. I wrote about Everett here, and anyone who’s been reading LH for a while will know that I root for anyone going up against Chomsky and his minions, but I must confess that my acquaintance with the current state of linguistics is so scanty that I do not have an informed opinion on the details of the argument. I have seen it said that Everett is attacking a long-abandoned form of the theory, that nobody any longer believes what Chomsky used to say about recursion, etc. But I will quote a section that illustrates why I despise what Chomsky has done to a once collegial field:

Critics haven’t just accused Everett of inaccurate analysis. He’s the sole authority on a language that he says changes everything. If he wanted to, they suggest, he could lie about his findings without getting caught. Some were willing to declare him essentially a fraud. That’s what one of the authors of the 2009 paper, Andrew Nevins, now at University College London, seems to believe. When I requested an interview with Nevins, his reply read, “I may be being glib, but it seems you’ve already analyzed this kind of case!” Below his message was a link to an article I had written about a Dutch social psychologist who had admitted to fabricating results, including creating data from studies that were never conducted. In another e-mail, after declining to expand on his apparent accusation, Nevins wrote that the “world does not need another article about Dan Everett.”

In 2007, Everett heard reports of a letter signed by Cilene Rodrigues, who is Brazilian, and who co-wrote the paper with Pesetsky and Nevins, that accuses him of racism. According to Everett, he got a call from a source informing him that Rodrigues, an honorary research fellow at University College London, had sent a letter to the organization in Brazil that grants permission for researchers to visit indigenous groups like the Pirahã. He then discovered that the organization, called FUNAI, the National Indian Foundation, would no longer grant him permission to visit the Pirahã, whom he had known for most of his adult life and who remain the focus of his research.

He still hasn’t been able to return.

Chomsky has remained magisterially in the background and refused to comment, but his minions are behaving in a way more appropriate to a down-and-dirty political campaign than to an academic disagreement. In a sense, the facts of the language are irrelevant; the way the dispute is carried on speaks volumes.

Update. See now Geoff Pullum’s excellent summary of the case.

I read and enjoyed Mrs Dalloway many years ago, and started To the Lighthouse, but I couldn’t get anywhere with it—I was too much in thrall to plot, to nineteenth-century narrative, the primitive satisfactions of the story. Here was a boy resenting his father for spoiling his excitement over going to the lighthouse the next day, and his mother trying to comfort him, and a lot of (to me tedious) parsing of how one character felt about another, and I gave up on it. Now (having grown up and read Proust) I’ve finally gotten back to it and finished it, and am very glad I did; it’s the modernist classic it’s cracked up to be, full of formal innovation and brilliant language and an acute vision of how people see the world and each other. I’ll be reading it again. I can’t help but wonder what Nabokov would have said about it; as far as I know he only read Orlando (not one of my favorites), and he called that a “first-class example of poshlost’.” I’d like to think he would have seen what a fine novel it is—after all, he shared Woolf’s hatred of novels that preach and of tyrants and dictators (and of the modernist writers who fell for them and their lurid isms), and like her he despised patriotism in the “my country right or wrong” sense but loved the landscape and customs of his native land—but I fear he, a patriarch himself, would have felt too threatened by her pitiless dissection of the egotism and unwitting repressiveness of the traditional patriarch, and her linkage of that figure with violence and war.

I’m making it sound like a tract, but it’s all done with imagery, with exactly the kind of close vision and use of verbal repetition that Nabokov himself deployed so well. Take one small example, the use of “purple.” Early on in the book, Mrs. Ramsay (we never learn her given name) is reading “The Fisherman and His Wife” to her son (the Russian version is Pushkin’s Сказка о рыбаке и рыбке), a fable of the insatiability of human greed in which the wife keeps sending the fisherman back to ask the flounder (Grass’s Butt) for more and more and every time he goes back the sea is less placid: “And when he came to the sea the water was quite purple and dark blue, and grey and thick, and no longer so green and yellow…” A few pages later, Lily Briscoe (the central character of the novel) is trying to paint the house from outside and another character asks “What did she wish to indicate by the triangular purple shape, ‘just there’?” “It was Mrs. Ramsay reading to James, she said. She knew his objection—that no one could tell it for a human shape. But she had made no attempt at likeness, she said.” Then, much later, in the amazing central section of the novel, “Time Passes,” in which World War I is presented from the vantage point of the abandoned summer house on Skye (“But slumber and sleep though it might there came later in the summer ominous sounds like the measured blows of hammers dulled on felt, which, with their repeated shocks still further loosened the shawl and cracked the teacups…”), there is a paragraph starting “At that season those who had gone down to pace the beach and ask of the sea and sky what message they reported or what vision they affirmed…” that includes this sentence: “There was the silent apparition of an ashen-coloured ship for instance, come, gone; there was a purplish stain upon the bland surface of the sea as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath.” And in the final section, James, who had been a child read to by his mother at the start and is now a resentful teenager out on a boat with his domineering father, is trying to analyze his feelings for the man he both hates and identifies with:

[Read more…]

John Cowan sent me a link to the Sound Change Applier at zompist.com (which, I see, has a snazzy new front page since last time I visited; if you’re not familiar with Mark Rosenfelder’s multifarious site, you should spend some time there—scroll down for the amazing variety of pages on languages, science, comics, and goodness knows what all). I’m swamped with work and don’t have time to play with it right now, but as John says, it’s “really clever: type in some definitions of character classes, some context-sensitive rules, and a lexicon, and see what happens to the lexicon when the rules are applied.” (If you click the Apply button without changing the sound change rules, it changes the Latin words to Portuguese.)

More snippets from all over:

1) Ned Beauman posts about an amusing former usage exemplified by “1848 J. R. Bartlett Dict. Americanisms (at cited word), She could eat fifty people in her house, but could not sleep half the number.” He gives a number of other citations (e.g., “[Mr. Dickens] has declined the invitation of the Philadelphians to eat him”), “of which every single example made me laugh.” (Thanks, N.!)

2) The Genizah fragments in Oxford’s Bodleian Library are now online. (Thanks, Paul!)

3) How should Shakespeare really sound?: “The British Library have released the first audio guide to how Shakespeare’s plays would have sounded in the original pronunciation.” (You be the judge of how successful it sounds.)

Normally, my attitude toward dictionaries is the more the merrier; each does certain things better than others, and it’s good to be able to compare and contrast. I haven’t had much contact with Webster’s New World Dictionary since I was a kid; I remember enjoying its etymologies and classy-looking typeface back in those days, but since I have been professionally involved with words and language I have relied upon Merriam-Webster, Oxford, and American Heritage and rarely given a thought to the New World, occasionally riffling through it with nostalgic curiosity when I ran across it somewhere. If you’d asked me who used it, I’d have been at a loss. Now, thanks to Allan Metcalf’s Lingua Franca post, I know: journalists. And the reason? Idiotic, sheeplike herd behavior triggered by ill-informed, bilious attacks on one of the great achievements of American lexicography:

Back in the 1960s, Webster’s New World was the David that slew the Goliath of dictionaries, Webster’s New International Dictionary, Unabridged. That one was published by Merriam-Webster, the nation’s most distinguished maker of dictionaries and direct heir of Noah Webster, America’s foremost lexicographer. [I omit the description of the bilious attacks, which you can read about in Metcalf’s piece or described at greater length by Geoff Nunberg here; you can read about the dictionary itself in this LH post.]
Careful reviewers noticed that the Second hadn’t been entirely prescriptive, either, and in fact contained definitions excoriated for permissiveness in the Third. But the mood was set, and to admit reliance on the Third was like confessing to possession of pornography. So what was a journalist to do? There had been a few events and inventions since the Second Unabridged of 1934, so an up-to-date dictionary was needed. But not a Merriam-Webster!
Fortunately, there was a company in Cleveland, Webster’s New World, that had no connection with Merriam-Webster and that published a nice, up-to-date college edition. (The name Webster isn’t trademarked and can be used by any dictionary.) So the non-Merriam became the book of choice.
Over the decades, the shock value of Webster’s Third has dissipated, but it never regained its pre-eminence. It has a place in newsrooms, but just second place.

First off, let me point out the parochialism of “slew the Goliath of dictionaries,” as if newspaper use were all that mattered; I repeat that in a long editorial career I have never seen a copy of Webster’s New World in an office. It might as well not have existed. And now, apparently, it is ceasing to exist; the start of Metcalf’s piece explains that despite the obfuscations of its publisher it appears to be moribund. As I said at the beginning of this post, ordinarily I would regret that, but now that I know how and why it came to be a journalistic standby, my reaction is: good, now let journalists start living in the real world.

1) The first episode of “That Other Word,” a collaborative podcast between the Center for Writers and Translators and the Center for the Art of Translation, which “offers discussions on classic and contemporary literature in translation, along with engaging interviews with writers, translators, and publishers”:

In this first episode, Daniel Medin and Scott Esposito chat about the accidental poetry and reasonable plausibility of César Aira’s Varamo, the miraculous strangeness of László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango, and the hopping city at the heart of Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories.

2) Amateur Archeologists Invited to Decipher Papyri: “Working in collaboration with Oxford University papyrologists and Egypt Exploration Society, Lintott’s team launched the Ancient Lives website, where armchair archaeologists can help with cataloguing and translating the ancient manuscripts.” N.b.: Knowledge of Greek not a prerequisite.

3) No-sword presents We’ll Shield: Taiko Pharmaceutical has a line of products with a brand name written “WE’LL SHIELD” in Roman characters and ウィルシールド wirushīrudo, a portmanteau word combining “English ‘We’ll’, rendered in katakana as ウィル, wiru, … the Japanese word for “virus”, ウイルス, uirusu, [and] English ‘shield’, rendered in katakana as シールド, shīrudo.” Clever!

I’m reading Christopher M. Clark’s Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (having enjoyed the excerpts Joel’s been publishing at Far Outliers, I went to Amazon and bought the surprisingly cheap Kindle edition with a single click, a perilously simple procedure, and started reading it a minute later), and I’ve just gotten to the description of Frederick the Great at the start of chapter 7. Here’s what Clark has to say about old Fritz’s relation to his native tongue:

In one of the eighteenth century’s funniest effusions of literary bile, Frederick, a grumpy old man of sixty-eight, denounced the German language as a ‘semi-barbarian’ idiom in which it was ‘physically impossible’, even for an author of genius, to achieve superior aesthetic effects. German writers, the king wrote, ‘take pleasure in a diffuse style, they pile parenthesis upon parenthesis, and often you don’t find until you reach the end of the page the verb on which the meaning of the entire sentence depends.’

Google Books provides the original:

Geoff Nunberg has a post at the Log about Simon Winchester’s review of Jonathon Green’s Dictionary of Slang (reviewed here at LH) for the New York Review of Books. I had read the review and disliked it, as I dislike everything Winchester does (see this 2004 jeremiad), and one of the reasons I disliked it was what Geoff (who otherwise finds Winchester “a personable and engaging story-teller”) focused on:

The review took an unfortunate turn, though, when Winchester brought in Jonathan Lighter’s still uncompleted Historical Dictionary of American Slang and compared it invidiously, and quite unfairly, to Green’s work. It’s another in a long line of ill-conceived evaluations of dictionaries by writers who mistake their literacy and passion for the language for lexicographical expertise—think of Dwight Macdonald on Webster’s Third, for example.

Geoff wrote a letter to the NYRB complaining about it, which he provides in his post (the magazine probably won’t run it, since it’s long and specialized), and it’s well worth reading; what leads me to post about it here, though, is that Green responded with a long and amazingly civil comment in the thread—Nunberg says it’s “almost certainly more gracious than mine would have been in the circumstances.” As I say in the thread, “the back-and-forth between Green and Nunberg above is one of the most polite and informative such exchanges I’ve ever seen; kudos to both.”

Simin Daneshvar has died at the age of ninety. Stephen Kinzer calls her “the most potent surviving symbol of the vibrancy of 20th-century literature in Iran” in his NY Times obit:

Iran’s turbulent modern history, defined above all by foreign exploitation, framed Ms. Daneshvar’s life. During World War II she witnessed the Allied occupation of her country. It provided the backdrop for her masterpiece, the sprawling family saga “Savushun,” published in 1969. …
After obtaining her doctorate with a dissertation titled “Beauty as Treated in Persian Literature,” she married the leftist writer and social critic Jalal Al-e Ahmad. … In the 1950s and ’60s, Ms. Daneshvar became known as a translator of Chekhov, Shaw, Hawthorne, Schnitzler, Saroyan and other writers. She also published short stories, including several that focused on the oppression of Iranian women. Until the publication of “Savushun” in 1969, however, she was generally assumed to be living under her husband’s literary shadow. No one ever thought of her that way again.

I’m embarrassed to say that her name meant nothing to me when I saw the obituary, even though I was very familiar with that of her husband, Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, and further embarrassed that I eventually realized I actually owned a copy of her magnum opus (under the title A Persian Requiem), though of course I hadn’t gotten around to reading it. I intend to remedy the omission eventually. (Thanks, Eric!)