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I recently finished Soviet Freedom (Picador, 1988), Anthony Barnett’s account of his trip to the Soviet Union in 1987, and was very impressed by his insight into the changing situation and the wide range of interesting people he talked to; I’d recommend it to anyone interested in what that time and place were like. Here I want to pass on an extended quote from Alexander Yakovlev that expresses very well my own sense of the relation between politics and psychology:

Democratization is needed first and foremost, second and third too.[…] We have not got used to really arguing, and what is more, arguing honourably, listening to one another’s opinions. Yet this is essential, since collective wisdom is always stronger than the view of one person. For this reason, the issue does not consist of the perfection of the system of political institutions alone; what is at issue is that we should shape human thinking itself, that we should get people used to a democratic outlook, to a kind of democratic way of thinking.

I mentioned a few days ago here that we have overthrown the tsars, but we have not yet overthrown the petty monarchs hidden within ourselves. Within all of us there sits some kind of khan, tsar, I might say God almighty, in other words a sort of power-hungry being. When this starts to take hold of one, there straight away appears this inner-being, who starts to give out orders, to administrate. It starts to walk not upon our sinful soil but hovers somewhere above it. Such a person already thinks he is more clever, more learned; he starts to make pronouncements and everyone is obliged to attend in awe to his wise thoughts.

Therefore, we have got to get used to spiritual, human equality; we have to understand that a person, in the last resort, is only one among millions. If he attains greater or smaller office, then this only means that people trust him and have honoured him with their trust. To a certain extent, perhaps, it shows that they recognize one of his abilities or talents, but it in no way authorizes him to detach himself from the millions of human beings, to put himself above them.

The passage is from an interview with Andras Sugar for the Hungarian television program Face to Face, broadcast July 30, 1987; I’d love to have it in Russian, but Google hasn’t turned it up for me.

Update. No original has turned up, but Sashura has provided the next best thing, a translation back into Russian, in this post (which also links to a recent hour-long talk by Yakovlev at Berkeley).

My wife and I are still reading Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series (we’re most of the way through the fourth novel, The Mauritius Command), and naturally we hear a fair amount about grog. I’ve seen the etymology of the word before but had forgotten it, and since it’s surprising and Asya Pereltsvaig tells it well at Languages of the World, I’ll quote her post for the edification and delectation of all and sundry:

Take the word groggy: today it describes someone who’s shaky, dizzy or sluggish, as from a blow or from the lack of sleep, as well as someone experiencing similar symptoms due to being drunk (that’s the earlier meaning, as we shall see immediately below). But the history of this word goes back to a rather unexpected place: the French expression gros grain meaning ‘coarse grain’. It is from this expression that the name of the coarse fabric grogram derives. Still, how did we get from a coarse fabric to being dizzy and sluggish? The crucial figure in this tortuous path is Admiral Edward Vernon of the British Navy, known to sailors as “Old Grog”, for he often wore a coat made of grogram (note that the shortening of grogram to Grog follows the same path of clipping that leaves behind a non-morpheme, as in the case of blog from weblog).
It was Admiral Vernon who in 1740 ordered water to be added to the ration of rum served to the sailors under his command; to cut down on the water’s foulness, lemon or lime juice was also added, which led to lowering the incidence of scurvy, even though the connection was not yet understood at the time. The rest of the Royal Navy rapidly followed Vernon’s lead, and eventually the Admiral’s nickname grog became associated with the drink itself, rum diluted with water. A sailor drunk on grog was called groggy, and eventually the meaning of this word was extended from a more specific to a more general one to include a hazy and dizzy state from any cause.

(The remainder of Asya’s post has interesting stuff about cheese, foie gras, and other things and is well worth reading.)

AJP sent me a link to this Guardian story by Alan Rusbridger and said he had been unfamiliar with the phrase that leaps out at the reader from the first sentence: “The Rt Rev Richard John Carew Chartres exuded an aura of benign ecclesiastical calm having performed the most dramatic reverse ferret in modern church history.” He pointed me to this Wikipedia article for an explanation; since it’s short and pungently written (and since I’m afraid some power-crazed administrator will edit it into blandness or simply delete it for “non-notability”), I’ll just quote the whole thing:

Reverse ferret is a phrase used predominantly within the British media to describe a sudden volte-face in an organisation’s editorial line on a certain issue. Generally, this will involve no acknowledgement of the previous position.
The term originates from Kelvin MacKenzie’s time at the The Sun. His preferred description of the role of journalists when it came to public figures was to “stick a ferret up their trousers”. This meant making their lives uncomfortable, and was based on the northern sport of ferret legging (where contestants compete to show who can endure a live ferret within their sealed trousers the longest). However, when it became clear that the tide of public opinion had turned against the paper’s line, MacKenzie would burst from his office shouting “Reverse Ferret!”

There’s so much concentrated goodness there I couldn’t withhold it from my loyal readers. (Naturally, the assertions are properly footnoted in the original article, to which I refer interested parties for references should they wish them.)

Visiting Lameen’s blog, I found a post mentioning that “Sorosoro have just put up a webpage by me, giving a general picture of the language of Tabelbala: Korandje.” Naturally, I followed the link, and found an interesting brief description of the Northern Songhay language he’s been working on. But what was Sorosoro? I went to their main page, which was intriguing; it has a fancy and colorful layout with links to blogs, videos, and news stories, and the subtitle “So the languages of the world may live on!” Their About page says:

Nowadays, the Araki language is only spoken by eight speakers in Vanuatu, a small state in the Pacific where we can find the biggest linguistic density in the world, about a hundred languages for 200 000 inhabitants.
In Araki, Sorosoro means “breath, speech, language”, and we have chosen this very symbolic word as the name for our safeguard program of threatened languages.
For the Araki language as for many others, time is running out. The process of extinction has accelerated considerably in recent decades and many languages with no more than a few speakers will disappear very quickly.
Of course, to safeguard the 6 000 languages that are spoken today all around the world is almost impossible : we already know that only a part of our linguistic inheritance will be saved. Yet, we want to participate and to contribute, with the help of other actors from this sector, towards the preservation of as many languages as possible ; because inaction will amount to the same thing as resigning to the cultural impoverishment of humanity.
That is why, with the support of our Scientific Council, we have set up a three- faceted program….

It all sounds admirable, but one is left wanting to know more about how it all came about, who’s behind it, how long it’s been in existence, and all the stuff an About page usually tells one. But if Lameen is involved with it, I presume it’s worthwhile, and I intend to investigate what it has on offer.

Stan of Sentence first has a post about “an admirable new website, The Spaceage Portal of Sentence Discovery, that stores and classifies examples of ‘interesting sentence- and paragraph-level patterns, including figures of speech, grammatical-syntactic structures, and other rhetorical devices’. It was created by David Clark, an English teacher who sees the educational value of collecting and systematically arranging sentences that exemplify these literary-linguistic structures and devices.” Clark himself says:

My career involves trying to teach young people to write well: if I want them to write great sentences, they must be exposed to great sentences, again and again; and if I want them to understand, identify, and use a grammatical construction or figure of speech or literary device, they must be exposed to examples of it, again and again and again. The effects of their exposure will be magnified if those examples are amassed, analyzed, grouped—presented systematically—especially if I am careful to include each relevant variation and apparent exception in my example-set.

As Stan says, “If you’re into language and literature, you’re likely to find it fun and edifying,” and you can contribute your own examples if you like. Another good use of the internet.

1) Recordings of various “lost dialects” of Irish, made around 1930 (scroll down). Thanks, Trevor!

2) Dnghu.org, “Indo-European: European Union’s National Language.” Complete with Amazon link for A Grammar of Modern Indo-European, Third Edition. Crackpottery, but my kind of crackpottery! (N.b.: *dnghu- is the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root for ‘tongue.’)

In Book II of the Aeneid, Vergil tells the story of how the wily Greeks pretend to go home, leaving the famous wooden horse behind as an offering; the Trojans are arguing about what to do with it when Laocoön runs up shouting “You fools! Don’t trust that thing, it’s a trick! I’m afraid of Greeks even when they’re carrying gifts!” He and his sons are immediately killed by sea serpents, which convinces the Trojans everything’s A-OK, and they decide to bring it into the city… but I digress. My question concerns that line about the gifts, which has become one of the most famous Latin tags; it’s usually translated something like “I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts” (and even more commonly boiled down to the maxim “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts”), and the Latin is quoted as “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”

But the Wikipedia article says “Although the commonly used form of this quotation has ferentēs (with a long ē), the original text has ferentīs (with a long ī),” and sure enough, my Oxford Classical Texts edition has ferentis, with no alternate form mentioned in the notes. So I have two questions: How does ferentis work grammatically, and what is the history of the universal misquotation (assuming that’s what it is)? As I have often had occasion to say, I am no Latinist; I can pick my way through a text thanks to Brother Auger’s stern methods of instruction back in seventh grade, but the finer points of syntax are lost on me, so (Google having failed me) I turn to the learning of the Varied Reader.

Nicholas Kristof often writes about subjects so depressing I can’t bring myself to read the whole column, but in Sunday’s NY Times he has an inspiring piece about John Wood, whose charity, Room to Read, has opened 12,000 libraries around the world, along with 1,500 schools:

It all began in 1998 when Wood, then a Microsoft marketing director, chanced upon a remote school in Nepal serving 450 children. Only one problem: It had no books to speak of.

Wood blithely offered to help and eventually delivered a mountain of books by a caravan of donkeys. The local children were deliriously happy, and Wood said he felt such exhilaration that he quit Microsoft, left his live-in girlfriend (who pretty much thought he had gone insane), and founded Room to Read in 2000.[…]

“I get frustrated that there are 793 million illiterate people, when the solution is so inexpensive,” Wood told me outside one of his libraries in the Mekong. “If we provide this, it’s no guarantee that every child will take advantage of it. But if we don’t provide it, we pretty much guarantee that we perpetuate poverty.”

“In 20 years,” Wood told me, “I’d like to have 100,000 libraries, reaching 50 million kids. Our 50-year goal is to reverse the notion that any child can be told ‘you were born in the wrong place at the wrong time and so you will not get educated.’ That idea belongs on the scrapheap of human history.”

Now, there’s a guy who can say “I spent my time on earth well.” (Thanks, Bonnie!)

A correspondent writes:

Movies put dialogue into the mouths of “characters of color” which marks their difference from normative English speakers but which is meant to resemble an admixture of their “original language” with English. Hence, fake Indian talk — “Me want-um heap big tomahawk!”.[…] The question I have is where the screenwriters picked up the allegedly original language features. Does movie-Indian dialogue bear any resemblance to the speech of any American Indian, and, if so, what is the extent of that resemblance?

An excellent question, and I thought I’d pass it along to the assembled multitudes. Anybody know the history of this form of stylized speech? I took a look at James Fenimore Cooper, but his version of Native American dialect, while piquant, is quite different in style: “He ole, now; like top of dead hemlock, wind blow t’rough his branches till leaf all fall off.”

According to John T. Frederick (“Cooper’s Eloquent Indians,” PMLA 71 [1956]: 1004-1017), Cooper did extensive research on how Indians were said by earlier travelers and writers to have lived and spoken—”Cooper’s daughter, Susan Fenimore Cooper, testifies in The Cooper Gallery to the careful research on the basis of which Cooper sought to give validity to his portrayal of Indian characters.”

Addendum. Lauren of Superlinguo kindly sent me the following reference [open access]:
Meek, B.A. (2006). “And the Injun goes ‘How!’: Representations of American Indian English in White Public Space.” Language in Society 35/1: 93-128.

The Browser has one of its FiveBooks interviews with Jonathon Green, whose admirable Green’s Dictionary of Slang I wrote about in this post; I especially liked his discussion of the five books he recommends, ending with Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word (which I reviewed here): “Everybody should look at this and see how lexicography should be done, because it is a superb piece of work. It’s not a grubby book, or a meretricious book, it’s an amazing piece of scholarship.” Quite so, and the same is true of Green’s own magnum opus.