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I’m still reading Звёздный билет/A Starry Ticket (see this post from yesterday), and I hit a snag at the point where Linda, an Estonian girl, asks Galya (one of the seventeen-year-old Muscovite protagonists): “А вчера на стадионе, когда “Калев” стал проигрывать, он сказал: “Повели кота на мыло”. При чем тут кот и при чем тут мыло?” [Yesterday at the stadium, when “Kalev” started to lose, he said: “The cat has been brought to the soap.” What do a cat and soap have to do with anything?] I shared her puzzlement, and wrote to Sashura asking if he could help. Of course, as I expected, he could and did, and he has graciously allowed me to share his typically thorough answer, which I expect others besides myself will enjoy and find useful (I’ve added helpful Wikipedia links):

Ah, that’s a lovely phrase! There are several puns in one. Classic Aksyonov. No wonder she is confused.
Kalev first appears as a handsome man. Then, a few paragraphs later, Kalev, from the giant of Estonian-Finnish mythology, is a very strong basketball team (football too). When people are nimble, jump and catch skillfully they can be compared to cats. Presumably they were watching men’s teams play. That’s why it’s кот, not кошка. But the idiom is with кошка – как мокрая кошка [‘like a wet cat’ -LH] is to look pathetic, pitiful.
The first reading of the phrase looks like the cat is going for a wash (мыло [‘soap’] – мыть [‘wash’]). Cats don’t like to be washed. I think there is умыть – to wash – implied here. Умыть someone also means to beat someone in a (sports) competition, to win (e.g. here: note разговорно-сниженное [‘low conversational’] stylistics). Kalev is getting a wash and doesn’t like it.
Second pun, “на мыло”. Idiomatically, it means to send to an abattoir, to slaughter, as when an old horse is slaughtered and its bones are boiled to make soap. And it’s a popular traditional cry of displeasure at Russian stadiums: судью на мыло! вратаря на мыло! – down with the referee, goalie.
A nimble tom-cat gets a wash with soap and is sent off to the slaughterhouse.
I don’t know how I’d translate it to convey both the meaning and the incomprehensibleness. Perhaps: The cat is in for a washout and with a lot of soap?

I don’t think it’s possible to translate it fully, any more than the “stock exchange hare” I wrote about here, but I certainly do enjoy it.

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I know I said I was going to read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich next, but I wasn’t quite up for it, so I decided to read Aksyonov‘s 1961 Звёздный билет (translated as A Starry Ticket), which is a delight. (And I’m reading it on my new Kindle, which is also a delight! See the comment thread to this Lizok post for my decision process.) It’s fun to get a snapshot of the slangy speech of hip Soviet youth circa 1960, and one word in particular gave me a peek into the odd folkways of the Eastern Bloc in that era. At one point Dimka, one of the protagonists, asks an Estonian who has invited his little group of adolescents (who have fled the tedium of their Moscow lives) to a Tallinn club for dancing, “А что у вас тут танцуют?” [What do you dance here?] The answer is “Чарлстон и липси” [the Charleston and the lipsi], and he thinks “Вот это жизнь! Чарлстон и липси!” [Now, that’s life! The Charleston and the lipsi!]. But what was lipsi? A little googling turned up the fact that it was a dance invented in East Germany in 1958 to try to distract young people from the vile temptations of rock-and-roll and the sexy hip-swaying associated with it. As Anna Funder describes it in her book Stasiland: “Just as ‘The Black Channel’ was the antidote for western television, the Lipsi step was the East’s answer to Elvis and decadent foreign rock’n’roll. And here it was: a dance invented by a committee, a bizarre hipless camel of a thing.” You can watch a mercifully brief clip of the camel in action here.

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Derek Watkins has created a striking map that he has posted here:

This map taps into the place names contained in the USGS National Hydrography Dataset to show how the generic names of streams vary across the lower 48. Creeks and rivers are symbolized in gray due to their ubiquity (although the etymology behind the American use of creek is interesting), while bright colors symbolize other popular toponyms.

Lite-Brite aesthetic notwithstanding, I like this map because it illustrates the range of cultural and environmental factors that affect how we label and interact with the world. Lime green bayous follow historical French settlement patterns along the Gulf Coast and up Louisiana streams. The distribution of the Dutch-derived term kill (dark blue) in New York echoes the colonial settlement of “New Netherland” (as well as furnishing half of a specific toponym to the Catskill Mountains). Similarly, the spanish-derived terms rio, arroyo, and cañada (orange hues) trace the early advances of conquistadors into present-day northern New Mexico, an area that still retains some unique cultural traits. Washes in the southwest reflect the intermittent rainfall of the region, while streams named swamps (desaturated green) along the Atlantic seaboard highlight where the coastal plain meets the Appalachian Piedmont at the fall line.

There’s more discussion at the link, and James Cheshire, impressed by Watkins’s work, has produced a similar map (posted here) that does the same for the major rivers and streams in Great Britain. It’s a wonderful use of cartography to illustrate language use. [Dec. 2023: Cheshire has modernized his blog, and the river-names post is here, but I have provided an archived link above because the modern version has ditched the comments. Tsk.]

One of Pushkin’s most delightful works is Маленькие трагедии, the Little Tragedies—a collection of four short verse dramas he wrote in 1830 (the Russian texts are available, for instance, here, and the wonderful filmed versions by Mikhail Shveitser are available on YouTube: 1, 2, 3). Alan Shaw, a poet, playwright, composer, and translator, has been working on English versions of these pieces for some time (and trying them out onstage when he had the chance), and is finally satisfied enough to publish them (they’re available for sale at his website). He sent drafts to both me and Sashura for our comments, and we both found them quite impressive; Sashura has reviewed them at Tetradki, providing a couple of samples of the translation, and I direct you there for more information. I always welcome new translations of Pushkin that are not only in living English but work well when read aloud, and I hope they get widely produced and introduce more people to the plays.

Having finished Master and Commander (see here and here), my wife and I have moved on to the second in the series, Post Captain, and have come to a passage that I want to share for obvious reasons. Stephen Maturin, Captain Aubrey’s friend and ship’s surgeon, is speaking to the lieutenant of Marines, a Scotsman named Macdonald; Parker is the ship’s first lieutenant (and thus in charge of discipline):

‘Two of your men, both by the name of Macrea, I believe, were speaking privately, furbishing their equipment with one piece of pipeclay between them as I stood near them — nothing of any consequence, you understand, just small disagreement about the pipeclay, the first desiring the second to kiss his arse and the second wishing the soul of the first to the Devil and a good deal more to the same effect. And I understood directly, without the least thought or conscious effort of will!’
‘You have the Gaelic, sir?’ cried Macdonald.
‘No, sir,’ said Stephen, ‘and that is what is so curious. I no longer speak it; I thought I no longer understood it. And yet there at once, with no volition on my part, there was complete understanding. I had no idea the Erse and the Irish were so close; I had imagined the dialects had moved far apart. Pray, is there a mutual understanding between your Hebrideans and the Highlanders on the one, and let us say the native Ulstermen on the other?’
‘Why, yes, sir; there is. They converse tolerably well, on general subjects, on boats, fishing, and bawdy. There are some different words, to be sure, and great differences of intonation, but with perseverance and repetition they can make themselves understood very well — a tolerably free communication. There are some Irishmen among the pressed hands, and I have heard them and my marines speaking together.’
‘If I had heard them, they would be on the defaulters’ list,’ said Parker, who had come below, dripping like a Newfoundland dog.
‘Why is this?’ asked Stephen.
‘Irish is forbidden in the Navy,’ said Parker. ‘It is prejudicial to discipline; a secret language is calculated to foment mutiny.’

Lots of interesting material there; if you’re surprised to see “Erse” and “Irish” differentiated, I will quote the OED on “Erse”: “Applied by Sc. Lowlanders to the Gaelic dialect of the Highlands (which is in fact of Irish origin), to the people speaking that dialect, to their customs, etc. Hence in 18th c. Erse was used in literary Eng. as the ordinary designation of the Gaelic of Scotland, and occasionally extended to the Irish Gaelic.”

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I’m taking a break from Serious Literature (next up: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich!) and reading Ivan Yefremov‘s 1957 Туманность Андромеды (The Andromeda Nebula), a foundational work of modern Russian science fiction. It’s frankly not very good—lots of chunks of “As you know, mankind long ago eliminated…” exposition and ludicrous love interests shoehorned in (showing the wisdom of early American sf writers in entirely avoiding the issue)—but it’s interesting enough to keep me reading (if occasionally skimming). There’s a mix of astronomy (it involves space travel and communication with alien civilizations) and paleontology (Yefremov was a paleontologist by profession), each of which provides me with plenty of opportunities to guess the English equivalents of technical terms. I just ran across a constellation with a fascinating history, which I will now share with you.

The Russian name I ran into was Гончие Псы [gónchie psy], which means ‘hunting dogs’ and did not immediately suggest a constellation to me. With Wikipedia to hand, I quickly learned that it is known to English speakers as Canes Venatici, which was probably familiar to me when I was a thirteen-year-old astronomy maven but has long since been displaced by some Russian word for part of the harness of a horse or by an irregular Georgian verb. At any rate, here, courtesy of Wikipedia, is the story of how it got its name:

In the medieval times, the identification of these stars with the dogs of Boötes arose through a mistranslation. Some of Boötes’ stars were traditionally described as representing the club (Greek, Κολλοροβος) of Boötes. When the Greek astronomer Ptolemy’s Almagest was translated from Greek to Arabic, the translator Johannitius (following Alberuni) did not know the Greek word and rendered it as the nearest-looking Arabic word, writing العصى ذات الكلاب in ordinary unvowelled Arabic text “al-`aşā dhāt al-kullāb“, which means “the spearshaft having a hook”. When the Arabic text was translated into Latin, the translator Gerard of Cremona (probably in Spain) mistook the Arabic word كلاب for kilāb (the plural of كلب kalb), meaning “dogs”, writing hastile habens canes (“spearshaft having dogs”). In 1533, the German astronomer Peter Apian depicted Boötes as having two dogs with him.

These spurious dogs floated about the astronomical literature until Hevelius decided to specify their presence in the sky by making them a separate constellation. Hevelius chose the name Asterion (from the Greek ‘αστέριον, meaning the “little star”, the diminutive of ‘αστηρ the “star”, or adjective meaning “starry”) for the northern dog and Chara (from the Greek χαρά, meaning “joy”) for the southern dog, as Canes Venatici, the Hunting Dogs, in his star atlas. In his star catalogue, the Czech astronomer Becvar assigned Asterion to β CVn and Chara to α CVn.

O felix culpa, that added two happy hunting dogs to the night sky!

Update. Primaler has posted a nice collection of images illustrating the story.

I’ve been coming across plaudits for Jonathon Green’s Green’s Dictionary of Slang for some time now, often with adjectives like “monumental” attached, and of course I wanted to know what the fuss was about. Ben Zimmer, in his NY Times review (where he appropriately calls it “copacetic”), explains:

Green spent 17 years compiling his opus, and the historical material he has amassed, in some 415,000 citations, is astounding. Whenever possible, he includes a citation from every decade of a term’s existence. Thus, if you look up the expression “on the Q.T.” (meaning “surreptitiously,” from the first and last letters of quiet), you find it from 1870 in a British broadside ballad, then attested from such writers as Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound and Tom Wolfe, with stops along the way for the country singer Merle Travis and the pimp-turned-novelist Iceberg Slim.

But I wanted to see for myself; happily, OUP offered me temporary reviewer’s access, and I can report that it’s every bit as amazing as it’s cracked up to be. The first word it occurred to me to look up was gazabo, which I wrote about in a post from 2002; here’s the entry (http://www.greensdictionary.com/entry?entry=t329.e19308):

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I’m finally reading Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation by Alexei Yurchak, which I got for my birthday last year, it having been recommended by both Sashura and slawkenbergius in this thread. It is, as Sashura said, a good complement to Zubok’s book; it is, however, more academic, and ipso facto less readable. As slawk warned, “the first chapter is overloaded with pomo namedropping” (as was the introduction to the Buckler book I wrote about here)—not only are there the requisite genuflections to Derrida and Bourdieu (as requisite in contemporary monographs in the humanities as comparable bows to Marx and Lenin were once in Soviet works), the dreaded Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler are cited as well, not to mention John Austin, Karl Mannheim, and Grumbly’s beloved Sloterdijk. Once past the first chapter, you’re pretty much out of the woods in terms of postmodern obeisances, but you still have to deal with the two besetting sins of academia, constant theorizing and the time-honored rhetorical strategy of presenting everything at least three times: “I will be telling you X… I am telling you X… As we have seen, X…” This means that there is less actual information per page than there is in the Zubok, but what there is is fascinating, so I’ll stop the griping and get to the good stuff, of which there is plenty.

The second chapter opens with a history of “revolutionary language” in the Soviet Union, beginning with the wild-eyed euphoria of linguists (Marr “argued that all languages developed toward unification by means of revolutionary explosions and mixing… and that in the communist society all spoken languages would finally merge into one communist language”) and writers—he has an exemplary quote from Velimir Khlebnikov:

The goal is to create a common written language shared by all the peoples of this third satellite of the Sun, to invent written symbols that can be understood and accepted by our entire star, populated as it is with human beings and lost here in the universe. You can see that such a task is worthy of the time we live in…. Let us hope that one single written language may henceforth accompany the longterm destinies of mankind and prove to be the new vortex that unites us, the new integrator of the human race.

He then moves on to Stalin’s assuming “the position of the ‘master’ external to ideological discourse” and therefore the unquestioned judge of all linguistic matters, citing this remarkable 1935 statement by Kalinin: “If you asked me who knows the Russian language better than anyone else, I would answer, ‘Stalin.'” The master’s death threw the situation into confusion (one might compare the effect of the disappearance of the Twelfth Imam on Shi’ism): “Since there was no longer any unambiguous and uniquely explained external canon against which to calibrate one’s own texts for ideological precision, what constituted the ‘norm’ of that language became increasingly unknowable, and any new text could potentially be read as a ‘deviation.'” His explanation of the results is thorough and interesting; one rhetorical tic, however, becomes increasingly irritating: on nearly every page he says that although the performative aspect of discourse began to play a greater role than the constative [i.e., the apparent semantic content of the words], this did not mean that meaning became unimportant; on the contrary, the discourse became “open to new interpretations, enabling the emergence of new and unanticipated meanings, relations, and lifestyles in various contexts of everyday life.” Naturally the reader wants to know about these unanticipated meanings, relations, and lifestyles, but I’m now a third of the way through the book and he hasn’t breathed a word.

However, I’m confident he’ll tell me all about it, and in the meantime I’m gobbling up juicy analyses of Pravda editorials and their uses (no wonder I found them so unreadable as a Russian major!), explanations of what actually went on at Komsomol meetings, and wonderful material like the stories of two young girls in different cities around 1970 who were each yelled at by their teachers for their childish attempts to draw Lenin:

To Masha and Lyuba these experiences came as a surprise and they remembered them well. They had thought that their portraits demonstrated their pioneer devotion; however, the obvious distortions in the representation of Lenin made both teachers uneasy about publicly displaying them. Their comments made it clear that the problem was not the unsophisticated technique of childish drawings, but that it was applied specifically to Lenin. The teachers were also nervous that such pictures by their students might suggest their own ideological carelessness. What students learned in such experiences was that “Lenin” was not just one among endless Soviet symbols, but a central organizing principle of authoritative discourse, its master signifier and external canon through which all other symbols and concepts were legitimized. That signifier grounded the whole authoritative discourse and was directly linked to the “original.” This is why only specially designated propaganda artists depicted Lenin and to guarantee the trace of the original used in their work Lenin’s death mask and the cast of his head, linking their images to the actual physical body.

I’ll put up with a lot of jargon to get that kind of insight.

John Emerson, frequent commenter and proprietor of the one and only Idiocentrism (investigating the historical nooks and crannies no one else dares enter), sent me a link to this story at ChinaSmack, pointing out that:

This newspaper is not only interesting in itself, but every story and every letter to the editor is there in English and Chinese. Just hover your mouse arrow and the Chinese will pop up. The translations are idiomatic and very carefully done, as far as I can tell, and are a convenient way to build vocabulary, including slang in the letters. (E.g., 装 B “being a pretentious cunt”).

What a great idea! I hope this sort of thing catches on (though, being a lot of work for little obvious profit, it probably won’t).

If you’ve ever wondered how historical novelists deal with the issue of period vocabulary, here‘s one writer’s answer. Mary Robinette Kowal (novelist and professional puppeteer) writes:

Glamour in Glass is set in 1815 and I wanted to have the language fairly clean of anachronisms. The challenge came in trying to figure out what words didn’t exist yet. So I decided to create a Jane Austen word list, from the complete works of Jane Austen, and use that as my spellcheck dictionary. It flagged any word that she didn’t use, which allowed me to look it up to see if it existed.
Sometimes the word did, but meant something different. “Blink” for instance, at the time meant to look through half-lidded eyes, or to open the eyes as if upon waking. The action we mean by it… “nictate.” Yeah… Not so much with the “She nictated at him.”
Once the word was flagged, I looked it up in the OED to double-check the meaning and the earliest citation. If the word didn’t work, then I used the OED’s historical thesaurus to find a period appropriate synonym.

That’s an excellent approach, and I was surprised by some of the results in her word list: who would have guessed that manipulate, condone, meaningful, and inkwell were not part of English vocabulary in 1815, nor for decades after? (For the last, they used inkpot.) I wish more writers followed her example. (Thanks, Derryl!)