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Almost a decade ago we discussed “why complex mythical stories that surface in cultures widely separated in space and time are strikingly similar” (1, 2); now Manvir Singh has a thoroughgoing and amazingly sensible New Yorker article on the subject (archived). It begins:

I read George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” sometimes hailed as the greatest British novel, in a rain forest in western Indonesia. I was there as a graduate student, spending my days slogging through mud and interviewing locals about gods and pig thieves for my dissertation. Each evening, after darkness fell, my research assistant and I would call it a night, switch off the veranda’s lone bulb, and retreat to our separate rooms. Alone at last, I snapped on my headlamp, rigged up my mosquito net like a kid building a pillow fort, and read.

Those were good hours, although, honestly, little of the novel has stuck with me—except for Casaubon. The Reverend Edward Casaubon is Eliot’s grand study in futility: an aging, self-important, faintly ridiculous clergyman who has dedicated his life to an audacious quest. Casaubon is convinced that every mythic system is a decayed remnant of a single original revelation—a claim he plans to substantiate in his magnum opus, “The Key to All Mythologies.” He means to chart the world’s myths, trace their similarities, and produce a codex that, as Eliot puts it, would make “the vast field of mythical constructions . . . intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected light of correspondences.”

The ill-fated project founders between the unruly diversity of cultural traditions and the fantasy of a single source, between the expanse of his material and the impossibility of ever mastering it, between the need for theory and the distortions it introduces. These failures are deepened by Casaubon’s limitations—his pedantic love of minutiae (he “dreams footnotes”) and his refusal to engage with scholarship in languages he doesn’t know (if only he’d learned German). […]

Casaubon’s “Key to All Mythologies” lingered with me less as a cautionary tale than as a temptation. Like Dorothea Brooke—Casaubon’s much younger, idealistic wife and the novel’s protagonist—I found his vision thrilling. As an aspiring anthropologist, I understood the seduction: the promise that somewhere, beneath the confusion of gods, ghosts, and rituals, there might be a hidden order. Of course, my method was different. I was mud-caked and by myself on a remote island, chasing a crocodile spirit; Casaubon was at his desk, trying to map out myths he barely knew. But, amid all the pedantry, I recognized a kind of kinship.

Singh namechecks Max Müller, James Frazer, Robert Graves, Joseph Campbell, and Robert McKee before continuing:
[Read more…]

Lauren Collins (a good but sometimes annoying writer) has a Talk of the Town piece in the New Yorker (archived) about Where Should I Go?, a company that “creates custom itineraries” in Paris:

They’ve done vegan Paris and occult Paris, romantic Paris and rainy Paris, and arranged for a superfan of the French TV series “The Bureau” to meet one of the show’s producers. “We just had a client who was really into needlecraft,” Solanki said. (They sent her to a yarn shop called Lil Weasel, in the Passage du Grand-Cerf.) Yet she and Colin could not have anticipated an unusual request that they received, about a year ago, from two American customers: they wanted to attend a soirée appart—a Parisian houseparty.

I was struck by the phrase soirée appart: was that some sort of variant of à part? Turns out appart is a clipping of appartement ‘apartment’; it must be pretty new, because it’s not in my dictionary of French slang or the TLFi, and the earliest example I found in a Google Books search (admittedly cursory) was this 2017 book by David Lebovitz (“the deed to my apartment in Paris. Or as time-pressed Parisians shorten it: l’appart”). And how is it pronounced? The Wiktionary page says /a.paʁt/, which makes sense for a clipping of appartement, but the audio file has /a.paʁ/, which makes sense for the spelling. I suppose both are used.

Later in the piece she mentions “an oozing Saint-Marcellin”; I guess the adjective is supposed to clue you in that it’s a cheese. And the quote “They floated the idea and I was down” would make a good test for a translator — no, “down” doesn’t mean ‘depressed’!

Longtime Hatter Martin Langeveld writes me as follows:

In the Dutch edition of Wikipedia, I came across this article about “locofaulisme”, the Dutch term for a nickname or insult for the inhabitants of a particular place or area. The article speaks only about Dutch and Flemish instances, and includes a link to a list of such terms which is quite extensive. Most of them are intended to be humorous, of course. For example, in Amsterdam and elsewhere “stoepeschijters” (stoop shitters); Ijmuiden “vissekoppen” (fish heads); Schiedam “jeneverneuzen” (gin-noses); Eindhoven “keienschijters” (bouldershitters); Vlissingen “flessendieven” (bottle thieves). (There are a lot of dialectical ones I can’t translate.)

These nicknames extend even to the smallest villages and hamlets — I first came across the term here on the page about Texel, the island where my family is from. In order, the village nicknames listed there translate to fingerbiters, sandbellies, stoopshitters, shitpullers, stonethrowers, spitters/barleybellies, cake-eaters, plumpers.

US instances might be things like the Wisconsin cheeseheads, Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, etc., as well as the amorphous “Yankee,” the definition of which depends on your point of view. (The old joke being that to a Southerner, a Yankee is a Northerner. To a Northerner, a Yankee is a New Englander. To a New Englander, a Yankee is an old Vermonter. To an old Vermonter, a Yankee is one who eats apple pie for breakfast. To the old Vermonter who eats apple pie for breakfast, a Yankee eats it with a knife.)

But is there an English word that’s equivalent to the Dutch “locofaulisme”? The obvious English version would be locofaulism, but the very few instances Google supplies of that spelling all refer back to the Dutch term. Also, are these insult names as ubiquitous in any other countries, or is this a particularly Dutch practice?

I don’t know of an English equivalent term, but of course there are such terms everywhere, and they are definitely a fit topic for Hattic discourse. (According to Dutch Wiktionary, the Dutch word is only attested from 1988 onwards, which seems oddly late.)

Anatoly Vorobey posts (in Russian) about another of those odd figures on the margin of literature that so fascinate me; here’s the start of his post (my translation):

It turns out that a significant portion of Japanese science fiction translated and published in the USSR was translated by a single person, a certain Zeya Rahim. I came across this name in the edition notice [colophon? I’m not sure how to render выпускные данные] of a novel and found it intriguing because of its oddity. Behind it hides the shadow of a mysterious man.

It is known that he spent many years in the same cell with Daniil Andreev (the author of Rose of the World, who was in prison from 1947 to 1957), who became attached to him. In the ’60s he moved in literary circles; Nina Voronel described meeting him in her memoirs. He gave his full name as Harun ibn Qahar, Sheikh ul-Muluk, Emir al-Qairi; according to his passport he was Zeya Rahim, a Tatar from Mukden, but he claimed that this name was imposed on him by the Soviet authorities, and that in fact he was an Arab who grew up in Alexandria, studied in Japan, owned factories in Manchuria, was arrested after the USSR drove the Japanese out of Manchuria, and received a long sentence for spying for Japan.

Regarding his translations, Voronel writes (though it should be taken into account that there have been many complaints about the reliability of her memoirs):

As a result, we became friends and, of course, immediately took him to the Daniels. They listened to him with curiosity and then promptly forgot about him, moving on to some new object of interest. However, he didn’t let himself be dropped, but clung to Seryozha Khmelnitsky, with whom he started a small business translating Japanese prose into Russian: he made interlinear translations, and Seryozha, a poet and a gifted literary man, polished them and turned them into good Russian prose.

The post continues with the murky details of his association with the KGB and other bad behavior; then Anatoly says:

But I learned what is to me the most interesting point in all this from the comments to a LiveJournal post quoting surviving references to Rahim (by Voronel and others). His granddaughter left a comment saying that Zeya Rahim himself died of cancer in 1998 and his daughter Svetlana died relatively recently in 2017. But most importantly, even his family didn’t know what to believe about his life-legend, because “grandfather communicated with his loved ones in the same mysterious way.”

Anatoly is amazed that anyone wouldn’t want to tell their nearest and dearest the truth about their life even as it is nearing its end. At any rate, it all reminds me of the life-legends of Lev Nussimbaum, alias Kurban Said, and Fëdor Emin.

Another sprig from the luxuriant linguistic hothouse that is Mikhail Shishkin’s Письмовник (The Light and the Dark; cf. this post): at one point he uses the Russian phrase По кочану, literally ‘by the head (of cabbage)’ but in practice a snarky rhyming response to the question Почему? ‘Why?’ and thus comparable to the English snarky-but-banal “Because.” I wondered how Bromfield had rendered it, so I checked and discovered he had “The answer’s a lemon,” which made no sense to me. Well, it turns out that’s a UK sort-of-equivalent; Eric Partridge has a listing in his invaluable though unreliable A Dictionary of Catch Phrases:

answer is a lemon—the; also the answer’s a lemon. A derisive reply to a query—or a request—needing a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ but hoping for ‘yes’; a ‘sarcastic remark—acidic in its conclusion’, as Noble aptly calls it; orig. (c 1910) US […]

But his evidence for its US origin is (as so often) extremely dubious, so I turn to the Varied Reader: are you familiar with this tart phrase, and do you know anything about its history?

I’m a sucker for translations into Scots (see my encomium to MacDiarmid’s version of Blok), so how could I resist Robert Crawford’s “Enheduanna’s Song” (LRB, Vol. 47 No. 19 · 23 October 2025; archived):

A version in Scots of a Sumerian hymn to the goddess of love and war, attributed to the priestess Enheduanna of Ur (fl. 2255 BCE), the world’s earliest identifiable author. As well as praising the nurturing but also terrifying and vengeful goddess, daughter of the moon, the poem inveighs against the rebel King Lu-gal-an-ne, who has flung Enheduanna out of the goddess’s temple.

Leddy o aa the airts, aye-bleezin licht,
Gracie and lowin, luved by Heivin and Erd,
Gaird o the Heich Shrine, wi yir lang braw robe,
Fain o the richt gowd circlet o the priesthuid,
Wha’s haun has won aa o the seivin airts,
My Leddy, gaird o ivry unco airt!
Ye’ve gaithered the airts, ye’ve held them in yir haun,
Ye’ve braided the airts, smooricht thaim tae yir breist.

Draigon-lik ye’ve pushionit the merse,
Yir thunnery rair wedes aa the flooirs awa,
Fleet wattir hurlygushin fae the muntain,
Foremaist Muin-Dochter, Queen o Heivin an Erd.
Ootpoorin fluffed flames doon aa ower the laund,
Graced wi the Heich God’s airts, baist-muntit Leddy,
Ye gie deliverances as the Heich God bids;
Ye awn grand rites – and wha can ken whit’s yours?

O malafoosterer o launds, scowe-weengit,
Enlil’s beluivit, ye flichter ower the merse,
Meenister o the Heich God’s strang decreets,
O Leddy, at your soun the launds boo doon.
Whan mankind passes unnerneath yir een,
Frichtit and tremmlin at yir roilin bleeze,
Frae ye they get the upcome they deserve:
Wi sangs o scronach they brak doon and greit;
They trek tae ye alang the peth o souchs.

It goes on for many more stanzas; most of the vocabulary is decipherable with a bit of squinting, but I had to look up the wonderful malafooster ‘To destroy, wreck, ruin’ ([Mal(e)-, badly, + ? Ir. dial. fuster, to bustle, fuss.]; citation: “The big laddie’s malafoostered oor snowman”). (Enheduanna previously on LH.)

Ryan Starkey, whose map of British English dialects was seen here a couple of years ago, had a clever post back in 2019 called England Could Have Been Sexland (and its speakers called Saxophones). It amused me and I hope it will amuse you.

Ruth Selman reports on a 17th-century letter written in cipher:

I’m excited to report that the challenge set in my blog post of 4 August 2025 has been met. The letter sent by William Perwich on 9 April 1670 from the court of Louis XIV in France has been successfully decrypted, not once but twice.

On a murky Monday in late September, I started work to find my inbox brightened by two emails with solutions which made sense, both in the context of a columnar transposition of the text and because they included gossip at the court also reported by the Venetian ambassador on the same day. The cryptographers who cracked the cipher were Matthew Brown (working alone) and Dr George Lasry, Professor Norbert Biermann and Tomokiyo Satoshi (working together). The latter team are well known for deciphering a group of letters from Mary Queen of Scots, found in the National Library of France, in 2023.

The tricky aspects to the cipher were working out how many columns it was in (20) before randomly rearranging them until they formed recognisable words, and identifying all the letters which were ‘nulls’, i.e. should be discarded before attempting to decrypt (a number it is impossible to be certain about without Perwich’s original cipher key). The letter frequencies pushed the cryptographers in the right direction. Most letters appeared a usual number of times for the English language but, exceptionally, there were 8 Qs. On noting that 6 of these were towards the right margin, they were made aware that each line was probably completed with nulls.

The solution was reached by using codebreaking software the team had developed along with extensive manual work, in part required because Perwich had mistakenly omitted a couple of letters in his ciphertext. […] You will note that some numerical codes, standing in for names and places, remain in the deciphered letter. These were a separate system, impossible to crack without the key, especially as there were two numbers for each entity, but possible to interpret with knowledge of the historical context.

Click through for details, images, the solution in modern English, and the historical outcome; having fallen under the spell of David Kahn’s The Codebreakers almost half a century ago, I love this sort of thing.

Anatoly quotes a passage from the Telegram channel “Минутка этнографии” (in Russian):

“Словаки клали в гроб к подозреваемому вампиру книжки, желательно на чужом языке, чтобы он пытался их прочесть и у него не было времени выходить из могилы (Низшая мифология славян… С. 259). “

My translation:

In the coffin of a suspected vampire the Slovaks placed books, preferably in a foreign language, so that he would try to read them and would not have time to leave the grave (Lower Mythology of the Slavs, p. 259).

He likes the idea but wonders if it’s true; there is a new book Низшая мифология славян. Этнолингвистические очерки, but he can’t find an electronic copy to check. At any rate, se non è vero, è ben trovato. I knew I’d find a use for that book of Albanian poetry! (One of his commenters suggests that the Slovaks could have put a set of Stalin’s complete works in Russian in the grave. That should work.)

Lucas Reilly at Mental Floss asks Why Do Ghosts Say “Boo”?:

People have screamed “boo,” or at least some version of it, to startle others since the mid-16th century. (One of the earliest examples documented by the Oxford English Dictionary appeared in that 1560s poetic thriller, Smyth Whych that Forged Hym a New Dame.) But ghosts? They’ve only been using the word boo for less than two centuries.

The etymology of boo is uncertain. The OED compares it with the Latin boare or the Greek βοᾶν, meaning to “cry aloud, roar, [or] shout.” Older dictionaries suggest it could be an onomatopoeia mimicking the lowing of a cow.

Whatever its origins, the word had a slightly different shade of meaning a few hundred years ago: Boo (or, in the olden days, bo or bu) was not used to frighten others but to assert your presence. Take the traditional Scottish proverb “He can’t say bo to a goose,” which for centuries has been a slick way to call somebody “timid” or “sheepish.” Or consider the 1565 story Smyth Whych that Forged Hym a New Dame, in which an overconfident blacksmith tries to hammer a woman back into her youth, and the main character demands of his dying experiment: “Speke now, let me se / and say ones bo!” […]

But boo became scarier with time. After all, as the OED notes, the word is phonetically suited “to produce a loud and startling sound.” And by 1738, Gilbert Crokatt was writing in Presbyterian Eloquence Display’d that “Boo is a Word that’s used in the North of Scotland to frighten crying children.”

In 18th century Scotland, bo, boo, and bu would latch onto plenty of words describing things that went bump in the night. According to the Dictionary of the Scots Language, the term bu-kow applied to hobgoblins and “anything frightful,” such as scarecrows. The word bogey, for “evil one,” would evolve into bogeyman. And there’s bu-man, or boo-man, a terrifying goblin that haunted man […] It was only a matter of time until ghosts got lumped into this creepy “muckle boo-man” crowd.

Which is too bad. Before the early 1800s, ghosts were believed to be eloquent, sometimes charming, and very often literary speakers. The spirits that appeared in the works of the Greek playwrights Euripides and Seneca held the important job of reciting the play’s prologue. The apparitions in Shakespeare’s plays conversed in the same swaying iambic pentameter as the living. But by the mid-1800s, more literary ghosts apparently lost interest in speaking in complete sentences. Take this articulate exchange with a specter from an 1863 Punch and Judy script:

Ghost: Boo-o-o-oh!
Punch: A-a-a-ah!
Ghost: Boo-o-o-o-oh!
Punch: Oh dear ! oh dear ! It wants’t me!
Ghost: Boo-o-o-o-oh!

He goes on to talk about the influence of spiritualism and traditions carried overseas by Celtic immigrants: “Scotland was a great exporter of people in the middle of the 1800s, and perhaps it’s thanks to the Scots-Irish diaspora that boo became every ghost’s go-to greeting.” For clickbait, it’s surprisingly informative! And A treatyse of the smyth whych that forged hym a new dame is available here, if you want the whole story; the “which that” in the title is striking.

By the way, if anyone’s interested in Media Cultures of the Russian 1990s: Inventing the Post-Soviet Public Sphere, edited by Maya Vinokour, it’s available for free download from Amherst College Press.