languagehat.com

Our bedtime reading these days is Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett (one of our favorites); much of the plot involves actors who are putting on a performance of Our Town, a famous play I have somehow managed never to see, and they keep talking about “swings,” a term neither my wife nor I was familiar with. So of course I googled and found multiple sites explaining the difference between a semantically related set of terms, e.g. Swing, Standby, Understudy: What You Need to Know:

A swing is an off-stage performer responsible for covering any number of ensemble tracks, sometimes as many as 12 or more. An understudy is a performer cast in the ensemble of a musical (or a minor role in a play) who is responsible for covering a supporting or lead role. A standby is an off-stage performer whose sole responsibility is to cover the lead (usually a star) in a production.

It’s interesting to me that understudy is a universally understood term, whereas the other two are (I’m guessing) known only to theater aficionados. It’s amusing that the antiquated (1921 vintage) OED entry defines understudy as “An actor or actress who studies a superior performer’s part in order to be able to take it if required; also, the study of a part of this purpose” (I have bolded the harsh and doubtless often inaccurate modifier that will certainly be removed when the entry is updated). And it’s curious that this sense of track (apparently equivalent to what the layman thinks of as a “part”) is not in any dictionary I have access to; perhaps when the OED updates its 1913 entry it will get around to including it.

Richard Hershberger, who comments here from time to time, has a Facebook series “150 years ago today in baseball” which is essential reading for anyone interested in the early game (and I look forward to the book that will surely come out of it); this post is of particular linguistic interest:

150 years ago today in baseball: Hartford is in Philadelphia, where the Fillies beat them 6-4. Here Tommy Barlow, the Hartfords’ shortstop, gets on base by “blocking” the ball. This is a term from cricket, where a block is a defensive stroke intended to defend the stumps, deadening the ball while putting it on the ground (keeping in mind that in cricket the batsman is not required to run on a ground ball). In other words, Barlow put down a bunt. The bat angle is different than a cricket block, but the analogy is clear.

Oodles of baseball vocabulary comes from cricket, so this fits right in. Except, of course, that it didn’t stick. We will see the appearance of “bunt” in about two months, coming out of Chicago. That “bunt” will be the word that sticks is an interesting example of the rising influence of the West (meaning the Midwest) on baseball culture. Stay tuned.

Bunt is, of course, the more expressive and therefore the better verb, so hurray for Chicago.

Irina Dumitrescu’s LRB review (23 May 2024; archived) of Minstrels and Minstrelsy in Late Medieval England by Richard Rastall and Andrew Taylor is full of information about minstrels and their lives; herewith a few bits:

Of all​ the medieval people who sound as though they should be made up, Roland le Pettour, also known as Roland le Fartere, must be near the top of the list. An entertainer who worked for Henry II, Roland is recorded in several medieval registers as holding substantial tracts of land north of Ipswich. His yearly service to the king, at least as it has come down to us, was ‘saltum, siflum et pettum’: a jump, a whistle and a fart.

Roland fits poorly with the image of medieval minstrels that later took hold. In the 18th and 19th centuries early entertainers were depicted either as quasi-religious bards who plucked their harps at court while intoning the histories of their people, or as romantic wanderers who earned their keep with love songs. In their own time, however, minstrels were viewed less favourably – at best as figures of some social value and at worst as licentious rogues. […]

Despite the scorn directed at minstrels, they were indispensable to medieval society. In The House of Fame, Chaucer imagines Fame living in a castle made of beryl. In the niches he sets every imaginable kind of minstrel, performing stories of woe and of delight – that is, ‘of all that belongs to fame’. Among them are Orpheus playing his harp, the centaur Chiron and a Welsh bard called Glascurion, as well as hosts of lesser harpers. Thousands of other musicians play bagpipes, flutes, clarions and reeds; German pipers demonstrate dance steps; trumpeters provide a ‘bloody’ soundtrack to battle. Chaucer was writing primarily about literary fame, but he recognised that, in a world where literacy was still limited to elites, fame depended on oral performers. […]

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I always perk up when I see that the New Yorker has a piece by John McPhee, and this one (archived) is the latest in his “Tabula Rasa” series of reminiscences. It is (needless to say) all worth reading; I’ll highlight a couple of especially Hattic bits. From the Proofreading section:

Reading proofs one time, I came upon a sentence in which 1492, a presumed error, had been changed to 1942. Crack a joke and watch it disappear. The 1492 was just hyperbole, a way of saying “ages ago.” Forget it. In the same set of proofs, fifty million shad were migrating up the Columbia River. Fifty million was an error ten times fact. Where did it come from? The New Yorker? No. In the magazine, five million shad went up the river. The mistake was unaccountable, but also caught. In my book contracts with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, a clause added long ago states that if other publishing houses are licensed to publish my paperbacks they will require that their professional proofreaders meet with me and compare what we have found. […]

Meanwhile, the text [of Coming Into the Country, or, as the New Yorker would have it, “Coming Into the Country”] had to be proofread. Bantam hired a professional and required that she go through her finished read with me. We met at Bantam’s offices, in Manhattan, and she was not just cold; she was furious. She said she did not miss typos and did not make mistakes, and being summoned to go over proofs with me was a personal and professional insult. I said I was sorry she felt that way, but that I had many times experienced the need to compare proofs, and had it in my contracts. Could we just sit down and make the best of it? In some sort of cubicle there, we sat down and made the best of it. On the second or third galley was a typo corrected by her that I had completely missed. Next came a typo that she had not found. It surprised her. We found others that I had missed, then two more that she had missed. She said she was embarrassed, and quietly began to apologize. I told her not to, told her she was obviously better at it than I was, and her discoveries were rescuing my book. Tension was turning into compatibility, and I think I can say that both of us enjoyed the rest of that morning together.

I feel bad for both of them and am glad they relieved the tension, but I disapprove of the high-and-mighty attitude displayed by the professional (“I don’t make mistakes”). I understand where it comes from — proofreaders have to put up with a lot of crap and don’t get the respect they deserve, and they have to learn to fight their corner — but it’s still a bad idea; everybody makes mistakes, and you’re just going to wind up (as this woman did) looking foolish. At any rate, the section continues:

Typographical errors are more elusive than cougars. One of my sons-in-law, the poet Mark Svenvold, wrote a nonfiction book called “Big Weather,” about tornadoes and people who chase them, from meteorologists to simple gawkers. Mark went to Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas, and rode around with both categories. When “Big Weather” appeared in hardcover, a sentence in the opening paragraph mentioned “the Gulf of New Mexico.” Where did that mutinous “New” come from, a typo right up there with “pretty” for “petty”? Mark said it was unaccountable. For a starter, I suggested that he look in his computer, if the original manuscript was still there. It was, and in that first paragraph was the Gulf of New Mexico. Remarkable, yes, but think where that paragraph had been. It had been read by a literary agent, an acquisitions editor, an editorial assistant, a copy editor, a professional proofreader, at least one publicity editor—and not one of these people had noticed the goddam Gulf of New Mexico.

Ouch!

This is from the Final Exam section:
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PhysOrg reports on a literary-historical discovery:

John Milton’s handwritten annotations have been identified in a copy of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), a vital source of inspiration for the Paradise Lost poet. The discovery, made in the Burton Barr Central Library in Phoenix, Arizona, makes this one of only three known books to preserve Milton’s handwritten reading notes, and one of only nine books to have survived from his library.

As interesting as the find is, I confess that what grabbed my attention was this:

The findings, detailed by three researchers in the Times Literary Supplement, include Milton censoring Holinshed by crossing out a lewd anecdote about the mother of William the Conqueror, Arlete. Spotted while dancing by Robert I of Normandy, and summoned to his bed, Arlete refused to let him lift up her smock and instead tore it herself from top to bottom, explaining that it would be immodest for her ‘dependant’ garments to be ‘mountant’ to her sovereign’s mouth.

In the margin, Milton dismisses this anecdote as inappropriate and told in the style of a pedlar hawking wares on the streets. In Milton’s exact words, it was: “an unbecom[ing] / tale for a hist[ory] / and as pedlerl[y] / expresst.” “The adverb ‘pedlerly’ was quite rare in writing at the time so we are seeing Milton really stretching language to express his contempt,” said co-author Prof. Jason Scott-Warren, from Cambridge University’s English Faculty, who was consulted to confirm that the handwriting was Milton’s.

And of course I appreciated this observation:

“Milton is renowned as an enemy of press censorship,” Scott-Warren said, “but here we see he was not immune to prudishness.”

There’s more about Milton’s use of source material and other finds from his library; it ends:

The researchers point out that public libraries like Phoenix’s are “are off the beaten path for academics who work with early modern books and manuscripts.” This discovery, barely five years after the Shakespeare Folio was found in another US public library, suggests that more of Milton’s books may be out there, including in less well-known collections.

Thanks, Trevor!

Carl Zimmer’s NY Times story “Why Do People Make Music?” (archived) begins:

Music baffled Charles Darwin. Mankind’s ability to produce and enjoy melodies, he wrote in 1874, “must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.” […] Other Victorian scientists were skeptical. William James brushed off Darwin’s idea, arguing that music is simply a byproduct of how our minds work — a “mere incidental peculiarity of the nervous system.”

That debate continues to this day. Some researchers are developing new evolutionary explanations for music. Others maintain that music is a cultural invention, like writing, that did not need natural selection to come into existence.

In recent years, scientists have investigated these ideas with big data.

You can go to the link for the details of the research; I’ll excerpt this bit here:

It’s possible that songs have distinct features because they have a special role in human communication separate from speech, said Aniruddh Patel, a psychologist at Tufts University who was not involved in the study. What’s more, our brains appear to be sensitive to those features. In 2022, Dr. Patel pointed out, researchers discovered human neurons that only responded to singing — not speech or music played on instruments.

“There is something distinctive about song all around the world as an acoustic signal that perhaps our brains have become attuned to over evolutionary time,” Dr. Patel said.

On the one hand, this is intriguing stuff; on the other, the general tone reminds me of the sort of Times article I was mocking back in 2003. So I thought I’d toss it out there for Hattic de(con)struction. (Thanks, Bonnie!)

Anatoly Vorobey (Avva) has posted about Mallams’ auction lot 539:

Tolkien (J.R.R.). ‘The Lord of the Rings‘ trilogy Pt I.’The Fellowship of the Ring‘ 4th Imp. Nov 1955. Pt II ‘The Two Towers‘. 2nd Imp 1955. Pt III ‘The Return of the King‘ 2nd Imp 1955. Allen and Unwin, London. Original red cloth, much split and bumped with m/s letter from Roger Lloyd? with comments (3+)

Avva is convinced — and it seems very plausible to me — that the author of the letter is Roger Bradshaigh Lloyd, an Anglican priest and writer who published with Allen & Unwin; at any rate, it is an interesting look at a reader’s impression of the trilogy before it was famous. I will reproduce Avva’s transcription, with his guesses and question marks replaced by my own readings:
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Jonathan Egid has a series of interviews called Philosophising in…:

‘Philosophising in…’ is an interview series devoted to exploring the philosophical richness of lesser-studied languages from across the world. Despite recent acknowledgement of the global nature of philosophical thought, an overwhelming majority of work focuses on philosophy written in either classical languages (Greek, Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese) or contemporary European languages (German, French, English etc.). Although covering a hugely diverse body of literary philosophy, this focus nevertheless reflects the thought of only a small portion of humanity. This series aims to rectify this narrowness by examining the philosophical ideas of peoples the world over, especially those expressed in the languages, of Africa, Asia and the Americas. […] Interviews are conducted with philosophers who are experts in the chosen language, and explore some philosophical ideas distinctive of that linguistic culture, the history of their production and the methodology by which these insights are discovered, often in spaces at the interface of literacy and orality.

I don’t have a great deal of interest in philosophy as an academic study, although I do enjoy reading the more literary philosophers (Plato, Nietzsche), but I am intensely interested in different ways of seeing the world, so I’m eager to investigate the series, and the first one I looked at was Philosophy in… Sakha, an interview with Justin Smith-Ruiu: “In this interview on philosophising in Sakha, we discuss Olonkho poetry, the distinctive position of Sakha in the diverse linguistic landscape of North Asia, and its fate under the Soviet Union, as well as ‘hyperactive intentionality detection devices’, the philosophical significance of animism, and living in the coldest inhabited regions of the world.” I’ll quote some chunks, but the whole thing is worth reading, and there are some gorgeous photos.
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This 35-minute video is a real treat:

What is the degree of mutual intelligibility between the North African dialects of Arabic, from Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, and the Maltese language […] In this video, we’ll take a look at how well Libyans, Tunisians, Algerians, and Moroccans can understand Maltese with Sean (Maltese speaker) reading a couple of short paragraphs and proverbs to Lameese, Donia, Yasser, and Jihane, who represent Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, respectively.

It’s hosted by Bahador Alast, who apparently has a whole series of such videos (e.g., Yemenite vs Samaritan vs Modern Hebrew). I know enough basic Arabic vocabulary that I was able to follow what was going on, and I expect it to be of considerable interest to drasvi (if he hasn’t seen it already).

Also, Jongseong Park sent me his new video (19:00) about the Tham Lanna script of northern Thailand:
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I was not familiar with the term metalepsis, which the OED (entry revised 2001) defines thus:

The rhetorical figure consisting in the metonymical substitution of one word for another which is itself a metonym; (more generally) any metaphorical usage resulting from a series or succession of figurative substitutions. Also: an instance of this.

It’s from post-classical Latin metalepsis < ancient Greek μετάληψις ‘alternation, succession.’ Some of the citations are quite lively:

1550 Transsumpcion, is when by degrees we go to yᵗ that is shewed as: he hyd hym selfe in the blacke dennes. By blacke, is vnder stand ful of darkenes & consequently stepe downe, and verye depe. [Margin] Metalepsis.
R. Sherry, Treatise of Schemes & Tropes sig. Cv

1589 The figure Metalepsis, which I call the farfet, as when we had rather fetch a word a great way off then to vse one nerer hand to expresse the matter aswel & plainer.
G. Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie iii. xvii. 152
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1930 Naturally a man who could combine a synecdoche and a metalepsis with intent to deceive would be capable of anything.
Journal Royal Statist. Society vol. 93 237

1975 In a metalepsis a word is substituted metonymically for a word in a previous trope, so that a metalepsis can be called, maddeningly but accurately, a metonymy of a metonymy.
H. Bloom, Map of Misreading ii. v. 102

(Puttenham’s farfet = far-fetched.) But even livelier is the Icelandic example given in the Wikipedia article, introduced as follows:
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