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Today’s NY Times story by Julie Turkewitz (archived) is both educational and annoying. Here is the meat of it:

In most of the Spanish-speaking world, the principal ways to say “you” are the casual “tú,” and the formal “usted.” But in Colombia there is another “you” — “su merced,” meaning, “your mercy,” “your grace” or even “your worship,” and now contracted to the more economical “sumercé.”

I did not know that, and I am pleased to have my knowledge of Spanish expanded. But here’s how the piece opens:

After Altair Jaspe moved from Venezuela to the Colombian capital, Bogotá, she was taken aback by the way she was addressed when she walked into any shop, cafe or doctor’s office.

In a city that was once part of the Spanish empire, she was no longer “señora,” as she would have been called in Caracas, or perhaps, in her younger years, “muchacha” or “chama.” (Venezuelan terms for “girl” or “young woman.”) Instead, all around her, she was awarded an honorific that felt more fitting for a woman in cape and crown: Your mercy.

Would your mercy like a coffee?

Will your mercy be taking the appointment at 3 p.m.?

Excuse me, your mercy, people told her as they passed in a doorway or elevator.

“It brought me to the colonial era, automatically,” said Ms. Jaspe, 63, a retired logistics manager, expressing her initial discomfort with the phrase. “To horses and carts,” she went on, “maybe even to slavery.”

And here’s how it ends:
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Nelson Goering’s Facebook post introduced me to a word whose pronunciation is disputed by the dictionaries:

I’m now curious how people I know pronounce quillon (the cross-guard of a sword). […] The OED gives as the only pronunciation /ˈkwɪlən/ (‘kwillen’). Wiktionary has only /kiːˈjɒn/ (‘kee-YAHN’). Neither evening hints at the existence of other pronunciation possibilities. I myself say /ˈkiːjɒn/ (‘KEE-yahn’).

Merriam-Webster has an even more Frenchified pronunciation; my instinct would be to favor the fully anglicized version, and since it’s sanctified by the OED I intend to use it in the unlikely event I ever have occasion to say the word. Rahul Gupta in the comments to Nelson’s post writes:

Pronunciation would be Anglicized like other such words established in English usage. Anglophone folk who have ado with swordplay these days say “kwillonz”, rhymes “villains”.

Which I like because it backs up my own preference, but I’m wondering if any Hatters have experience with the word and how they say it. (If you’re curious, the word is derived from French quille ‘skittle,’ borrowed from Middle High German kegel.)

A bit over a year ago I posted about Vladimir Sorokin’s 2006 novel День опричника (Day of the Oprichnik), remarking on the change in his work since the wild novels of the early ’90s; now, thanks to the generosity of New York Review Books, who sent me Max Lawton’s translations of his 1999 novel Голубое сало [Light-blue salo], called Blue Lard, and a bunch of stories collected as Red Pyramid, I have discovered the transitional element between early and late Sorokin. According to Mark Lipovetsky in Russian Literature since 1991, “Sorokin intentionally wrote Blue Lard in an attempt to expand his readership and introduce his aesthetics in a less experimental way than in his early fiction,” and it worked: published in a large print run, it was wildly controversial (protestors threw copies into a large model of a toilet bowl) and made him far more famous. It starts in Siberia in 2068 when scientists are cloning Russia’s great writers in a clandestine lab and harvesting the blue lard that forms on their bodies, and moves back in time to an alternate 1954 where Hitler and Stalin rule the world together; if you want more of a description, you can read Dustin Illingworth’s very favorable NY Times review (archived). Personally, although I enjoyed many of the delightfully perverse episodes here — and of course the parodies of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, et al. — I prefer the early books with their maximum épatage, and you can get a nice dose of that in the story collection, which ranges from 1981 to 2000 and is (of course) brilliantly translated by Lawton, who is very much on Sorokin’s wavelength (see this LH post). Here I will just point out a couple of passages to which I can add something useful.
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In Jenny Turner’s long LRB review essay on a couple of books by Stuart Hall (archived), there occurs the following sentence:

And so, too, with the police, and the courts, and schools and churches and social services, as explored in Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978), written in collaboration with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, but with its great and terrifying sweeps of synthesis – not to mention their calm, dry, paddingly Socratic delivery – commonly assumed to be the work mainly of Hall.

Does anyone have a sense of what “paddingly” means in the phrase “paddingly Socratic”? The only thing that occurs to me is a typo for “ploddingly,” but that seems unlikely in the LRB, and I am so out of touch with both current UK colloquialisms and current high-Left jargon that I have no useful context for it.

For those who don’t care about high-Left jargon and its discontents, check out William H. Race’s “The Process of Developing a Publishable Paper in Classics: An Illustrative Example and Some Suggestions,” as excerpted at Laudator Temporis Acti; the suggestions seem useful, the first being “Start with primary material and trust your instincts. This is the origin of your original contribution. If you jump too quickly into the secondary literature, it is easy to get lost in a sea of δόξα.”

Our nightly reading these days is Zadie Smith’s The Fraud; in a break from tradition, we’re letting Smith read it to us via audiobook rather than having me do the reading, since her version is supposed to be excellent and I’ve been curious to try this newfangled medium. Last night we got to a passage that I knew I had to post at LH, from ch. 18, “Talking ‘Cant’ in Chesterfield”; “he” is the (historical) author William Harrison Ainsworth:

In the evenings he was supposed to belong to Mrs Touchet, but over dinner continued outlining his first ‘proper novel’ in a great stream of talk. The plan was to take all he’d learned of the Gothic from Mrs Radcliffe and Sir Walter and apply it to a grand old English house. (For a model, Crossley had suggested Cuckfield Park, a gloomy Elizabethan mansion in Sussex.) For William, this new location meant a new aesthetic. No more exotic counts and princes. No more evil monks or scheming Italian Doges. Instead: lords and ladies, highwaymen, gravediggers, Newgate types, and all manner of simple, English, country folk. The highwayman Dick Turpin would make an appearance! And gypsies! It would be called Rookwood – after the fictionalized house at its centre – and was to be a tale of fate and murder, involving a worryingly large cast of characters, drawn from the high world and the low. Once he stayed up all night, writing a scene in which ‘Dick Turpin rode from London to York’, although what this had to do with the family saga he had previously described she could not make out. There was no point in asking rational questions. He was besotted with his project, especially the ‘flash songs’, sung by the criminal and cockney underworld characters and written in the ‘cant’ slang he had picked up somewhere. Where?

‘What do you mean, where?’

‘Well, cant is not the same wherever you go, is it? Cockney flash must be different from Scots flash, for example. And surely Manchester cant is different again.’

‘Eliza Touchet, what a curious pedant you are. Does it matter?’

‘Don’t characters have to speak believably? So we believe in them?’

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Chris Quirk has a nice feature on Samantha Schnee for Dartmouth Alumni Magazine:

More than 20 years ago, Schnee cofounded Words Without Borders (WWB), an online journal that publishes literature translated into English from almost every part of the globe. The journal has published 4,600 writers—including seven who later won the Nobel Prize—in translations into English from 139 different languages. Today, 11 staffers operate the publication with an annual budget of just under $1 million, funded primarily through grants and donations.

WWB builds bridges between writers and readers across languages and cultures, providing English-language readers access to lesser-known works and opportunities for translators. It draws an estimated 750,000 readers annually, half of whom live outside the United States. “It’s a handbook for understanding the world,” says Iranian American author Reza Aslan, who edited WWB’s 2011 anthology of Middle Eastern translations. […]

Schnee learned about the project that would be become WWB when she heard W. W. Norton editor Alane Salierno Mason propose the idea at a 2002 meeting of the organization PEN America. “I ran up to her as soon as she finished speaking and told her that editing WWB was my dream job—it synthesized my interests in literature, language, and culture,” Schnee recalls. She started the following month, and the journal launched in mid-2003.

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From last September comes this Lithuanian National Radio and Television story:

A mysterious tablet with an unknown 13th-14th-century script is on display at the Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania Museum. No one knows what it means or where it came from. LRT TV journalist Virginijus Savukynas reports.

The plaque was found twenty years ago while exploring Vilnius castles. Archaeologists were using a metal detector to scout the location where some of the earliest wooden structures were located. Expecting to find no more than a simple axe, instead, they discovered something else entirely – a rectangular strip of metal with strange engravings. Such scripts have surfaced in Lithuania for the first time. […]

“We tried to find a logical explanation for the markings: on the sides of the tablet, the beginning and the end were marked with crosses, as if they were marking the beginning and the end of the text,” said Gintautas Striška, head of the Archaeology and Architecture Department at the Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania Museum in Vilnius. “The text is clearly composed of several lines. The top line seems to be written in two ways – signs and letters, and the bottom line has several more lines with various inscriptions,” he added.

“At the time, we thought that part of the text may have been written in ancient Greek. With the help of linguists, we saw that part of it could be translated as ‘Algirdas Basileus’ – that is, ‘King Algirdas’,” said Striška. After a while, however, the archaeologists abandoned their fruitless search. “The letters only resemble Greek letters, and a person who carved them may have missed something or combined several letters into one, making deciphering the record difficult,” he added. […]

It is also possible that the inscriptions on the plate are engraved in several languages, making it difficult to read. Now, the researchers have turned to visitors and researchers to present their ideas on how to read this 13th-14th-century text.

As Dmitry Pruss, who sent me the story, points out, there’s no link to anything scholarly, and frankly the images look like gibberish to me, but check it out!

I’ve come to love the interactive features the NY Times publishes on its website, and Alex Carp’s piece on endangered languages in New York City is a doozy, and perfect for LH. (There are archived versions here and here, but I’m afraid you only get the text, not the interactive stuff, including the audio clips.) It opens with an outline map of Manhattan with lines pointing to locations where dozens of languages are spoken, then continues:

Most people think of endangered languages as far-flung or exotic, the opposite of cosmopolitan. “You go to some distant mountain or island, and you collect stories,” the linguist Ross Perlin says, describing a typical view of how such languages are studied. But of the 700 or so speakers of Seke, most of whom can be found in a cluster of villages in Nepal, more than 150 have lived in or around two apartment buildings in Brooklyn. Bishnupriya Manipuri, a minority language of Bangladesh and India, has become a minority language of Queens.

All told, there are more endangered languages in and around New York City than have ever existed anywhere else, says Perlin, who has spent 11 years trying to document them. And because most of the world’s languages are on a path to disappear within the next century, there will likely never be this many in any single place again. […]

With Daniel Kaufman, also a linguist, Perlin directs the Endangered Language Alliance, in Manhattan. When E.L.A. was founded, in 2010, Perlin lived in the Chinese Himalayas, where he studied Trung, a language with no standard writing system, dictionary or codified grammar. (His work helped establish all three.) He spent most of his time in the valley where the largest group of remaining speakers lived; the only road in or out was impassable in winter.

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Jennifer Ouellette writes for Ars Technica about a productive element of English vocabulary:

British comedian Michael McIntyre has a standard bit in his standup routines concerning the many (many!) slang terms posh British people use to describe being drunk. These include “wellied,” “trousered,” and “ratarsed,” to name a few. McIntyre’s bit rests on his assertion that pretty much any English word can be modified into a so-called “drunkonym,” bolstered by a few handy examples: “I was utterly gazeboed,” or “I am going to get totally and utterly carparked.”

It’s a clever riff that sparked the interest of two German linguists. Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer of Chemnitz University of Technology and Peter Uhrig of FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg decided to draw on their expertise to test McIntyre’s claim that any word in the English language could be modified to mean “being in a state of high inebriation.” Given their prevalence, “It is highly surprising that drunkonyms are still under-researched from a linguistic perspective,” the authors wrote in their new paper published in the Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association. Bonus: the authors included an extensive appendix of 546 English synonyms for “drunk,” drawn from various sources, which makes for entertaining reading.

There is a long tradition of coming up with colorful expressions for drunkenness in the English language, with the Oxford English Dictionary listing a usage as early as 1382: “merry,” meaning “boisterous or cheerful due to alcohol; slight drunk, tipsy.” Another OED entry from 1630 lists “blinde” (as in blind drunk) as a drunkonym. Even Benjamin Franklin got into the act with his 1737 Drinker’s Dictionary, listing 288 words and phrases for denoting drunkenness. By 1975, there were more than 353 synonyms for “drunk” listed in that year’s edition of the Dictionary of American Slang. By 1981, linguist Harry Levine noted 900 terms used as drunkonyms.

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We discussed that odd fruit the pawpaw a decade ago, at which time Bathrobe pointed out that “In Australia a pawpaw is a papaya,” but we didn’t really get into the linguistic aspect, so I’ll take the opportunity of happening on Matthew Meduri’s Belt essay “Consider the Pawpaw,” linked at MetaFilter, to do some of that. As rory says in that MeFi thread, “the UK/Aust./South Pacific pawpaw is what Americans know as the papaya. This American pawpaw is a different fruit.” To add to the confusion, the OED entry (revised 2005) says:

Variant of papaya n., of uncertain origin, apparently originally a shortening (although compare a reported disyllabic form in Otomaco pappai: see etymological note s.v. papaya n.).

Notes
The α forms reflect an earlier pronunciation /pəˈpɔː/ related to the shortening < papaya n. The β forms reflect the shift in stress to word-initial position which is now the current pronunciation.

N.E.D (1904) enters this under papaw and gives the pronunciations (păpǭ·, pǭpǭ·) /pəˈpɔː/ /pɔːˈpɔː/. Webster gives only the pronunciation /pəˈpɔː/ until the 20th cent.

And s.v. papaya (also from 2005):
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