languagehat.com

Back in the day, one of my favorite websites was Books and Writers, which had detailed and lively entries for just about any writer you might be interested in; I used to link to it often, e.g. for Walt Kelly in that stirrin’ thread The Hazy Yon (two decades ago!). I always wondered who was responsible for it; alas, the drifting dream is done: the URL vanished into the hazy yon years ago, and I’ve been substituting Internet Archive versions in old posts ever since. But I just discovered that some good people have created this archived version, with the notice:

This is an archive of a dead website. The original website was published by Petri Liukkonen under Creative Commons BY-ND-NC 1.0 Finland and reproduced here under those terms for non-commercial use. All pages are unmodified as they originally appeared; some links and images may no longer function. A .zip of the website is also available.

The list runs from Abdullah Achmed (“pseudonym of Alexander Nicholayevitch Romanoff”) to Zweig Stefan (“Austrian biographer, essayist, short story writer, and cosmopolitan”), and it is well worth your perusal. Belated thanks to Petri Liukkonen for conceiving it and putting it out there, and brand-new thanks to Green_Cardamom for creating the archive! (Oh, and kirjasto is the Finnish word for ‘library,’ “Coined by Finnish explorer, historian and author Carl Axel Gottlund in 1828.”)

Update. The site is now here; thanks, Dirk!

An Ezra Klein interview with Nate Silver (NYT; archived) starts as follows:

Nate Silver came to fame in American politics for election forecasting. But before Silver was in politics, he was a poker player. And after getting into politics, he went back to being a poker player. He’s been running through poker championships and out there on tables — partly because he’s been writing a book about risk.

I was baffled by the phrase “out there on tables,” and it’s not just me — my wife couldn’t figure it out either. I figure there are two likely explanations: 1) it’s sloppily written, or 2) it’s some current usage that we old codgers are unfamiliar with. (“You’re really out there on tables, man!”) Anybody know?

Also, as a public service: I ran across the name Christopher Wlezien recently (he’s Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin) and naturally wanted to know how the surname is pronounced. (It’s from the Polish name Wlezień, but of course it’s not going to be pronounced à la polonaise by an American.) Happily, there’s a brief video clip where he introduces himself, and it sounds to me like he’s saying /ˈwlɛʒən/, though I’m not sure about the initial /w/, which is very brief if it’s there. (Note that Heidi Wlezien says /ləˈziːn/, so Wlezien is a land of contrasts.)

Christine Smallwood has an essay in the Yale Review about being a freelance book reviewer which resonates with me on a number of levels. She starts by describing the magnificent top-floor duplex on West Sixty-Seventh Street where Elizabeth Hardwick did her own writing (“Next to the built-in bookshelves and requisite rolling ladder, swag curtains frame an enormous window, giving a the­atrical effect”), then transitions to her own less than grand situation:

My own desk is wedged into one corner of the bedroom I share with my husband, behind the children’s trampoline, between a hulking armoire and an ugly IKEA thing exploding with file boxes and rolls of scribbled-on paper that I really ought to throw away. Cairns of books are at my feet. If I turn my head just so I can glimpse a cluster of grocery bags brimming with toys and still more books, which I plan, someday, to sell or give away. Sometimes I pile the bags on top of each other to reduce their footprint, and when they threaten to topple, spread them out again.

What interests me about the photographs of Hardwick’s living room is that they provide evidence of the environment in which a brilliant and original mind worked. The couch on which she sat when she thought about Donne or Melville expressed a sensibility, but it also incubated one. On my way to my own desk, I catch a glimpse of the bags filled with crap. Whether or not I acknowledge it, the crap is always buried in the piece. Sometimes it rises right to the top.

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Monica Madeja of NBC Boston News reported last year on a word that’s new to me but seems (unfortunately) useful enough it should spread:

We see it over and over again, trucks stuck or smashed on the roads along the Charles River. Simply put they’re “storrowed.” A phrase that’s become so common, it’s become a part of the vernacular in the Boston area.

“One of the great things about the English language is how incredibly flexible it is,” said Dr. Mary Dockray-Miller an English and Humanities professor at Lesley University in Cambridge. Dr. D, as her students call her, examines the way we talk and says people take pride in words that define where they’re from … especially in Boston. “We’re Bostonian,” she said, “We know what this means we use it. And in doing so in a way we’re making fun of all those outsiders who are actually the ones who are doing the storrowing.”

The state is trying to stop the messes and embarrassment that result when a driver isn’t paying attention on roads with low bridges, so they’ve put up new, reflective “cars-only” signs around troublesome areas like Storrow Drive.

Via MetaFilter, where you can see a photo of a massive wind turbine blade knocked off a truck on Route 1 in Maine.

I showed my wife a striking photo of hop pickers at work; neither of us had had any idea that hops grew vertically and had to be picked that way. Then (of course) I got onto the word hops, which the OED told me had been around since the 15th century (c1440 “Hoppe, sede for beyre..hummulus, secundum extraneos,” Promptorium Parvulorum 245/2) and was inherited from Germanic:

In 15th cent. hoppe, < Middle Dutch hoppe, Dutch hop = late Old High German hopfo (Middle High German hopfe, German hopfen); medieval Latin hupa (for *huppa); ulterior origin obscure.

The Wikipedia article mentioned that hops are dried in an oast house, and we agreed that oast is a funny-sounding word; it goes back to Old English (OE “Siccatorium, cyln uel ast,” Antwerp Glossary 239) and has a more ancient etymology:

Cognate with Middle Dutch ast, est, eest (Dutch eest), Middle Low German eist, probably < a suffixed form (verbal adjective) of the same Indo-European base as ad n.¹; compare classical Latin aestās summer, aestus heat, boiling, bubbling, tide, and also the first element of the Germanic personal name Aistomodius, lit. ‘fiery mind’ (2nd. cent.). Compare east n.²

That ad¹ is “A pyre, spec. a funeral pyre. Also: fire as a means of burning bodies” and only lasted until the 13th century:

Cognate with Old Frisian ēd peat (for fuel), Old Saxon ēd pyre, Old High German eit hearth, pyre (Middle High German eit) < the same Indo-European base as (with various different stem formations) ancient Greek αἶθος heat, classical Latin aedēs hearth, house (see edifice n.), Early Irish áed fire.

And east² is an English regional (south-western) equivalent of oast.

Joel of Far Outliers wrote me as follows:

The huge memorial for the Lahaina, Maui, wildfire yesterday included a massive “paddle-out”! Are you familiar with the term? Surfer Today has an explanation.

The article, by Luís MP, begins:

The paddle-out is a spiritual symbol of surf culture. It’s a traditional Hawaiian tribute to the life and legacy of people who passed away.

In most cases, the paddle-out is a floating memorial held in the ocean, a few yards from the shore, where surfers and other water sports participants honor someone they cherished. Paddlers often carry flowers and Hawaiian leis on top of their boards and in their teeth to the place where they will celebrate someone’s life. As they arrive at the selected location, surfers join hands, form a human circle, say a few words, chant, and splash the water.

What I liked about the article is that it gently but firmly debunks the idea that it has to do with “pre-historical Polynesian rituals”:

Most historians believe the paddle-out was born in the Hawaiian islands, but only in the 20th century when the Waikiki beach boys introduced it in Oahu. The earliest reports of a paddle-out date back to the 1920s.

Legendary surfing pioneer Wally Froiseth once said he participated in his first paddle-out in 1926 when he was just a six-year-old kid. “I don’t know of any place that did it before Waikiki,” Froiseth told the New York Times in 2010.

Well done, Luís MP! As Joel points out, it’s not in the OED yet, but Wiktionary has an entry for it.

Jonathon Green is a longtime favorite here at LH (e.g., 2014, 2018); now he has posted a cri de coeur called The End Is Nigh (and we can all be grateful I didn’t use that as my post title):

I am 76 and change. I cannot continue for ever. But it is my wish that my lexicon should. OK, not forever, a dangerous promise, but I would certainly prefer that the ‘book’ should not vanish alongside its creator. GDoS offers 738 synonyms for ‘death’, ‘dead’ and ‘die’ and I see no reason to stop things there. Up till now continuation has been simple: I want another dictionary? that the last edition is now out of date and should now merely prefigure its replacement? then sit down at the screen for yet another day or many more, and make one. But without a sitter? Here comes the problem. […]

Off the top of my head the only major dictionary (multi-volume, working on ‘historical principles’, which means usage examples or citations) that one might term ‘future proofed’ is Oxford’s OED. (Smaller ones, aimed at school/college presumably are more likely to appear, even in print). And we know from its histories, whether that of Katharine Murray or more recently Peter Gilliver, the extent to which every day of its existence has been a struggle against those who are allegedly its supporters and financiers. Bean-counters will count, whether Master of Balliol or otherwise. Publishers, however grand, are ‘trade’ and trade seeks, depends on profit. They may not tell you so as the flattery dances across that initiatory lunch table but thus it is. And if ‘they’ must be dragged like a genuinely unwilling Speaker when it comes to the national treasure that is the OED, am I really to expect a rush to support the unveiling of yet another synonym for gherkin-jerking?

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A MetaFilter post reminded me of the odd regional term hotdish, which refers to what most Americans would call a casserole; according to this CBS News explainer:

“To try to put a boundary around hotdish is a losing battle,” said Tracey Deustch [sic; s/b Deutsch], a professor of food history at the University of Minnesota. She pointed out that virtually all hotdishes are casseroles, but probably not all casseroles are hotdishes.

Casseroles became popular in the United States during the 1920. They were made possible by the advent of the self-regulating oven, according to Megan Elias, a professor of gastronomy at Boston University. This was also around the time canned goods were becoming more accessible. […] Casseroles could be used to stretch leftover meat, which was especially important during the Great Depression and World War II. Tater tots, though, were not a staple of casseroles — or hotdish — until much later. Ore-Ida came up with the tater tot in the 1950s as a way to sell potato scraps. According to Deutsch, the product did not sell well at first, so Ore-Ida decided to market it as toppings for casserole.

Hotdish is common terminology in western Wisconsin and Minnesota, while casserole is the preferred name everywhere else in the country. The story behind that is still a mystery, at least according to Deutsch, Elias and Ann Burckhardt, author of Hot Dish Heaven. What is known, though, is that the term “hotdish” first appeared in a 1930 Mankato cookbook, published by Grace Lutheran Ladies Aid. “What’s clearer is that the dish has become a symbol of Minnesotan identity,” [Deutsch] said. “That is exactly why there are so many debates over what a hotdish can be.”

The OED created an entry last year:
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Muireann Maguire’s Facebook post introduced me to a new word: “Extremely pleased we made it to this beautiful place, the biggest tombolo (not to be confused with a tombola, which tends to involve the Women’s Institute) in the UK.” I was familiar with tombola but not tombolo, which that Wikipedia article defines as “a sandy or shingle isthmus,” adding:

A tombolo, from the Italian tombolo, meaning ‘pillow’ or ‘cushion’, and sometimes translated incorrectly as ayre (an ayre is a shingle beach of any kind), is a deposition landform by which an island becomes attached to the mainland by a narrow piece of land such as a spit or bar.

All well and good, but I wanted to know more, so I went to the OED, where I found the following etymology:

< Italian tombolo sand dune, tombolo (1763) < classical Latin tumulus tumulus n., with folk-etymological alteration after Italian tomba tomb n.

But I was surprised by the pronunciation they gave, which is:

British English /tɒmˈbəʊləʊ/ tom-BOH-loh
U.S. English /tɑmˈboʊloʊ/ tahm-BOH-loh

Surely, thought I, the Italian word has the stress on the first syllable, and this turned out to be the case (Wiktionary). So I turned to AHD, which gives the pronunciation as (tŏm′bə-lō′), with the stress on the first syllable. Merriam-Webster says the same; neither gives a penultimate stress even as an alternate. So the OED is completely wrong about U.S. English!

Furthermore, for tombola the OED says:

British English /tɒmˈbəʊlə/ tom-BOH-luh
U.S. English /tɑmˈboʊlə/ tahm-BOH-luh
      /ˈtɑmbələ/ TAHM-buh-luh

But again Merriam-Webster gives only initial stress for the US (“ˈtām-bə-lə British usually täm-ˈbō-lə”), with no alternate penultimate stress (AHD, oddly, doesn’t have the word). So here too the OED is misleading about US usage. (For what it’s worth, I myself use initial stress for tombola, and though I’d never seen tombolo my instinct was the same there.)

A couple of decades ago, commenter Godfrey mentioned Familiar Dialogues (1586), by Jacques Bellot, “a treatise written to teach Frenchmen to pronounce English,” and now I present Simon Roper’s video (11:43) about it. It has various points of interest: there are almost no occurrences of “thou” (was it seen as rural and quaint? grandfatherly? religious?); there are very few contractions (but a striking form is “God be wy,” now even further condensed to “goodbye”); and pronouns can be omitted in now-surprising ways (“I will pay no more for [sc. them]”). Roper even provides citations to works of linguistics onscreen. It’s well worth your while — thanks, Ransom!

By the way, speaking of pronouns — I’ve noticed in French movies I’ve watched recently that couples who are in love, live together, and have sex use vous rather than tu. In Portrait de la jeune fille en feu [Portrait of a Lady on Fire] you could say “Well, it was prerevolutionary France, usage must have been different,” but La maman et la putain [The Mother and the Whore] is set in 1972 Paris, and yet Alexandre and his lover Marie se vouvoient. Anybody know what’s up with that? They’re not haughty aristocrats like Boëldieu in La Grande Illusion, who says “Je dis vous à ma mère et vous à ma femme”!