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I was listening to Fresh Air the other day and was riveted by a segment on mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who died last summer (bio, New Yorker piece by Charles Michener); not only was her voice gorgeous, but an excerpt from Sings Peter Lieberson: Neruda Songs sent me back to the poem (set by her husband, Peter Lieberson), Neruda’s Soneto XLV, whose beginning is heard on the program. Spanish is not one of my favorite languages for poetry, but there are exceptions, and Neruda is one of them, particularly his youthful [Veinte canciones de amor y una canción desesperada and the later] Cien sonetos de amor; through some poetic alchemy, reading even a few lines of these sonnets can make my chest swell with the unbearable urgency of the kind of passionate love we are most likely to experience in our late teens or early twenties. Here is the text of the poem she sang:

No estés lejos de mí un solo día, porque cómo,
porque, no sé decirlo, es largo el día,
y te estaré esperando como en las estaciones
cuando en alguna parte se durmieron los trenes.
No te vayas por una hora porque entonces
en esa hora se juntan las gotas del desvelo
y tal vez todo el humo que anda buscando casa
venga a matar aún mi corazón perdido.
Ay que no se quebrante tu silueta en la arena,
ay que no vuelen tus párpados en la ausencia:
no te vayas por un minuto, bienamada,
porque en ese minuto te habrás ido tan lejos
que yo cruzaré toda la tierra preguntando
si volverás o si me dejarás muriendo.

If you don’t read Spanish, the Stephen Tapscott translation seems to be all over the internet, for instance here; it’s not bad, but it doesn’t have remotely the same effect as the original.

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The last time we discussed the word portobello ‘mature cremino mushroom,’ the etymology was unknown despite a plethora of suggestions. Well, it may still not be exactly known, but at least we have an authoritative hypothesis; MMcM of the brand-new blog Polyglot Vegetarian (“Grazing through the world of words”) had the excellent idea of looking for the word in the latest update to the OED, and (in the words of his latest post) “sure enough, they’ve got it”:

Brit. /ˌpɔ:təˈbɛləʊ/, U.S. /ˌpɔrdəˈbɛloʊ/ Forms: 19- portabella, 19- portabello, 19- portobello. [Perh. alteration of Italian pratarolo meadow mushroom.]
More fully portobello mushroom. A large brown variety of the common edible mushroom, having an open flat cap and a distinctive musky smell.
1990 Doylestown (Pennsylvania) Intelligencer 28 Oct. C12/3 Out of darkness now emerge the cream-colored and fuller flavoured crimani.. the wild tasting portobello and the soft-for-soup oyster mushroom. 1998 Scotl. on Sunday (Nexis) 26 July 32 Before grilling, stuff meaty Portabello mushrooms with oil-soaked crumbs and grated Parmesan or crumbled goat’s cheese. 2004 Phytochemistry 65 671/2 Tyrosinase, laccase, and peroxidase were detected in portabella mushrooms, a brown strain of Agaricus bisporus.

He adds “I am amazed that the earliest quotation they could come up with is from 1990,” and so am I. I welcome the new addition to the blogosphere, and am encouraged by his scrupulous reproduction of the OED’s formatting—too many people just paste in the text and ignore the itals and bolds; I recommend his earlier posts on vegan, okra, and burek.

Manchán Magan decided to take a trip around his country and speak its native language. Nothing remarkable about that? Ah, but he’s Irish, in a country where 25% of the population claims to speak the language of that name but in fact… well, let him tell it:

I chose Dublin as a starting point, confident in the knowledge that in a city of 1.2 million people I was bound to find at least a few Irish speakers. I went first to the Ordnance Survey Office to get a map of the country. (As a semi-state organisation it has a duty to provide certain services in Irish.) “Would you speak English maybe?” the sales assistant said to me. I replied in Irish. “Would you speak English?!” he repeated impatiently. I tried explaining once again what I was looking for. “Do you speak English?” he asked in a cold, threatening tone. “Sea,” I said, nodding meekly. “Well, can you speak English to me now?” I told him as simply as I could that I was trying to get by with Irish.

“I’m not talking to you any more,” he said. “Go away.”

He had similar experiences trying to get a drink (“‘Did you not hear me, no?’ the barman said menacingly”), information from the tourist office (“‘You don’t speak English, do you?’ he asked coldly”), and so on, and he and the reader are getting pretty depressed, until:

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Copyright Watch has posted a list of the authors (including musicians and other creators of art) whose works went out of copyright as of January 1—or rather, two lists, one of for those countries (the majority) where copyright subsists for fifty years after the author’s death (Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Fadeev, Russian novelist; Pio Baroja, Spanish novelist; H.L. Mencken, American journalist and author; Art Tatum, American jazz pianist; Carl Brockelmann, German Semitic scholar; Walter de la Mare, English poet, short story writer, and novelist; A. A. Milne, English author…), and one for “the quarter or so of the world where the copyright term has foolishly been extended to life+70” (German historian and polymath Oswald Spengler; British ghost story writer M. R. James; Italian composer Ottorino Respighi; English author G. K. Chesterton; English scholar and poet A.E. Housman; pioneering American “muckraker” journalist Lincoln Steffens; Russian author Maxim Gorky; Spanish poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca…). As for Canada, unfortunately “there will not be another archival Public Domain Day for archivists, historians, genealogists, and others, to celebrate in Canada until January 1, 2049.” To read about the “short-sighted 1998 amendments to the Copyright Act” there, go to the post. I got this link from Matt of No-sword, whose post adds a list of Japanese authors who are now free for all to use. As CopyrightWatch says, “Short live copyright! Long live the public domain!”

The prestigious group of savants over at Language Log have created an award named for Goropius Becanus, a 16th-century Dutch humanist who “theorized that Antwerpian Flemish, or Brabantic, spoken in the region between the Scheldt and Meuse Rivers, was the original language spoken in Paradise.” (I’m proud to say the very first LH post was about him.) The award goes to “people or organizations who have made outstanding contributions to linguistic misinformation,” and Geoff Nunberg announced the winner today on Fresh Air:

But by a unanimous vote, this year’s Becky goes to the psychiatrist Louann Brizendine, whose bestselling book The Female Brain argues that most of the cognitive and social differences between the sexes are due to differences in brain structure. It’s a controversial thesis. The New York Times’s David Brooks and others have hailed the book as a challenge to feminist dogma, and Brizendine herself has charged that her critics are angry because her conclusions aren’t politically correct. Actually, though, you can leave out the “politically” part. The reviewers for the British science journal Nature described the book as “riddled with scientific errors.” And in newspaper commentaries and posts on the LanguageLog blog, the University of Pennsylvania linguist Mark Liberman has been meticulously debunking Brizendine’s claims about men’s and women’s language.

Brizendine claims that “differences between men’s and women’s brains make women more talkative than men, and goes on to say that women on average use 20,000 words a day while men use only 7000” and that “women on average speak twice as fast as men do.” Both these claims are utterly and provably wrong (see the Log and the Nunberg link for details). Congratulations, Louann, and I look forward to your rapidly delivered, many-worded acceptance speech!

I finally finished Sukhanov’s The Russian Revolution 1917 (discussed briefly here)—it’s a fascinating eyewitness account of momentous months, but he’s a lot more interested in the theoretical infighting of various Marxist fractions than most of us are today, so some of it is heavy slogging—and was rewarded towards the end, during the dramatic account of the opening session of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on the night of Oct. 25 (November 7), 1917, with what is if not the first use at least the locus classicus of one of the great rhetorical cliches. The Mensheviks and SRs whom Sukhanov graces with the sarcastic epithet “the pure-in-heart” (чистые) have made the fateful decision, after the Menshevik leader Martov has placed before the congress a resolution (very popular, judging from the response of the crowd) opposing any military settlement of the ongoing crisis (i.e., the Bolshevik coup which was then underway), to walk out in protest, leaving the Bolsheviks unopposed. As they do so, to the jeers of the Bolsheviks, Trotsky makes a triumphant speech justifying the Bolshevik actions (“We openly forged the will of the masses for an insurrection, and not a conspiracy”), ending with this zinger: “To those who have left and to those who tell us to do this we say: you are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out; go where you ought to be—into the dustbin of history!” (Тем, кто отсюда ушел и кто выступает с предложениями, мы должны сказать: вы — жалкие единицы, вы — банкроты, ваша роль сыграна и отправляйтесь туда, где вам отныне надлежит быть: в сорную корзину истории!)

Sukhanov, by the way, is an interesting guy. At first, caught up in the story he’s telling, you find him a likable and eagle-eyed observer, but after a while you start noticing that he must have been a pain in the ass to his acquaintances, what with his constant harping on theoretical disagreements and his sneers at anyone who doesn’t follow the correct line (which is, of course, his); about that time, he lets you know that he’s quite aware of it, mentioning his bad temper and (what we would now call) poor interpersonal skills. This comes to a head in the quite moving description of his relations with Lunacharsky (pp. 374-76):

After he arrived in Russia on May 9th, together with Martov, he at once, and quite naturally, came to the Novaya Zhizn [Gorky and Sukhanov’s independent newspaper]. There we became personally acquainted and quite soon intimate… he was not yet in Lenin’s party and had a rather ‘soft’ disposition; we still felt ourselves to be comrades-in-arms in politics as well as literary collaborators.

But we also became rather close friends on purely personal grounds. You might say I spent almost all my unoccupied time with Lunacharsky. He often spent days and nights with us in the Letopis, where my wife and I had a pied-à-terre. Sometimes at night he would come to see me at the printer’s, to have a little more talk and look at the next day’s edition. And when we were detained in the Tauride Palace we used to spend the night at Manukhin’s and again talk away endlessly.

We discussed everything: regardless of the theme, Lunacharsky’s talk, stories and repartee were interesting, clear and picturesque, just as he himself was interesting and brilliant…

It is said that when he became a Minister Lunacharsky more quickly and completely than others acquired a ministerial manner, with its negative qualities. I don’t know. After the October Revolution I completely broke with him… For two and a half years, down to this very moment, I’ve only had a few fleeting encounters with him, and not very agreeable ones at that. He really took a ministerial air with me. But I don’t know how much he was to blame for all this, and I know very well how much I was, with my rather disagreeable character. My continual polemics were really bitter and unendurable, when we ceased to be companions-in-arms and became political enemies.

The tragedy of a man who values friendship but is unable to keep friends because of his difficult character, of which he is well aware, shines through that passage; I think Sukhanov must have been lonely much of his life.

I understood his character a little better after I read the introduction to Nikolai Sukhanov: Chronicler of the Russian Revolution (thanks, Amazon Search Inside!). Nikolai Nikolaevich Gimmer (he adopted the name Sukhanov in 1907) was born in 1882 to a minor railway official of German descent whom he never knew and a mother to whom he said (in a brief autobiographical sketch he wrote in 1927) he was never close. Well, it turns out his mother, Ekaterina Pavlovna Simon, was at the center of one of the most notorious Russian court cases of the late 19th century. In love with Stepan Ivanovich Chistov but unable to divorce her worthless, drunken husband and marry him because “the Moscow Ecclesiastical Consistory refused her application for a divorce on the grounds that the evidence proving her husband’s ‘marital infidelity’ was ‘insufficient’,” she convinced Gimmer to fake a suicide: his clothes and a farewell note were left on the ice of the Moskva River, while he took a train to Petersburg with the money she’d given him. Unfortunately, the police figured out the deception, and she and her new husband were charged with bigamy, and the details of the case (fully reported in the papers) riveted the country (and became the basis for Tolstoy’s play The Living Corpse, Живой труп). They were sentenced to seven years’ exile in Siberia, but “thanks to their case being taken up by A. F. Koni, a well-known lawyer in the criminal appeals department of the Senate, in 1898 Tsar Nikolai II, acting on the advice of his minister of justice, commuted the sentence to one year’s imprisonment.” So the teenaged Nikolai spent a year of high school fending for himself while his mother was in Butyrki Prison. No wonder he became a difficult person!

My New Year’s resolution was to be a nicer, more positive language blogger. No more slapping Safire around, no more holding journalistic slips up to public ridicule, none of that stuff; instead I’d praise the praiseworthy and let the broom of time sweep the rest away. Well, make ’em big and break ’em fast, I say, and having read Baloney Bill’s year-end column, it’s time to start slapping!

The Mooncalf Maven begins with a riff on the suffix -stan:

“Sometimes I get confused with all these stans,” said Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, then the military dictator of Pakistan, “but as long as I don’t say Hindustan” — a Persian name for India that once included what is now Pakistan — “I’ll be O.K.”

That 1982 citation of the suffix –stans in the form of a noun — rooted in the Persian for “home of” — was dug up by the phrasedick Paul McFedries of wordspy.com.

So far, so good; “home of” isn’t exact, but it gives the general idea. (“Place of” would be better; it’s from the Indo-European root *stā- ‘stand,’ and in Persian it’s also used in words like registan ‘place of sand, desert’ and gulistan ‘place of roses, rose garden.’) But he goes on: “Zia picked up the suffix used by critics of South Africa’s proposed black African homelands in 1949; they had nicknamed the impoverished areas bantustans after the Bantu language spoken by the tribes.” Why on earth would you link Zia’s use of an old Persian name for India with a modern South African term Zia might or might not ever have heard of? Zia “picked up” a word that was lying around in his language; if you’re desperate to make a transition to bantustans, make it yourself, don’t foist it on Zia. Furthermore, since all other quotes in the column are from much later, Safire leaves the impression that 1949 is as far back as we can trace the suffix, whereas the first cite in the online OED is from considerably earlier:

1932 Times 7 Sept. 13/6 When all the land in the Stans is collectivized in cotton plantations, say the Soviet governors, then the wheat, meat and vegetables are to come over from the Ukraine, Siberia, and the Caucasus.

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I know no better quote for the turn of the year than the Robert Louis Stevenson one I posted two years ago, so here it is again:

To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven and to what small purpose: and how often we have been cowardly and hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness;—it may seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries, a certain consolation resides. Life is not designed to minister to a man’s vanity. He goes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures as it is—so that to see the day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner-call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys—this world is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, health fails, weariness assails him; year after year, he must thumb the hardly varying record of his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly process of detachment. When the time comes that he should go, there need be few illusions left about himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much:—surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed. Nor will he complain at the summons which calls a defeated soldier from the field: defeated, ay, if he were Paul or Marcus Aurelius!—but if there is still one inch of fight in his old spirit, undishonoured. The faith which sustained him in his life-long blindness and life-long disappointment will scarce even be required in this last formality of laying down his arms. Give him a march with his old bones; there, out of the glorious sun-coloured earth, out of the day and the dust and the ecstasy—there goes another Faithful Failure!

And once again I wish you all the very best of years. May 2007 bring us more joy than sorrow and more wisdom than forgetfulness.

Aaron Haspel of God of the Machine is on a quest, and I’m here to hold his coat, cheer him on, and offer the services of my variegated readership. His latest post begins:

“Sentence first — verdict afterwards,” says the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland; and the trial of the Knave of Hearts has justly remained the literary standard for injustice, since the book’s publication in 1869.
Being an idiot, I thought the expression originated with Lewis Carroll, until last night. I was reading Macaulay 1830 essay on Lord Byron, and ran across the following passage, on Byron’s failed marriage: “True Jedwood justice was dealt out to him. First came the execution, then the investigation, and last of all, or rather not at all, the accusation.” The term “Jedwood justice,” also new to me, implied that the concept is proverbial, and led to a slightly earlier citation, in 1828, from Walter Scott’s Fair Maid of Perth: “Jedwood justice — hang in haste and try at leisure.”

He traces it back, in the form of “Lydford Law,” to “the early 17th century poet William Browne“:

I oft have heard of Lydford Law,
How in the morn they hang and draw,
And sit in judgment after:
At first I wondered at it much;
But since, I find the reason such,
As it deserves no laughter…

But there the trail runs cold: “My patchy scholarship, abetted by some desultory Googling, can take me no further. Can my readers supply earlier citations, in English or another language?” Aaron and I await any enlightenment you can provide.

I got a number of presents of linguistic interest, including foreign movies (La Meglio gioventù and Akarui mirai—thanks, Eric!) and Russian opera DVDs (Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Lyudmila, Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, The Gamblers, and War and Peace, and Shostakovich’s The Nose—thanks, Elias!), but certainly the two most directly connected with the concerns of this blog are Тень русской ветки: Набоковская Выра [Shade of a Russian branch: Nabokov’s Vyra], by Aleksandr Alexandrovich Semochkin (apparently there’s an English edition, Nabokov’s Paradise Lost: The Family Estates in Russia, whose description applies equally well to my Russian 2002 second edition: “This album consists of photographs from the family archive of the Nabokovs, as well as pictures of the family estates near St. Petersburg where Vladimir Nabokov spent the summers of his boyhood and youth. Together with the quotations from his works, they make a fascinating background to the novels based on his early experiences: Speak, Memory, The Defense, and The Gift”)—thanks, Tatyana!—and Anthology of Old Russian Literature by Adolf Stender-Petersen, which I owe to the generosity of Songdog and his lovely wife (and of course their excellent son, who at two years eight months may not have had much intellectual input into the choice of gift but whose affection is clearly attached to it); the Life of Archpriest Avvakum alone (excerpts here, in three languages) should give me hours of pleasure. And I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the LH readers who sent cards and other holiday communications, books, and (in one case) actual money—your words of encouragement and tokens of esteem mean more to me than I can say. If it weren’t for the enthusiasm and responsiveness of my readership, I’d have given up the blog long ago.