languagehat.com

Prompted by who knows what passing vagary of thought, I said to my wife “I always liked that good old insult crumb — people don’t say ‘You crumb!’ to each other any more, and it’s too bad. I wonder when it went out of fashion?” She said it reminded her of another antiquated insult, louse. I decided (inevitably) to look it up, and imagine my surprise when Green informed me that crumb originally meant ‘louse’ (from “the diminutive size of the insects, the infestation of the human being”)! Here are some early cites for that sense:

1848 [Aus] Bell’s Life in Sydney 26 Feb. 1/4: So I gets cummeser, cos of them are crums you no’s.
1863 [US] O.W. Norton Army Letters (1903) 175: Fortunately, I am not troubled with the ‘crumbs’ now [DA].
1898 [US] Scribner’s Mag. XXIII 440/1: And just then I felt something crawling on my neck. It was a crumb [DA].
1910 [US] ‘Ship Out’ in Lingenfelter et al. Songs of the Amer. West (1968) 519: The bunks they are plumb full / Of crums and fleas.

Here are some cites for “2. a filthy person, an objectionable, worthless or insignificant person”:

1914 [US] G.D. Chase ‘Navy Sl.’ in DN [Dialect Notes] IV: ii 150: crumb, n. A dirty sailor.
1915 [US] M.G. Hayden ‘Terms Of Disparagement’ in DN IV:iii 198: crumb, an insignificant person.
1925 [UK] Wodehouse Carry on, Jeeves 168: This old crumb so generally disliked among the better element of the community.
[…]
1955 [US] B. Schulberg On the Waterfront (1964) 13: Once in a while […] some crumb forced a meeting of the local.
1962 [US] P. Highsmith Cry of the Owl (1968) 257: You’re such a heel, you wouldn’t know! You’ve wrecked my life, you crumb.
1964 [Aus] ‘Charles Barrett’ Address: Kings Cross 31: To start with that crumb, Greg, didn’t have a car.
[…]
2000 [US] B. Wiprud Sleep with the Fishes 74: That crum you just crushed – yeah, his name is Jimmy.

And here are the cites for “3. a cruel, vicious person” (though how you distinguish this sense from 2 is beyond me):

1944 [US] J. Archibald ‘Defective Bureau’ in Popular Detective 🌐 ‘Desertin’ your wife, you dirty crumb!’ the customer yelped.
2001 [US] J. Stahl Plainclothes Naked (2002) 251: Doubtless the crumb who’d mocked him […] was lolling around some swanky office, cackling […] about the rube down in Hicksville, Pennsylvania.

(I don’t know what that 🌐 is doing in the 1944 entry; it’s not on the Abbreviations or How to Use pages.)

Brandon Yu’s NY Times piece “Found in Translation: Asian Languages[/亞洲語言/아시아의 언어/Mga Wikang Asyano/Ngôn ngữ Á châu] Onscreen” (archive.today, Wayback Machine) is a heartening look at how things have changed when it comes to subtitles:

American audiences used to balk at subtitles. But recent hits like “Shogun” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” show how much that has changed. In Hollywood today, not only are Asian and Asian American narratives more prominent than ever, but they are also being told in increasingly dynamic ways through the artful use of Asian languages. […]

Just a few years ago, when his Korean dark comedy “Parasite” won the 2020 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, the writer and director Bong Joon Ho ribbed Americans for their aversion to “the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles.” But in 2024, “The Sympathizer” is among a growing number of American works — including the recent prestige films “Minari” (2020), “Past Lives” (2023) and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (2022); the television epics “Pachinko” (2022) and “Shogun” (2024); and the family-friendly series “Ms. Marvel” (2022) and “American Born Chinese” (2023) — that use Asian languages to bring additional depth and nuance to their stories.

“I don’t think it is just a temporary blip,” said Minjeong Kim, the director of the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies at San Diego State University. “The trend has shifted.”

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John Considine’s essay “Why do large historical dictionaries give so much pleasure to their owners and users?” (from the Proceedings of Euralex 1998) is not especially perceptive (“When large historical dictionaries are opened, they may give certain limited kinds of pleasure […] An analogous case is that of etymological information, which is also not particularly useful, but much enjoyed by readers”), but it has a good number of lively quotes, mainly about the OED; e.g. from a New Statesman review c. 1910:

[Large dictionaries] are something more than works of reference … a large dictionary is first-class reading. Murray’s [the Oxford English Dictionary] would be as good a companion on a desert island as a man could hope for, as, apart from the history of the words, the quotations are endlessly entertaining in themselves. It is like having all the birthday books and literary calendars ever written rolled into one.

Or this from Rose Macaulay:

[…] having heaved one of the somewhat ponderous volumes of this mighty work from its shelf (this is one of the [main] ways in which I keep in good athletic training) I continue to read in it at random, since it would be waste to heave it back at once. I need not expatiate on the inexhaustible pleasure to be extracted from the perusal of this dictionary, from the tasting of this various feast of language, etymology, and elegant extracts from all the periods of English literature.

(I supplied “main” from a Google Books snippet of Macaulay’s text; alas, Considine is one of the many writers careless with their quotes.)

And from Arnold Bennett: “I have been buying it in parts for nearly forty years and am still buying it. The longest sensational serial ever written!” Good stuff. (Via an eudæmonist.)

Madeleine Schwartz has a thoughtful and wide-ranging piece in the NY Times Magazine (archived) that begins with her own background:

My mother is American, and my father is French; they split up when I was about 3 months old. I grew up speaking one language exclusively with one half of my family in New York and the other language with the other in France. It’s a standard of academic literature on bilingual people that different languages bring out different aspects of the self. But these were not two different personalities but two separate lives. In one version, I was living with my mom on the Upper West Side and walking up Columbus Avenue to get to school. In the other, I was foraging for mushrooms in Alsatian forests or writing plays with my cousins and later three half-siblings, who at the time didn’t understand a word of English. The experience of either language was entirely distinct, as if I had been given two scripts with mirroring supportive casts. In each a parent, grandparents, aunts and uncles; in each, a language, a home, a Madeleine.

She moved to Paris in October 2020 and “realized my fluency had its limitations: I hadn’t spoken French with adults who didn’t share my DNA.” She cites Julie Sedivy, who we’ve talked about a number of times, and describes her own difficulties in learning to use French as an adult:

Compared with English, French is slower, more formal, less direct. The language requires a kind of politeness that, translated literally, sounds subservient, even passive-aggressive. I started collecting the stock phrases that I needed to indicate polite interaction. “I would entreat you, dear Madam …” “Please accept, dear sir, the assurances of my highest esteem.” It had always seemed that French made my face more drawn and serious, as if all my energy were concentrated into the precision of certain vowels. English forced my lips to widen into a smile.

But going back to English wasn’t so easy, either. I worried about the French I learned somehow infecting my English. I edit a magazine, The Dial, which I founded in part to bring more local journalists and writers to an English-speaking audience. But as I worked on texts by Ukrainians or Argentines or Turks, smoothing over syntax and unusual idioms into more fluid English prose, I began to doubt that I even knew what the right English was.

She then moves on to more general considerations:
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The linguist Sally Thomason (see this 2017 post) posted this at Facebook:

It wasn’t so long ago that I learned the word pretendian, which refers to a person who falsely claims Native American or First Nations identity. I just re-discovered, in my Salish-Ql’ispe dictionary files, that there’s a word for that: qlixwi7Ci ‘an Indian wannabe, someone pretending to be an Indian’. Now I’m wondering how many indigenous North American languages have a word with that meaning — or, for that matter, how many Indigenous languages elsewhere in the world have equivalent words. Does anyone out there know?

Good question, but I suspect outside of North America there are not many indigenous identities members of majority populations would be interested in claiming, at least in sufficient quantities there would be a word for it. But what do I know?

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!