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1) Nic Dafis of Morfablog alerted me to the BBC radio drama based on David Jones’s In Parenthesis (which I discussed here, here, and here); it’s an hour and a half long, and you can listen to it by following the link on this page. It’s only online for a week from last Sunday, so I guess through this coming weekend; sorry about the delay, but at least it’s still there. It’s very well done, with lovely Welsh accents and restrained use of WWI sound effects; it was worth it for me just to learn that reveille is pronounced ruh-VALLEY Over There. (I followed along in my copy of the book, and noted some odd changes; “night woods” for “night weeds” is presumably just a misreading, but why did they change the song “Casey Jones” to “Tipperary” and “bull-shit” to “muck”??)

2) That great NYC institution Film Forum is currently showing my favorite movie of all time, Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, and tomorrow will begin a two-week run of perhaps my favorite Godard movie, Two or Three Things I Know About Her, about which I wrote here. (The title in French is 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle, which in idiomatic translation should be ‘one or two things I know about her,’ but the clunky literal version has become firmly embedded.) It’s a rare chance to see these great movies (especially the Godard, for which I thought there were no longer any screenable prints); don’t miss ’em if you can.

Jack Shafer has done a follow-up on the “bus plunge” piece I wrote about here; it turns out the headline for the “bisexual snail” story is probably unrecoverable:

Tina Orzoco of ProQuest valiantly searched the company’s vast databases in an attempt to locate the hed for Allan M. Siegal’s favorite K-hed of all time—”Most snails are both male and female, according to the Associated Press.” Orzoco failed, Siegal writes, because timeless filler such as the snail story ran in early editions only, “and was replaced thereafter by live news. And the microfilm edition of the Times—now the basis of ProQuest—was the final edition.”

But on the brighter side, Bernard Adelsberger guarantees that the old Philadelphia Bulletin once published this K-hed:

No Blood in Ants
Ants have no blood.

I want to recommend Geoff Pullum’s thorough analysis in Language Log of the following cryptic statement from Simon Jenkins in the Guardian: “They are no longer the subject of that mighty verb, only its painful object.” It cost him a great deal of effort even to figure out what the verb was, but it seems that Jenkins was trying to say that the personages under discussion were forced to react to events rather than initiating actions. Grammatical and terminological confusion doesn’t make for clear statements.

And while I’m at it, let me heartily second Mark Liberman’s recommendation that everyone acquire and consult a copy of Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage (or its big brother Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage); Mark says “Geoff [Pullum] used blurb-worthy phrases like ‘the best usage book I know of’ and ‘this book … is utterly wonderful’, and I agree with him”—and I agree with them both. (Read Mark’s post for a convincing refutation of the myth that it’s grammatically wrong to say “5 items or less.”)

The excellent Conrad has alerted me to the blogovial existence of Raminagrobis, a comparably learned and literate personage who began with a promise “to vent my rampaging egomania, register my disgust and rage at all those things that don’t really matter to anyone, exercise my critical faculties, and fulfil a long-standing ambition to be a boorish old fool with too much time on his hands,” but in fact writes about all manner of interesting things, most recently the Fagles Aeneid, jumping off from a dislike of the way Fagles rendered the famous line sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt and comparing many other versions before settling on that of my own favorite Robert Fitzgerald as the most satisfactory. The name, incidentally, is from Rabelais; the motto/URL “When her name you write, you blot” is from the Urquhart translation, but as far as I can tell nothing in the original corresponds to that particular line. Odd.

When I was growing up, the newspapers always carried tiny stories on the inside pages about world events that didn’t really affect anyone in the U.S. and that garnered at most a bemused “Huh!” from the reader before he or she passed on to the wars and rumors of wars; you can see a 1959 NY Times page with such stories circled in red here. There were cabinet changes in far-off countries and ambassadorial appointments to far-off countries and extreme weather events in far-off countries, and one special subcategory of these one-paragraph items (which it turns out are known in the trade as K-heds) was the bus plunge, always so called: “Brazil Bus Plunge Kills 26,” “10 Die in Colombia Bus Plunge,” etc. Jack Shafer has done a wonderfully nostalgic piece about these filler items in Slate; it turns out that they were an artifact of bygone methods of newspaper production:

No matter what their editorial policies, newspapers of the era had a physical need for short articles. Typesetting was still a time-consuming industrial art, with craftsmen pouring molten metal into molds—”hot type”—to form a newspaper’s words, sentences, and paragraphs. Because the length of a news story couldn’t be calculated precisely until type was set, makeup editors would have to physically cut overlong pieces from the bottom to make them fit. If a story ran short, they would plug the hole with brief filler stories typeset earlier in the day.

Once such holes no longer existed, thanks to computer typesetting, the need for filler stories vanished, and we no longer read about bus plunges in Peru and Nepal (“It was better when buses plunged in countries with short names”) on a regular basis.

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I recently stumbled on the archive of what began as Dhumbadji! but ended its career as the more sedate History of Language, a publication of the (Melbourne) Association for the History of Language whose history is briefly reviewed here. It was exciting enough to have all these abstracts (in most cases) about topics like (from the second issue) An Introduction to Oceanic Linguistic Prehistory and (from the last one) Developing The Comparative Study Of The Histories Of Chinese Linguistics And European Linguistics and The Position of Etruscan in the Western Mediterranean Ancient Linguistic Landscape, but what really thrilled me was finding the best discussion of the “Chomskyan revolution” I’ve seen, Konrad Koerner’s The Anatomy of a Revolution in the Social Sciences: Chomsky in 1962. He emphasizes an aspect to which I hadn’t given enough thought, the financial; here’s a very enlightening quote from James McCawley, one of the beneficiaries of the “revolution” and its lavish government funding:

I maintain that government subsidisation of research and education, regardless of how benevolently and fairly it is administered, increases the likelihood of scientific revolutions for the worse, since it makes it possible for a subcommunity to increase its membership drastically without demonstrating that its intellectual credit so warrants. The kind of development that I have in mind is illustrated by the rapid growth of American universities during the late 1950s and 1960s, stimulated by massive spending by the federal government. This spending made is possible for many universities to start linguistics programs that otherwise would not have been started or would not have been started so early, or to expand existing programs much further than they would otherwise have been expanded. Given the situation of the early 1960s, it was inevitable that a large proportion of the new teaching jobs in linguistics would go to transformational grammarians. In the case of new programs, since at that time transformational grammar was the kind of linguistics in which it was most obvious that new and interesting things were going on, many administrators would prefer to get a transformational grammarian to organise the new program; in the case of expansion of existing programs, even when those who had charge of the new funds would not speculate their personal intellectual capital on the new theory, it was to their advantage to speculate their newfound monetary capital on it, since if the new theory was going to become influential, a department would have to offer instruction in it if the department was to attract students in numbers that were in keeping with its newfound riches. And with the first couple of bunches of students turned out by the holders of these new jobs, the membership of the transformational subcommunity swelled greatly.

And here’s Chomsky himself, responding to a 1971 question about why Syntactic Structures and many other works of his contained acknowledgments of support from agencies of the U.S. Department of Defense:

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A couple of years ago I posted about a South African fish called snoek, the subject of a New Yorker article by Calvin Trillin about a man’s obsession with it. That snoek is the Afrikaans descendent of Dutch snoek, which is the source of the English fish name snook, and oddly enough, the Oct. 30 New Yorker has an article (not online) by Ian Frazier on American snook and a man’s obsession with it. Frazier writes well, but I care little or nothing about fish and fishing, so I suspect the reason I kept reading was the word snook itself, so odd and such fun to say. But I was taken aback when I got to this, on page 59: “This time when seeking a guide, I asked around for one with credentials for snook (which people there [in Everglades City, Florida] pronounce to rhyme with ‘fluke’).” Well, how else would you pronounce it? Then it occurred to me it could perfectly well be rhymed with cook, and sure enough, when I checked my trusty Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate that was the first pronunciation given, though the one favored by me and Everglades City, Florida is also accepted—and is, indeed, the only one given in the OED. I suspect my assumed pronunciation (for I’ve never had any contact with the fish or those who love it) was based on the etymology; the Dutch say /snuk/, so I did too. My question, of course, is: if you are actually familiar with this denizen of the deep, how do you say it (and where do you hail from)? Fluke or cook?

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That’s the burning question posed by Sarah Crown in a Guardian article:

Believe me, I’ve tried nearly everything. I used to favour the popular “by genre” approach: different shelves for poetry, plays, fiction, non-fiction, travel, cookery … The problem there, though, is that the travel shelf ends up only half-full, and then you’re faced with the problem of what to complete it with. So you pick cookery, but cookery spills over onto the next shelf … and so it goes. Even if you decide that, despite its flaws, the genre system is for you, there are further choices to be made. Do you organise each genre alphabetically? Do you attempt the infinitely tricky but profoundly impressive, if you can pull it off, genre-bleed – science into sci-fi, history books into historical fiction? (Actually, the latter would be a non-starter in our house as my boyfriend is a historian and is sceptical – nay, contemptuous – of the entire historical fiction field).

Perhaps you forsake genre altogether and go alphabetical. If so, does it offend your eye to see towering hardbacks pressed up against slim volumes of poetry? Does the resulting disjunction persuade you that you should abandon the alphabet and arrange your books entirely on aesthetic grounds, by size or – whisper it – colour? And is there any form of classification that won’t break down within the first three months, leaving you surrounded by piles of books that you know, in your heart, will never come within striking distance of a shelf until the next time you move, when the whole process begins again?

There are in fact people who arrange books by color; me, I use the traditional arrangement by subject, with history, travel, religion, language, and Russia-related books up here in my office; literature, poetry, music, and science down in my wife’s office; and baseball, science fiction, Vietnam, and other miscellaneous topics down in the basement (having a basement at last was one of the joys of buying this house). Order within each genre depends; in literature, it’s alphabetical by author, in history it’s by region and period, and in travel… hmm, travel appears to be pretty chaotic. I do rearrange them from time to time: the growing pile of Russian-history books on the floor persuaded me to move a bunch of religion books elsewhere and allow an expansionist Russia to invade their former shelves. With over 5,000 books now, there’s bound to be some pushing and shoving. (Thanks for the link, Glyn!)

A BBC News story by Sean Coughlan describes a new dictionary and the language it represents:

Are you a “badmash”? And if you had to get somewhere in a hurry, would you make an “airdash”? Maybe you should be at your desk working, instead you’re reading this as a “timepass”.
These are examples of Hinglish, in which English and the languages of south Asia overlap, with phrases and words borrowed and re-invented.
It’s used on the Indian sub-continent, with English words blending with Punjabi, Urdu and Hindi, and also within British Asian families to enliven standard English.
A dictionary of the hybrid language has been gathered by Baljinder Mahal, a Derby-based teacher and published this week as The Queen’s Hinglish…
This collision of languages has generated some flavoursome phrases. If you’re feeling “glassy” it means you need a drink. And a “timepass” is a way of distracting yourself.
A hooligan is a “badmash” and if you need to bring a meeting forward, you do the opposite of postponing – in Hinglish you can “prepone”.
There are also some evocatively archaic phrases – such as “stepney”, which in south Asia is used to mean a spare, as in spare wheel, spare mobile or even, “insultingly, it must be said, a mistress,” says Ms Mahal.
Its origins aren’t in Stepney, east London, but Stepney Street in Llanelli, Wales, where a popular brand of spare tyre was once manufactured…

For more on “prepone,” see this old LH thread. And thanks for the link, Paul!

Two words I never dreamed existed:

1) “The wooden library, or xylothek (from the Greek words for tree, xylon, and storing place, theke) … is generally speaking a collection of simple pieces of wood specimens placed together in some kind of cupboard. In a refined form it is in the shape of ‘books’ where you can find details from the tree inside, everything arranged as a ‘library’.” More here, with pictures. It’s not in the OED, but it should be. What a wonderful phenomenon! (Via wood s lot.)

2) “mongo (MAWNG.goh) n. Objects retrieved from the garbage.” The earliest citation is from James Brooke, “Sanitation art showings brighten workers’ image,” The New York Times, September 10, 1984. (A couple of years ago, the Times reviewed a book by Ted Botha called Mongo: Adventures in Trash.) I ran across the word while reading a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece [archived] by Ben McGrath on the “san men” of New York City and Robin Nagle, who studies them:

Nagle’s interests lie more with the trash collectors than with the trash, although the two intersect on the subject of “mongo”—sanitation lingo for “redeemed garbage” or the act of collecting it. (Nagle consulted a lexicographer, looking for help in tracking down the etymology, to no avail.) “Within the department, if you mongo or if you don’t—there’s kind of a dividing line,” she said. “ ‘He mongos.’ ‘Do you mongo?’ ‘Oh, mongo, are you kidding? I wouldn’t mongo.’ ” She paused. “Hell, I mongo, absolutely. And I have some pretty nice things.”

No, that one’s not in the OED either, though they do have Mongo “A Bantu language spoken by an African people living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire)” and mongo “A monetary unit of Mongolia, equivalent to one-hundredth of a tugrik.” I hope they’re busy working on that etymology while they prepare an entry.

Unrelated to language, but a very sobering fact from later in the piece: “nationally, fatality rates for sanitation workers, owing to the risks associated with loading trucks in the midst of moving traffic, are roughly three times those for firemen and policemen.” I tip my hat to sanitation workers everywhere, who never get enough respect.