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It’s always fun to make guesses about unfamiliar words. The Tensor has a post on this very subject, introducing “two separate bits of terminology associated with modern sport fencing: homologated and maraging.” If you already know these words, you’re presumably a fencer (and I’d be interested to know how you pronounce the latter, since it seems to have undergone a curious process of foreignizing in some circles in the few decades of its existence). If you don’t, take a stab (so to speak) at the meaning of “homologated jackets, britches, and masks” and “maraging blades” (or, more properly as far as I can tell, “maraged blades”). Then pop over to The Tensor and get the facts (which suprised me).

Addendum (2019). I just ran across this post and was alarmed at my fecklessness in having left the important facts to be discovered by visiting a post at The Tensor which might vanish away at any time. As it happens, it’s still there, but just in case:

ho·mol·o·gate: To approve, especially to confirm officially. (From Medieval Latin homologāre, homologāt-, from Greek homologein, ‘to agree’, from homologos, ‘agreeing’) […]

The word maraging actually refers to steel subjected to a particular heat treatment process to greatly increase its hardness. It’s derived from the words martensite (a kind of crystalline mineral that forms during the process) and aging, so it’s pronounced like the English words mar and aging. Live and learn.

Pok-ta-pok, according to the OED, is “the Maya name of the sacred ball game of Middle America, called tlachtli by the Aztecs, which was played on a court as a religious ritual. The object of the game was to knock a rubber ball through a stone ring, using only the hips, knees, and elbows.” Now, when I ran across this entry, it struck me forcibly because I recently got Long Hidden: The Olmec Series, a (superb) new CD by my favorite living bassist, William Parker (review), and one of the longer tracks is called “Pok-a-Tok,” about which Parker says “Pok-a-Tok is an Olmec ballgame whose object is to knock a four and a half pound rubber ball through a small ring using only the elbows, wrist, and hips.” At first I thought Parker simply got the name wrong (he’s a musician, not a linguist, as is shown by his absurd statement that “the Olmec spoke a dialect of the Manding language”), but when I googled it I got a large number of hits, though not nearly as many as for pok-ta-pok. So does anyone know if there is any basis for the variation—for instance, is one the Maya form and the other the Olmec—or is “pok-a-tok” simply a widespread error? And can the word be analyzed? The OED says simply “[Maya].”

Update. Jesse Sheidlower, Editor-at-Large of the Oxford English Dictionary, informs me that the revised OED entry for this term explains that the form pok-ta-pok is itself an error; the correct word in Yucatec Maya is actually pokolpok, and the ta- form is an error introduced by Frans Blom in 1932 and repeated throughout the literature. The classical Maya name for the game was pitz.

Further update. The September 2006 quarterly update of the OED just came out, and they’ve put the revised entry (dated June 2006) online. The etymology now reads:

[Alteration of, or error for, Yucatec Maya pokolpok (1877 in J. PIO PEREZ, Diccionario de la lengua Maya).
  Blom states (p. 497 of the article cited in quot. 1932) that he adopted the word to signify the game after consulting Juan Martinez Hernandez ‘the outstanding Maya linguist of today’. This inaccurate name remained current for some time. The classical Maya name was pitz.]

Joel Martinsen reports on a Chinese publication that makes me wish I knew Chinese:

Among all of the copycat urban lifestyle magazines, the paparazzi rags, and the ever-changing array of undistinguished special-interest publications that make up China’s periodicals market, Yaowen-Jiaozi (咬文嚼字) stands out as one of the most delightfully peculiar magazines available. With a title variously translated as “Correct Wording,” “Verbalism,” and “Chewing Words,” it turns a critical eye to the misuse and abuse of language in Chinese society…
Perhaps there’s a bit of guilty pleasure to be had in unmasking the usage foibles of major papers, but it’s done with a wink rather than a warning of impending social breakdown. The strongest condemnation is reserved for those who should know better: copyeditors who let malapropisms slip by, sign-makers who splash typos across storefronts, and monks in TV shows who mispronounce their Sanskrit transliterations.
In 2005, the magazine featured a different evening paper’s errors in each issue, while this year the scheduled targets are television stations. In addition to biting the popular media over language misuse, Yaowen-Jiaozi also chews on pressing usage questions: What’s the pronunciation of 峠, which appears in names in translations of Japanese novels? What’s the correct usage of · ? What are the usage differences between 三部曲 and 三步曲?

What fun! But lest you think they’re nothing but “a curmudgeonly group of conservative language pedants,” they’re quite willing to accomodate change when it makes sense to them:

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Thanks to a MetaFilter comment by xueexueg, I’ve discovered the Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini, which, as xueexueg says, will be the OED of older Italian. It’s only up to the letter D (and is only “quasi complete” for A and B) and uses only texts from before 1375, but it’s extremely comprehensive and fun to consult. Looking up amore (naturalmente!), we find first a full list of spellings (ammore, amò, amô, amor, amor’, âmor, amore, ämore, amori, amorre, amors, amur, amure, amuri, amurj, mor, ‘mor, ‘more), a list of collocations it occurs in (amare per amore, amor falso, amore fraterno, amore paterno, amor fino…), a set of definitions, and finally the heart of the entry, a list of citations illustrating each of the senses:

1 Sentimento di chi desidera o intrattiene un rapporto intimo ed esclusivo, spirituale o fisico, con un’altra persona; affetto intenso, passione.
[1] Raimb. de Vaqueiras, Contrasto, c. 1190 (gen.), 53, pag. 165: Si per m’amor ve chevei, / oguano morrei de frei: / tropo son de mala lei / li Provenzal.
[2] Giacomo da Lentini, c. 1230/50 (tosc.), 19c.1, pag. 275: Amor è un[o] desio che ven da core / per abondanza di gran piacimento…
[3] Pamphilus volg., c. 1250 (venez.), [Panfilo], pag. 47.20: E chascun amore lo qual non è pasudo, çoè saciado de çogi e de solaci, sì è debele et enfermo.
[4] Andrea da Grosseto (ed. Selmi), 1268 (tosc.), L. 3, cap. 19, pag. 256.5: Et sappi, che a l’amor perfetto fa fine ‘l tempo et non l’animo; perciò che, nonn- è in podestà dell’animo del lasciare e di rimanersi de l’amore.
[5] Giovanni, 1286 (prat.), 8, pag. 22: Dialtuccia piace(n)te i(n) aspecto, / suo viso rispre(n)de i(n) dilecto: / alchuno no(n) fue sì in p(er)fecto / amore. […]

A splendid project; I hope it’s well funded and perseveres to the end of the alphabet.

I have received a welcome shipment from Language Log Plaza: a copy of Far from the Madding Gerund, a collection of posts by Mark Liberman and Geoffrey K. Pullum from Language Log. Now, you might think: “Why should I pay for a book the entirety of whose contents is available online gratis?” But except to those frighteningly nouveau-siècle types who think books are a relic of the past, like clay tablets and slide rules, the experience of reading is much enhanced by being able to see the words in nice crisp type on a page that can be carried around, read while walking down the street, and (if inspiration strikes and one is not part of the books-are-sacred-objects crowd) annotated by hand. And this is a beautifully produced book (my hat is off to the publisher, William, James & Company): handsome, nicely laid out (with URLs and annotations in smaller-type sidebars), well indexed; hell, it even smells good. And it’s actually been proofread, which seems to be viewed as an unnecessary expense by most publishers these days; the only thing I’ve found to raise an eyebrow at so far is the failure to change quotes-within-quotes to single quotes in this (from page 25): “A grammatical, usage or pronunciation mistake made by “correcting” something that’s right to begin with. For example, use of the pronoun whom in ‘Whom shall I say is calling?'” But that’s extremely small potatoes.
And all of that is beside the real point, which is that this is a tremendous pleasure to read. I’ve read just about everything in it already, but I find myself inexorably drawn to read it all again. The first selection is one of my all-time favorite posts, last year’s The disappearing modal: for those who’ll believe anything, which contains this immortal exchange:

Q: Is James Cochran, then, nothing but a mendacious pontificating old windbag?
A: Yes, it would appear that he is an utter fraud.

I read that several times over when it appeared online (once, out loud, to my wife), and I’ve reread it again now with undiminished joy. The selection after that is They are a prophet, which promotes one of my favorite causes, singular they. Then comes The blowing of Strunk and White’s rules off, an attack on one of my favorite targets, and after that a demolition job on the Chicago Manual of Style‘s sadly deficient new grammar section (“They commissioned a tired rehash of traditional grammar repeating centuries-old errors of analysis instead of trying to obtain a more up-to-date presentation. A real lost opportunity that has lessened the authority of a wonderful reference book, one that on topics from punctuation to citation to indexing to editing can really be trusted”)… Well, it’s all good stuff, is what I’m trying to say.

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As an American, I’ve never actually had any experience with Bovril (and I can’t say I have any desire to), but I certainly know the word. Imagine my surprise when I was leafing through the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and encountered the following in the article on LYTTON, FIRST BARON (better known to me, and I presume you, as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose name lives on in the Bulwer-Lytton contest for bad writing):

His sf novel is The Coming Race (1871[…]), a utopia set in an underground lost world inhabited by an evolved form of Homo sapiens, larger and wiser than surface dwellers. This race derives its moral and physical virtue from vril, an electromagnetic form of energy of universal utility which fuels flying machines and automata, and even makes telepathy possible. (The UK beef-tea Bovril took its name from vril.)

This is no urban myth; the official website of the company that makes the stuff says “The name Bovril comes from an unusual word Johnston found in a book. ‘Vril’ was ‘an electric fluid’ which ‘cured diseases and established equilibrium of natural powers.’ He combined it with the first two letters of the Latin word for beef ‘Bos’.” But the OED’s etymology (yes, they have an entry for Bovril—they’re Brits, aren’t they?) says simply “f. L. bōs, bovis, ox, cow.” Were they ashamed to cite a trashy popular novel? If so, they’d gotten over it by the time the Visor-Vywer fascicle appeared in 1920; it includes the entry:

vril
[Invented by Lytton.]
A mysterious force imagined as having been discovered by the people described in one of Lytton’s novels.
1871 LYTTON Coming Race vii. 47 These people consider that in vril they have arrived at the unity in natural energic agencies, which has been conjectured by many philosophers.

The last citation is from 1888 (Pall Mall G. 27 Dec. 4/1 If so,.. we are within hailing distance of the discovery of vril); I think it should be brought back into circulation. Use the vril, Luke!

Darija “is the term used by speakers of Maghreb Arabic to name the varieties they speak” (it’s also called darja); Lucy Melbourne, an American professor and creative writer who teaches English and American literature at Mohammed V University in Rabat, has an interesting discussion of it in the Morocco Times:

Darija, what the participants at the Salon du Livre clearly recognized as the real deal, is the spoken vernacular Arabic of Morocco and, aside from a few songs, has rarely been written down. Hence it is a kind of fluid, oral medium in which people swim in common but never see themselves in the fixed reflection of individual reading.

Animated by the rhythms of Morocco’s hypnotic storytellers and stinging with the barbs of village gossip, Darija reaches deep into the Moroccan soul, shaping its psyche and its often irreverent wit. The written language, on the other hand, is in its turn rarely spoken: the sinuous curves dotted and dashed of classical Arabic are reserved for the print media—and the Koran.

When spoken, classical Arabic, like most languages cut off from their umbilical in sound, is pontificated as sermon or filtered through the sterilized, hot potato equivalent of a BBC announcer anxious to disguise his class origins.

In short, Moroccans are linguistic schizophrenics: if literate—and only 51% are—they must leap a thousand times a day the chasm between body and mind, between the organic timbre and gestures of their mother tongue and the patriarchal reverberations of a silently echoing script.

She describes the attempts of some Moroccans to write books in dialect, and the opposition evoked (reminiscent of the language controversy in Greece, which saw riots break out over a vernacular translation of the Gospels). A fascinating read, and I thank Liosliath for bringing it to my attention.

Incidentally, I learned about darja from Lameen Souag, whose Grammar of Algerian Darja is no longer available at its former Geocities site. Lameen says, “I hope to reestablish my website sometime soon – can anyone recommend a good free/very cheap website hosting service other than Geocities?” Anyone who can help him out will be doing a service both for linguistics and for me: I need to update my links!

My wife asked me about the surname Aiuvalasit, which she had just encountered in a list, and I drew a complete blank. Googling has [wrongly, apparently] convinced me that it’s a Jewish name, but that’s as far as I can get. Any further information (pronunciation, alternate spellings, and of course etymology) will be much appreciated!
Update. It seems Ajovalasit is a much more common spelling, and it’s apparently a Sicilianized Greek name; I’m still hoping for more details.

I just found (via wood s lot) a wonderful interview with one of my favorite novelists, Richard Powers, but when I realized the interview was from 1999 I thought “I must have linked to it before and just forgotten about it.” When I checked, though, I discovered to my horror that I’ve never even mentioned Powers on LH. So it’s high time I informed you all that the man’s combination of intelligence, wide knowledge, and brilliant writing is unparalleled, and you should all run out and start reading him right away. The book that made me a believer was Galatea 2.2 (which begins “It was like so, but wasn’t”), but you could perfectly well start with his first, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. Here’s a quote from the interview to give you an idea of his approach to writing:

My idea is that successful writing advances as its own, complex, living hierarchy, one that mirrors the kind of complex hierarchy that we living beings are. We exist at the cellular level or even the nucleic or chemical level, at the level of organs and systems, at the level of the complete organism, and at the social level. All of these different levels have their analogies in a good story, levels from diction on up to meaning, and in a good story, all these levels advance simultaneously, in concert. We may not even be aware of these phenomena as we read, but in great fiction, all the parts and subassemblies of creation are integral and mutually supporting. You could look at a sentence of a well-made story and see it as a fractal microcosm of the entire workings of the story. You can hear in the syntax, or in the diction of a sentence, the sensibility that drives voice, and the voice that drives character, and the character that drives drama. Again, a good story exemplifies a continuum, both discrete and continuous, and it works because all of its levels participate in a negotiated conversation with one another….

The novelist’s job is to say what it means to be alive. I don’t think there are any wrong ways of doing that; I think there are wrong ways of not doing that, of avoiding it, but I think there’s nothing that you could throw into that hopper that would be irrelevant. The more you can treat—providing you can continue to synthesize it into something that’s both intellectually and emotionally engaging—the better. Right now a lot of fiction restricts itself totally to dramatic revelation, raising a lot of proscriptions about the way that fiction can and can’t function. The direct introduction of discursive material has been considered anathema for a long time. I’ve been trying in different ways to violate that prohibition from my first book on. True, you can get more emotive power over your reader by dramatic revelation than by discursive narrative. But you can get more connection with discursive narrative! The real secret is to triangulate between these two modes, getting to places that neither technique could reach in isolation. Because that’s how the human organism works. We employ all sorts of intelligences, from low-level bodily intuitions to high-level, syllogistic rationalism. It’s not a question of which way of knowing the world is the right one.

I was struck by the fact that Powers, like myself, spent time in Thailand as a kid, though he was there a decade later and thus saw Bangkok as “a capital for American servicemen on R & R” rather than the quiet little city laced with canals that I remember.

Incidentally, wood s lot is full of good stuff today, including various links celebrating May and Giuseppe Ungaretti (“Translating Ungaretti“) and a new online magazine called Otoliths that looks worth investigating.

Tiago Tresoldi, a Brazilian blogger, is reposting entries from here and Language Log in Portuguese on his site Ars Rhetorica. I’d like to thank him for taking the trouble; may his efforts help jump-start a renaissance of linguistic understanding in the home of o jogo bonito! Here’s the start of his version of my Bakhtin post, Smoking your own:

Fumando tudo
Esta é uma história terrível com toques de humor negro em si. Mikhail Bakhtin passou os últimos anos da década de 1930 trabalhando naquilo que muitos consideram sua obra-prima, um estudo sobre o romance alemão do século XVIII (em especial, o Bildungsroman). Vou citar o restante da história a partir de dois livros publicados, já que há muito material impreciso rodando pela internet (por exemplo, algumas pessoas situam o fato durante o cerco a Leningrado, mas pelo que sei Bakhtin vivia nas cercanias de Moscou durante a guerra). O primeiro é a p. xiii da introdução de Michael Holquist à coleção de Bakhtin Speech Genres and Other Late Essays…

As lagniappe, here’s a piquant bit from Beckett’s short monologue Krapp’s Last Tape, courtesy of wood s lot:

(reading from dictionary). State—or condition—of being—or remaining—a widow—or widower. (Looks up. Puzzled.) Being—or remaining?… (Pause. He peers again at dictionary. Reading.) “Deep weeds of viduity”… Also of an animal, especially a bird… the vidua or weaver bird… Black plumage of male… (He looks up. With relish.) The vidua-bird!