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I would like to join my colleague Geoff Pullum in celebrating Jan Freeman’s superb takedown of that mangiest of stuffed owls, Strunk and White’s inescapable The Elements of Style, which has just undergone its latest restuffing, this time with illustrations by Maira Kalman (it’s been taxidermized more often than Lenin’s corpse). A sample:

It was never a seamless creation, to be sure; the 1959 first edition merely sandwiched Strunk’s 1918 handbook for his Cornell students, lightly edited, between White’s introduction and his essay on prose style. But at least you knew Strunk was Strunk, vintage 1918, and White was White, circa 1958. Succeeding revisions, instead of blending the disparate parts, have left ”Elements” a hodgepodge, its now-antiquated pet peeves jostling for space with 1970s taboos and 1990s computer advice.
(The illustrated ”Elements” is essentially the 1999 edition, with a couple of small restorations from the 1918 original. Not quite a restoration, alas, in the case of Strunk’s introduction: The proofreaders overlooked one of his ”Words Often Misspelled,” so the opening sentence now promises ”to give in brief space the principle requirements of plain English style.”)
Scanning the recent editions, you sometimes wonder what could possibly have been cut, given the absurdity of what remains. Don’t use claim to mean ”assert”? Mark Twain did it in 1869, the year Strunk was born. Don’t contact anyone? It’s a ”vague and self-important” verb—or so people said in the 1920s, when it was new. Don’t use they to refer to ”a distributive subject” like everybody—unless you’re E.B. White: ”But somebody taught you, didn’t they?” says a character in ”Charlotte’s Web.”

Ouch. I know I can’t talk you Strunk-lovers out of your affection, but can you at least look on the damn book as an affectionate portrait of a crotchety former teacher and not as a guide to English, a task for which it is manifestly unsuited? Let it sit harmlessly on the mantelpiece and glare out at the unruly world with its glassy eyes.

Lameen Souag at Jabal al-Lughat has a post about a language hitherto unknown to me (and almost everyone):

A tantalizingly brief note of 1931 in the Gold Coast Review describes an ethnic group called the Mpre, found only in the village of Butie in central Ghana (8° 52′ N, 1° 15′ W) near the confluence of the White and Black Voltas, apart from a few emigrants in Debre. According to the author’s description, the Mpre people, once more widespread, were reduced to a single village in the course of comparatively recent wars with the Asante. Noting that their language was “different to that of the surrounding tribes”, he lists 106 words of Mpre. This short vocabulary appears to be the only existing record of the language, which is believed to be extinct. The gap is all the more unfortunate because Mpre turns out to be of some taxonomic significance. It is not closely related to any of its neighbors, and Heine and Nurse (2000) treat it as unclassified. A friend of mine’s paper dealing partly with this will be appearing sometime soonish, but I won’t spoil the surprise.
You might think, given all this, that it was impossible to retrieve any information on its grammar. However, you would be wrong! Fellow language geeks may find it an interesting exercise to try their hand at extracting grammar information from the wordlist, which Blench gives a copy of [actually he says they’re “available from the author at r.blench@odi.org.uk”], before reading on…

You can go to Lameen’s post for the details; Wikipedia has a brief article on Mpre, with citations.

A while back I asked if anyone could tell me who was responsible for “the change [in Russian punctuation] (deplorable, in my view) from an intuitive system of the kind Dostoyevsky used to the rule-based system familiar to all modern readers”; nobody answered, but I was reading about Aleksei Remizov in Georgii Adamovich’s smarmy but enlightening collection of biographical/critical essays Odinochestvo i svoboda [Solitude and freedom] when the answer leaped out at me: “…убедить, что наша школьная грамматика произвольна и неосновательно-тиранична, что мы сами себя обворовали, доверившись Гроту и другим лжезаконодателям…” Grot, that was it! (Not that far from my wild guesses: “Korff? Gets? Shtumpf?”) So I googled him and found a nice biography and a Russian Wikipedia article on punctuation, which I am memorializing here in case I want them again.

Back to the September issue of Poetry; this time I want to praise a poem by Mike Chasar called “Conches on Christmas,” which happily for all of us is online (happily for you because you can read the whole thing, for me because it makes it a lot easier to quote). I love rhyme and meter and the whole kitbag of traditional poetic technique, but I’m aware that English poetry can no longer be constrained within those bounds (it requires a tremedous effort of will and imagination to write a good sonnet these days), so I’m especially happy when a poet is able to dance comfortably to the new music in an old pattern. I read the first stanza:

Diluvian, draggled and derelict posse, this
barnacled pod so pales
next to everything we hear of red tides and pilot whales
that a word like “drama” makes me sound remiss

and relaxed into pleasurable anticipation when I realized the rhymes were unobtrusive and exact, the meter irregular but confident, and the syntax complex enough to make reading further a compelling adventure:

except that there
was a kind of littoral drama in the way the shells
silently, sans the heraldry of bells,
neatly, sans an astrological affair,

and swiftly, sans a multitude of feet, flat-out arrived—

and at that I simultaneously cracked up at the transition from the solemn “silently, sans the heraldry of bells” to the bathetic “swiftly, sans a multitude of feet” (which instantly brought to mind “And this was odd, because, you know,/ They hadn’t any feet“) and marveled at the sonic sculpture of the line “and swiftly, sans a multitude of feet, flat-out arrived”—and I gobbled up the rest of the poem with undiminished pleasure, which I now urge you to do. When you get back, you can hit the Extended Entry for a few linguistic observations.

[Read more…]

While I was at the bookstore, I picked up the September issue of Poetry magazine on the strength of several poems (like “On the Metro“) by C.K. Williams, with his wonderful long lines, and a long essay about Richard Wilbur, one of my favorite living poets, by Phyllis Rose. But at the moment I’m going to quote one of the sections of Michael Hofmann‘s “Sing Softer: A Notebook”:

I think I’ve probably always been drawn to the foreign in English. When I first came across the strange and lovely word “macaronics,” I wanted to use it for a title. There’s a kind of joyful hopscotch, a cavalierism, a dandyishness, an enrichment, about alien presences in English, which otherwise remains for me a chewed, utilitarian, mercantile language. These importations are the making of Shakespeare. They are there in Walt Whitman, that quintessentially American poet, even if Henry James (of all people!), complained about his predilection for “the other languages.” They are there in Stevens, who claimed English and French were one language, and in Pound, who wrote Chinese in English, and Provençal in English, and Latin in English. I sometimes think the only Eliot I really like are the two French poems. These importations are in Lowell, even though he’s as heavily monoglot as a linebacker; in one of his Montale versions in Imitations it says: “The scirocco gunned the dead stucco with sand”—neither Italianate noun in Montale’s original! (Imitations was a huge act of will on the part of Lowell to internationalize and modernize himself by his bootstraps.)

I don’t understand the “chewed, utilitarian, mercantile” bit (what, Beowulf? after that it’s all alien presences) or “monoglot as a linebacker,” but I like the bit about Lowell and Montale. Anybody know which Montale poem Lowell was reworking? I don’t have Imitations.

I was in Lenox this morning, happily browsing Matt Tannenbaum’s The Bookstore (so old-school they don’t have a website, but probably the best literary bookstore in the Berkshires), when I found a new book about the Jewish community in New York a century ago, A Fire in Their Hearts by Tony Michels (you can read part of the introduction and first chapter here in a pdf file). The introduction explained something I hadn’t known about the linguistic world of the immigrants from Russia:

The origin of the Jewish labor movement can be traced to the convergence of two disparate immigrant groups in a single section of lower Manhattan. When large numbers of eastern European Jews started arriving on New York’s Lower East Side, they discovered a thriving socialist labor movement among German (mostly non-Jewish) immigrants, who constituted the majority of the area’s population into the 1880s. A number of Jews, mainly Russian-speaking intellectuals, started learning the German language so they could mix with their neighbors and read their publications. German socialists welcomed the “Russians” and encouraged them to organize Jewish workers into unions and socialist groups of their own. They provided financial assistance, publicity, organizational models, and ideological guidance. With their help, Russian Jews created their labor movement in a German image. They experienced an unusual kind of Americanization, one guided not by native-born elites but by a larger, already established immigrant group. Through socialism, Russian Jews did not become so much Americanized as German-Americanized.

The German socialist influence led to a second interesting twist in the “Americanization” of immigrant Jews, particularly regarding the Yiddish language. To organize Jewish workers, Russian-speaking intellectuals needed to employ Yiddish, the spoken language of nearly all eastern European Jewish immigrants. But many of the intellectuals either did not know Yiddish or had rejected it years earlier as a marker of cultural backwardness. They had to learn or relearn the zhargon, or Jewish vernacular, thousands of miles from Europe’s Yiddish-speaking heartland. This return to Yiddish was initially justified as a short-term concession necessary only until immigrants learned English. Yet the trend toward Yiddish gathered momentum as the number of immigrants increased. Over the next four decades, Russian-speaking intellectuals continued to adopt Yiddish so they could take part in the East Side’s political and cultural activities. Some intellectuals even began to glorify the once-scorned zhargon as the authentic voice of “the folk masses.” They advocated a full-blown cultural renaissance in Yiddish, which they hoped would serve indefinitely as the primary medium of Jewish culture in the United States. Although the movement was controversial, proponents of yidishe kultur helped animate the new socialist culture arising from the Jewish labor movement. From Russian to Yiddish via German: such was the circuitous path of Americanization on New York’s Lower East Side.

Who knew? Well, you maybe, but not me. And may I remark that bookstores have been at least as much of an education to me as schools.

Update (March 2022). The Bookstore now has a website, and a spiffy one too.

I was just asked about the origin of the phrase “can’t hold a candle to,” and now that I’ve looked it up I’m going to share it with you all. In the words of the OED:

to hold a candle to another: lit. to assist him by holding the candle while he works; hence, to help in a subordinate position. not to be able or fit to hold a candle to: not fit to hold even a subordinate position to, nothing to be compared to.

My favorite of the citations: 1773 BYROM Poems, Others aver that he to Handel Is scarcely fit to hold a candle.

I’ve been meaning to write about this ever since Glyn sent me the link some days ago: John Simmons, the Oxford librarian who built their Slavic collection, died Sept. 22 at the age of 90. I hadn’t known of him, but the Times obituary makes him sound well worth knowing:

After war service and three more years at Birmingham, Simmons was invited to Oxford to fill the post of librarian-lecturer in charge of Slavonic books, created for him by Konovalov. His buccaneering spirit showed itself in August 1953 when he flabbergasted the director of the Lenin Library, Moscow, by turning up unannounced, armed with a list of desiderata and the catalogues of Oxford University Press, to propose a book exchange. In return for OUP publications, scientific material and two runs of Punch, Oxford received thousands of valuable, out-of-print Russian publications.

Simmons’s proudest achievements were his part in building up the retrospective collections of Russian books in the Taylorian and Bodleian libraries and the creation in Bodley of the only specialised Slavonic reading room in the country. He considered, with justification, that it was these library collections, together with the remarkable group of Russian academic teachers recruited by Konovalov, Maurice Bowra and Isaiah Berlin, that led to the establishment of Oxford as a unique centre for Slavonic studies…

At All Souls, which became his second home, he was a genial host, an inspiring guide, and a fount of knowledge on college history, Oxford’s libraries, and a host of other subjects which he gladly put at the disposal of resident and visiting Fellows. He was a regular visitor to the Codrington Library; he sometimes came in to read The Times, and would inquire of former colleagues: “Has anybody interesting died recently?” His hundreds of publications are listed in his Autobibliography (1975, with two later supplements), one of several samizdat publications composed on his typewriter and reproduced in limited editions.

Margaret Marks of Transblawg has an interesting post on “Pseudoenglisch,” elements of the German vocabulary that look like English words but would not be recognized by an actual English-speaker, like Talkmaster ‘moderator’; she links to the Fruchtbringendes Wörterbuch, a Wiki site that defines such terms in standard German, or tries to—as she says, far too many of the entries are actual English: “Perhaps this is the topic where the Wikipedia concept won’t work, because the more confused Germans add to it, the more useless it will become!” Unfortunately, the definitions aren’t always reliable, either; “Arm candy” is defined as schmückendes Beiwerk ’embellishment, accessory’ when it actually means (in the words of the New Oxford American Dictionary) ‘a sexually attractive companion accompanying a person, esp. a celebrity, at social events.’ I think a reference site like this should definitely be maintained by people who know what they’re talking about rather than by all comers. Still, a nice idea and an enjoyable site to browse despite the problems.

A strange, choppy essay by Murray Bail that’s ostensibly a review of the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina (and if you’re going to call yourself Volokhonsky instead of Volokhonskaya, why Karenina rather than the Karenin Nabokov was so keen on? but I digress) but is really a series of thoughts on literature and translation. It’s tricked out with a nutty false dichotomy between “Europe” and “English or American culture,” and it comes to a stop without actually ending, but there are enough nice bits along the way it’s worth a read:

It is only a matter of time in a Russian novel before a sturgeon arrives on a plate, a “fine sturgeon” or a “large sturgeon”. It is like the appearance of bicycles in Irish novels, or the dog wagging its tail in every other Tom Roberts painting. The sturgeon makes its entrance on a plate held by an old footman in a greasy shirt. At other times a landlord of an inn brings the fish half cold to a filthy table. At a rundown estate a traveller is ushered into the presence of the impoverished landowner, tucking into a local sturgeon (Gogol). Russian characters have healthy appetites. They’ve been travelling on bad roads, in badly sprung carriages. In the 1950s, in Adelaide, reading about “black bread” sounded not tasty at all, but peasant-poor, positively wretched; in a Russian novel it coloured the domestic scene – made it extra-foreign. Where else in literature do you find a languid landowner pondering a pleasantly wasted life, while at the same time reaching out, as if for another slice of sturgeon, for some essential, life-saving truth?

(Via wood s lot.)