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Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker essay on Camille Pissarro (archived) is full of things I didn’t know, but this passage is what brings it to LH:

Pissarro was born in 1830 on the island of St. Thomas, then a Danish colony. His parents were Sephardic Jews, with a typical combination of a hyper-strong clan identity and a weak national one. He was sent to study in France at eleven, and fell in love with French culture; forced to return home six years later, he found himself desperate to get off the little island. The result was that he spent a couple of meandering years in Venezuela, not a promising place for the kind of artist he had decided he would become. Though he got back to Paris when he was twenty-five, he never felt, or was allowed to feel, fully at home there, or anywhere. […] (Even his name was uncertain; trilingual, he signed his paintings in the Spanish style, as Pizarro, like the conquistador, until well into the eighteen-fifties.)

I guess it’s a good thing he changed his name; one less multivalent-surname problem in the world. (Compare Sollogub/Sologub.) And speaking of nomenclatural confusion, I feel it is my duty to explicate this bit of toponymy:

The young painters left the Louvre to drink and argue over what was to be done, and the cafés gave them places to do so. The Café Guerbois, on Grande Rue de Batignolles, became the favorite.

You might think “Grande Rue de Batignolles” is just a supersized reference to the rue des Batignolles, but no, it’s an earlier (pre-1868) name of the nearby avenue de Clichy.
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I happened on Ritesh Babu’s Comics I Loved In 2023 and, not being a comics fan, I didn’t read much of it, but I was struck by his rave for his first choice, Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed:

This is, to me, the undisputed comic of the year. Mohamed’s been serializing this saga in Egyptian comics for a while now. But it’s finally been translated into English and presented to us in a beautiful package. Set in an alternate history Cairo, Shubeik Lubeik/Your Wish Is My Command is a sci-fi character drama built around intricate character portraits set in a ‘post-colonial’ context, wherein we see people from a variety of backgrounds wrestle with life. It’s Black & White comics, with deliberate uses of color when necessary, and it’s as formally audacious and bold as you’ll ever see, from its deployment of Charts as a tool for intricate personal emotional expression to ‘aesthetic break-ups’ and world-building. […] I’ve recommended it to everyone and their mother at this point, but it still doesn’t feel enough. This is a book that’s worth every second spent on it, and if by the end, it leaves you with such impact that it feels impossible to forget. This is not only the best comic of this year, this is one of my favorite comics ever period. I adore the way Mohamed has chosen to translate the book from Arabic to English by drawing from Manga, wherein she chooses not to ‘flip’ the book but instead retain the original right-to-left reading experience.

I wrote about right-to-left manga translations last year; what interests me here is the title phrase. I found an interview with Ms. Mohamed in which she says:

The title – so, “Shubeik Lubeik” – it’s actually kind of a – almost a fairy tale rhyme in Arabic. It’s what genies say when they come out of a bottle. So it’s sort of like abracadabra. But what it actually means is, your wish is my command.

But of course I want to know how it works semantically and morphologically. Anybody know?

Dave Wilton of Wordorigins has a new Big List entry on the phrase “Dark Ages,” summarizing its usage as follows:

Over the centuries, the term dark ages has undergone a number of shifts and refinements in its meaning. It has referred to the early Middle Ages and the entire span of the Middle Ages (c. 500–c. 1500). In early Protestant writing, dark ages was often used to refer to the supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church prior to the Reformation. And the term is also used generically, referring to any period dominated by ignorance, superstition, or repression.

He finds the origin of the idea in Petrarch, who in his poem Africa (c. 1343) writes vaguely “This sleep of forgetfulness will not last forever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance,” then quotes Protestant cleric John Rainolds in a 1584 tract (“euen of all churches from the beginning of the world till the darke ages in which the Barbarians of late did ouerflow them”), Caesar Baronius (in 1603 “the first to say the period was dark due to its lack of writing and scholarship”: “atque inopia scriptorium appellari con sueuit obscurum” [and called dark because of its lack of writings]), and so on, ending with this caution:

One should avoid using dark ages to refer to the early medieval period. It’s arbitrary and inaccurate.

I am happy to say that my editorial eye has not lost its cunning; I alerted him to a typo at the start of the excerpt from James Maxwell’s 1611 The Golden Art, which is why it now has a bracketed letter: “Of such bagge-bearing I[u]dases […].” You can see the original edition here (l.4 has the word in question).

I just finished watching the Argentine movie Nueve reinas (Nine Queens), which I heartily recommend to all lovers of con/heist movies — I figured out the scam in House of Games pretty quickly, but this one kept me guessing till the end. But for LH purposes what matters is an infuriating problem with the subtitles. For whatever reason, the software that put them on the screen couldn’t handle accents (mind you, this is a Spanish-language movie), so people named Sebastián, Fabián, and Cárdenas wound up in the subtitles as Sebastin, Fabin, and Crdenas. Crdenas! You’d think somebody along the way would have noticed!

As Dmitry Pruss, who sent me the link, said, another computational not quite phylogenetic paper: Sizhe Yang, Xiaoru Sun, Li Jin, and Menghan Zhang, Inferring language dispersal patterns with velocity field estimation (Nature Communications 15, 190 [2024]). The abstract:

Reconstructing the spatial evolution of languages can deepen our understanding of the demic diffusion and cultural spread. However, the phylogeographic approach that is frequently used to infer language dispersal patterns has limitations, primarily because the phylogenetic tree cannot fully explain the language evolution induced by the horizontal contact among languages, such as borrowing and areal diffusion. Here, we introduce the language velocity field estimation, which does not rely on the phylogenetic tree, to infer language dispersal trajectories and centre. Its effectiveness and robustness are verified through both simulated and empirical validations. Using language velocity field estimation, we infer the dispersal patterns of four agricultural language families and groups, encompassing approximately 700 language samples. Our results show that the dispersal trajectories of these languages are primarily compatible with population movement routes inferred from ancient DNA and archaeological materials, and their dispersal centres are geographically proximate to ancient homelands of agricultural or Neolithic cultures. Our findings highlight that the agricultural languages dispersed alongside the demic diffusions and cultural spreads during the past 10,000 years. We expect that language velocity field estimation could aid the spatial analysis of language evolution and further branch out into the studies of demographic and cultural dynamics.

Thanks, Dmitry!

Nora Goldschmidt’s LRB review (22 September 2022; archived) of The Roman Republic of Letters: Scholarship, Philosophy and Politics in the Age of Cicero and Caesar, by Katharina Volk, and I found it extraordinarily interesting and informative. She starts off with the wonderfully named Nigidius Figulus as a character in Lucan, and continues:

According to Aulus Gellius, Nigidius was one of ‘the most learned men of the Roman race’, second only to Marcus Terentius Varro. His enormous scholarly output, of which only around 130 fragments survive, many just a few words long, included thirty volumes of ‘Grammatical Notes’, treatises On Entrails and On Winds, a study of the spheres (details of which may inform his speech in Lucan) and a brontoscopic calendar, detailing what thunder would portend on any given day of the year. St Jerome later called Nigidius ‘a Pythagorean and a sorcerer’, and the occult turn of his intellectual pursuits and his habit of divination has gained him a reputation as the Harry Potter of Ancient Rome (figulus is Latin for ‘potter’).

The late Republic was a period of intense cultural production as well as political turmoil. ‘These so learned times’, as Cicero described them, produced an unprecedented number of works on philosophy, linguistics, rhetoric and antiquarianism. The political and intellectual heavy lifting was often done by the same people. Julius Caesar described himself as a ‘military man’, but he sidelined as a historian, grammarian, playwright, poet and astronomer. The memoirs of his military campaigns formed part of a larger body of work that included De Analogia (‘the most careful and precise treatise on the principles of correct Latinity’, according to Cicero), a polemical pamphlet (the Anticato), a tragedy on the theme of Oedipus, a poem called Iter (‘The Journey’) and an astronomical treatise, De Astris, probably written with the Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes to support the reform of the Roman calendar.

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Back in 2010 I read Andrei Platonov’s novel Чевенгур (and wrote about it here and here); now the translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler has finally been published as Chevengur, and NYRB Classics has been kind enough to send me a copy. I have not had time to read the translation itself, but the Chandlers can be trusted to do a good job on Platonov (see my post on Котлован, which they translated as The Foundation Pit), and I can state that the introduction and notes are excellent. I can also link to the Washington Post review by Michael Barron, which is highly favorable:

Though a Russian edition of “Chevengur” wasn’t officially published until 1988, versions of it had previously appeared elsewhere: first in 1971 in a French translation from a samizdat copy, and then in English a few years later. Chandler regards that early translation as “marred by serious errors,” and his diagnosis is an authoritative one. Platonov’s lyrical prose, peppered with symbolistic winks and allusions, has been the subject of deep text scholarship, including Chandler’s, in the decades since its release. This new edition of “Chevengur,” translated by him and his wife, Elizabeth Chandler, incorporates alterations by Platonov that never made it into the first published copy, along with more than 100 pages of supplemental material that help decode the novel and exonerate its author. It is efforts of this kind that have restored Platonov’s reputation as one of the greatest writers of 20th century.

With the conclusion of the retranslation of his novels, NYRB has affirmed Platonov’s place in the Soviet-censored canon — where he joins the likes of Mikhail Bulgakov, the poet Osip Mandelstam and the chronicler Vasily Grossman (Platonov’s good friend). Platonov is not just a voice of his generation but a sage to our own, warning us that the flaws of human idealism are condemned to overshadow its realized visions.

(Eric and Stu sent links to the review; gracias, amigos!)

Ben Zimmer has made his annual Tucker Award post: “We’ve logged yet another fucking year here at Strong Language, so that can mean only one thing: It’s time for our annual awards recognizing excellence in swearing.” He opens with someone going by “Malcolm Tucker” on TikTok, who has created Tucker’s Law: “If some cunt can fuck something up, that cunt will pick the worst fucking time to fuck it up, ’cause that cunt’s a cunt.” Then he gets to the categories; the top Best Fucking Swearing of 2023 award goes to Cory Doctorow for coining “the highly appropriate term enshittification in a blog post on Jan. 21”:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

I thoroughly approve; it’s a great word and has deservedly caught on. The television award goes once again to HBO’s Succession (“sweary insults were always grounded specifically in situational context, appropriate for the character doing the insulting and the one being insulted”); the film award goes to a movie I very much want to see, American Fiction, directed by Cord Jefferson (warning: spoilers in description):

In the movie, adapted by Jefferson from Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, the protagonist Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is a frustrated novelist who is told his work isn’t “black” enough. Monk writes a book satirizing the tired tropes portraying African Americans in fiction called My Pafology and submits it to his publisher using the pen name Stagg R. Leigh. His novel ends up being an unexpected success, even after he petulantly decides to retitle it Fuck. In an interview with podcaster Pablo Torre, Jefferson said he actually wanted to call the movie Fuck, but he changed his mind. That was probably for the best — and anyway, there already is a movie called Fuck, a 2005 documentary about the word. (It has 857 F-bombs, for those keeping track.)

He also mentions the “Lui, c’est juste Ken” kerfluffle we discussed here. The award for books went to For F*ck’s Sake: Why Swearing is Shocking, Rude, and Fun by Rebecca Roache, Words from Hell: Unearthing the Darkest Secrets of English Etymology by Jess Zafarris, and On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down by James Fell, and that for music to Olivia Rodrigo and Andre 3000, with a special recognition of The Offspring “for their excellent response to accidentally releasing a clean version of a vinyl reissue”:
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Geoff Pullum sent me a link to “Does electrical activity in fungi function as a language?” by Michael R. Blatt, Geoffrey K. Pullum, Andreas Draguhn, Barry Bowman, David G. Robinson, and Lincoln Taiz (Fungal Ecology 68 [April 2024], 101326), whose abstract reads:

All cells generate electrical energy derived from the movements of ions across membranes. In animal neurons, action potentials play an essential role in the central nervous system. Plants utilize a variety of electrical signals to regulate a wide range of physiological processes, including wound responses, mimosa leaf movements, and cell turgor changes, such as those involved in stomatal movements. Although fungal hyphae exhibit electrical fluctuations, their regulatory role(s), if any, is still unknown. In his paper “Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity”, Andrew Adamatzky, based on a quantitative analysis of voltage fluctuations in fungal mycelia, concludes that the patterns of electrical fluctuations he detects can be grouped into “words” analogous to those found in human languages. He goes on to speculate that this “fungal language” is used “to communicate and process information” between different parts of the mycelium. Here we argue on methodological grounds that the presumption of a fungal language is premature and unsupported by the evidence presented, that the voltage fluctuations he detects are likely to originate as nonbiological noise and experimental artifacts, and that the measured electrical patterns show no similarity to any properties of human language.

The Adamatzky paper is here; a credulous Graun story (“Mushrooms communicate with each other using up to 50 ‘words’, scientist claims”) is here and a credulous Ecologist story (“Further research is needed to understand the possibility of fungal language in more detail, such as syntax and grammar”) here. The answer to the titular question is, alas for interspecies communication, in the negative. Thanks, Geoff!

Rachel Gutman-Wei writes for the Atlantic (archived) about penmanship, an evergreen topic for thumbsucking opinion pieces; there’s a fair amount of thumbsucking here, but I thought this section was interesting:

In the age of text on screens, many of us hardly write by hand at all, so we rarely get the chance to assess one another’s character through penmanship. Handwriting, as a language of its own, is dying out.

Over the centuries, the way people read that language has shifted. Until the 1800s, at least in the U.S., writing styles were less an act of self-expression than a marker of your social category, including your profession. “There were certain font types for merchants, for example, that were supposed to reflect the efficiency and the speed with which merchants work,” Tamara Plakins Thornton, a historian at the University at Buffalo and the author of Handwriting in America, told me. Lawyers used a different script, aristocrats another, and so on. The distinctions were enforced—by social norms, by teachers, by clients and colleagues and employers.

Men and women, too, were assigned their own fonts. Men were taught “muscular handwriting,” Carla Peterson, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Maryland, told me. They used roundhand, a larger script that was meant to be produced with more pressure on the quill or pen; women, by contrast, learned the narrower Italian script, akin to today’s italics. The latter style was compressed, says Ewan Clayton, a handwriting expert at the University of Sunderland, in the United Kingdom, in the same way that women’s waists might be limited by contemporary fashion. Eventually, women switched to using roundhand too.

The idea that handwriting styles might differ meaningfully from one person to another—and that those differences could be a means of showing your true nature—really took off in the 19th century, around the time that business correspondence and records started being outsourced to the typewriter. As penmanship was freed from professional constraints, it became more personal. “It was really believed that handwriting could be the articulation of self, that indeed the character of script said something about the character of a person,” says Mark Alan Mattes, an assistant English professor at the University of Louisville and the editor of the upcoming collection Handwriting in Early America.

She goes on to discuss graphology (“basically, phrenology for handwriting”), and there is for some reason a link to Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s lively defense of women’s rights from the February 1859 issue, Ought women to learn the alphabet? (“It is an alarming feature of this discussion, that it has reversed, very generally, the traditional positions of the sexes: the women have had all the logic; and the most intelligent men, when they have attempted the other side, have limited themselves to satire and gossip”). Me, I can barely read my own handwriting these days, so when I write and send actual letters through the mail, I tend to type them on the computer and just add my illegibly scrawled signature after I’ve printed them out. But I still bristle at the mockery by younger generations of the whole idea of handwriting.