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It’s been a while since I ranted about linguistic idiocy in the media (a regular feature of this blog back in the days when the sainted Bill Safire perpetrated his NY Times column), but Zach Helfand’s New Yorker piece on tipping (archived) pushed me right over the edge. In the course of a potted history of the practice, Helfand writes:

By the seventeenth century, visitors to aristocratic estates were expected to pay “vails” to the staff. This might have lowered payroll for the estate itself. At least one aristocrat helped himself to some of this new income stream; he threw frequent parties to increase revenues. The system spread. English coffeehouses were said to set out urns inscribed with “To Insure Promptitude.” Customers tossed in coins. Eventually, the inscription was shortened to “TIP.”

When I got to that last sentence, I cursed so loudly I alarmed my wife. It would have been bad enough to see such blithering idiocy in our wretched local paper, but in the New Yorker! This isn’t some obscure byway of etymology about which reasonable people can disagree, this is the kind of dumbass just-so story I would hope the better sort of high school students would be too sophisticated to share. It’s on the level of “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.” For the record, tip is a slang verb originally meaning (in the words of the OED, entry revised 2023) “To give, lend, or present (something) to a person; to do or perform (something) for a person’s benefit” (first citation 1610 “Tip me that Cheate, Giue me that thing”); the OED says:

Origin uncertain. Perhaps a specific use of tip v.¹, with the thing given being regarded as touching the recipient lightly; however, the notion of touching seems generally less obvious here than in such constructions as those at touch v. II.21. Alternatively, perhaps a specific use of tip v.², with allusion to the notion of tilting something towards a recipient so that it can be taken.

But the exact source doesn’t matter; the vital point is that acronymic origin stories are bullshit except in a few modern and well-known cases. In the words of Melissa Mohr’s CSM story, Colorful stories of acronyms are often false:

English words rarely get their start as acronyms. Looking at the number of folk etymologies that explain acronymic origins, though, you might think that many common terms were stitched together from the first letters of other words. English does contain acronyms, of course, but they tend to be produced in academic, military, or governmental contexts, and first appeared in the late 19th century.

For the latter, she gives the examples of laser, snafu, and scuba. But posh is not from “port out, starboard home,” news is not from “North, East, West, and South,” and tip is not, repeat not, from “To Insure Promptitude.” Is it too much trouble to just look in a dictionary?

And of course the problem is that once you discover one alleged fact is wrong, you stop giving the benefit of the doubt to others. Did Trotsky really refuse to tip when he was living in the Bronx? I’m sure not taking Helfand’s word for it. Bring back the fact checkers!

Update. I was pleased to see this letter in the Feb. 5 issue of the NYkr:

Tip of the Iceberg

I very much enjoyed Zach Helfand’s thorough and interesting piece on tipping (“Tipping Points,” January 1st & 8th). However, the story about the word “tip” beginning as an acronym for “To Insure Promptitude,” sometime in the eighteenth century, is almost surely apocryphal, as are most rumored etymologies involving acronyms, which did not become widespread until the twentieth century.

According to Douglas Harper’s Online Etymology Dictionary, the use of “tip” to mean “give a gratuity to” first appeared in 1706, and is believed to derive from its use in thieves’ jargon to mean “give, hand, pass.” In 1909, a version of the claim about the acronym which Helfand cites appeared in Frederick W. Hackwood’s book “Inns, Ales and Drinking Customs of Old England.” A reviewer debunked it that same year, writing, “We deprecate the careless repetition of popular etymologies such as the notion that ‘tip’ originated from an abbreviated inscription on a box placed on the sideboard in old coaching-inns, the full meaning of which was ‘To Insure Promptitude.’ ”

Kate Deimling
Brooklyn, N.Y.

You tell ’em, Kate!

TYWKIWDBI (“Tai-Wiki-Widbee” [“Things You Wouldn’t Know If We Didn’t Blog Intermittently.”]) explains a word hitherto unknown to me; the post opens with a close-up photo of a canceled stamp, and continues:

When I sold this 1902 KEVII official stamp on eBay, I described it as having a “bold full-date upright Liverpool cancel” and mentioned to the winning bidder that it had a “ditzel” that might be removed to enhance the cosmetic appearance, though it wouldn’t add to the substantial monetary value.

The new owner (in Glasgow) messaged me back his pleasure re the stamp but asked for clarification on the word “ditzel,” which was new to him. This surprised me, as I have used the term my entire adult life, so I did some research. I couldn’t find it in my OED, nor in my Random House dictionary. Thence to the internet, where I found this in a StackExchange post about orthography, asking whether “ditzel” is a “real word”:

“When I was a Cardiology fellow at UMass Medical Center, there was a technician who would use a certain word to mean “a little”. It sounded like /a ditzle/. I never asked her how it was spelled and later when I tried to look for the spelling in dictionaries, I never found it. The context would be something like: “Can you see any regurgitation on the screen?”, “Just a “ditzle”, meaning “very little”.” …

[a reply]: “Although not found in Dorland’s Medical Dictionary, the term ditzel is universally recognized among radiologists as a very small nodule found in the lung. … The origins of this word are obscure.” [Mundsen RF, Hess KR. “Ditzels” on Chest CT: Survey of Members of the Society of Thoracic Radiology. AJR 2001; 176:1363-1369.]

Since I spent 30 professional years examining chest xrays with radiologists, that may be where I picked up the term, but it’s not unique to radiology. Again, from the StackExchange post:

“In surgery we use the term “ditzel” to mean “a little nothing” or a piece of small, inconsequential tissue. For example, surgeon wipes instrument on sponge, leaving small globule of tissue. Nurse asks “Is this a specimen?”, surgeon replies “No, just a ditzel. ” Meaning it’s nothing, junk, unknown and can be ignored.”

I passed that observation on to an experienced pathologist, who said that in pathology laboratories, specimens are occasionally sorted into categories for examination: surgical specimens, small biopsies, and the incidental “ditzels.”

So, it is a “real word,” in the category of jargon. […] Question for readers: in your experience, does the term “ditzel” extend beyond the medical field to other professional or technical areas? Just curious.

It’s a charming word that I will try to add to my repertoire (it will alternate with “tad” and “skosh”), and I second the final question. Thanks, hat_eater!

Laudator Temporis Acti is posting excerpts from Robert Hughes’ Barcelona, and I couldn’t resist this one:

The earliest names for the two rivers that bordered the medieval city of Barcelona were the Merdança (shit stream) and the Cagallel (turd bearer), whose waters were totally unfit to drink by the fourteenth century and have remained so ever since. The first item in the invaluable collection of Versos Bruts (Coarse Poems, edited by Empar Pérez-Cors) was written in the early thirteenth century and takes the form of a discussion between two nobles, Arnaut Catalan and Ramon Berenguer V, count of Provence and Cerdanya, concerning a hundred noble ladies who went to sea in a boat and, becalmed, got back to shore by farting in chorus into its sails. One of the durable favorites of Catalan verse was Vicent Garcia (c. 1580-1623), rector of Vallfogona, a village in the Pyrenean foothills, who wrote sonnets in imitation of Luis de Góngora and Francisco Gómez de Quevedo, but whose real popularity depended on his burlesques, banned by the Inquisition. They included such works as To a Monumental Latrine, Constructed by the Author in the Garden of his Rectory and On a Delicate Matter, which roundly asserts that no person, however low, not even a Portuguese, could have anything bad to say about shit. Excrement, Garcia wrote in a Dalí-like transport of enthusiasm, is beneficial, the sign of our true nature, a kind of philosophers’ stone that “the pharmacists of Sarrià / contemplate night and day.” In doing so he evoked the peasant origins of the cult: shit as the great fertilizer, the farmer’s friend, the emblem of root and place.

(I like “not even a Portuguese.”) This is, of course, connected with that great Catalan Yuletide tradition the caganer, for which see this post. And a very happy new year to all Hatters!

Anthony Ham reported for the NY Times back in August (archived) on attempts to understand a nonhuman species:

A male saltwater crocodile approached a female saltie — as they’re known in Australia — in the same enclosure at Australia Zoo. He snapped at her aggressively. But then in a change of heart that wasn’t what you’d expect from one of Australia’s most fearsome predators, he appeared to think better of it. “He went down under the water and started blowing bubbles at her,” said Sonnie Flores, a crocodile researcher at the University of the Sunshine Coast who observed the interaction. “It was kind of sweet. It was almost like he was blowing her a kiss.”

Trying to decipher what crocodiles like that one are saying is at the center of ongoing research by Ms. Flores and her colleagues to create the world’s first crocodile dictionary. Such a gator glossary would catalog different forms of crocodilian communication and unlock their meanings. If successful, it could even help prevent conflict between humans and crocodiles.

Like all reptiles, crocodiles and alligators don’t possess a larynx and their vocal cords are rudimentary. And unlike those of most mammals, crocodilian lung muscles can’t regulate the vibrations of those vocal cords. But crocodiles and alligators have overcome their physical limitations to become the most vocal of all reptile species.

[Read more…]

I was flipping through Alan Davidson’s Penguin Companion to Food (see this 2005 post) when my eye fell on the entry Paximadia, “an exceptionally interesting Greek item in the frontier area between breads and biscuits.” It ends:

Paximadia do not belong only to Greece. Kremezi’s essay and Dalby (1996) between them illuminate their wider distribution and the likely derivation of their interesting name.

Which of course sent me on a quest. Wikipedia says:

The name paximathia comes from the Greek term paximadion (Greek: παξιμάδιον), which is derived from Paxamus, a 1st-century Greek author who wrote, among many things, a comprehensive cookbook. The word first appears in a recipe for laxative biscuits composed by the Greek physician Galen.

Wiktionary says “Ultimately from Ancient Greek παξαμᾶς (paxamâs, ‘biscuit’) and says the latter is “From Πάξαμος (Páxamos), the name of a baker.” I’m not saying that’s wrong, but it has a whiff of folk etymology to me, and I’m wondering how convincing it is to others. (Also, if anyone has tried them, are they perceptibly different from your basic rusk?)

I was reading Stephen Sedley’s LRB review (Vol. 44 No. 18 · 22 September 2022; archived) of The Mandela Brief: Sydney Kentridge and the Trials of Apartheid by Thomas Grant when I hit this paragraph:

When the trial began in August 1970 Kentridge, brought in as leading counsel, took the preliminary point that the new indictment was so similar in detail to the one on which the accused had been acquitted that this amounted to an illicit retrial. To his and everybody else’s surprise, the judge (Justice Viljoen, an individual with no liberal credentials) accepted the submission – still known in Law French as ‘autrefois acquit’ – and stopped the trial. The work by Kentridge and his team, matching each detail of the second indictment with the first, had been colossal, but the submission it yielded was unanswerable.

I always enjoy bits of Law French, and of course I wanted to know the traditional pronunciation, so I went to the OED (entry revised 2017) and found the very satisfying /ˌəʊtərfɔɪz əˈkwɪt/ (oh-tuhr-foyz-uh-KWIT). U.S. English has the pathetic /ˌoʊtrəfwɑ əˈkwi/ (oh-truhff-wah-uh-KWEE) and the merely boring /ˌoʊtrəfwɑ əˈki/ (oh-truhff-wah-uh-KEE) as well, but as usual I’m sticking with Ye Good Olde Wayes.

For the benefit of the lawyers among us, I’ll quote the next paragraph as well:

In addition to the fruits of hard work, every advocate is entitled to one piece of dumb luck. In Kentridge’s case this came when, following the Biko verdict and the announcement that no police officers were to be prosecuted, an informal gathering was held at his home in Cape Town to discuss the possibility of bringing a civil lawsuit for damages on behalf of Biko’s family. By mistake an invitation was sent to the state pathologist, Johan Loubser, who had testified at the inquest that prompt medical attention would not have saved Biko’s life. Loubser turned up at the meeting, and Kentridge, instead of getting rid of him, invited him to start the discussion. Loubser, unprompted, said he now thought Biko might have survived if given early medical attention, and the state eventually settled the family’s claim for a realistic sum. You can call it luck, but how many lawyers would have simply asked Loubser to leave?

Lameen has posted “The Sound of Music” across three languages:

You may well be familiar with The Sound of Music, an American musical from the 1950s loosely based on the von Trapp family’s memoirs. It features a neat little song for teaching musical notes, “Do, a Deer”, which has been translated into a number of languages. Let’s contrast three versions – English, Japanese, and Arabic – and see what they suggest.

That is, of course, just the sort of thing I love, and after giving the versions (Japanese: ドはドーナツのド Do is for “donut” [dōnatsu], Arabic: دو دروب ومعاني Do is “paths” [durūb] and meanings), he concludes:

As should be obvious, the Arabic version is derived from the Japanese one (via a popular anime of the 1990s) rather than directly from the English one. However, it contrasts sharply with both in the choice of note-mnemonics. In English, each note name (well, except “la”) is mapped directly to a near-homophonous monosyllabic word, taking advantage of English’s relatively short minimal word length; most of these are widely familiar, high-frequency items. In Japanese, the word choices are necessarily longer and perhaps more obscure (the syllable fa is found only in relatively recent loanwords anyway), but in each case the note is mapped perfectly to the first syllable of a single word, usually referring to something readily visualisable. In Arabic, the note is again mapped (increasingly approximatively) to the first syllable, not of a word, but of a 2-4 word phrase; not a single one of these phrases refers to anything concrete enough to visualise. High-flown slogans replace the original’s homely whimsy.

I have no way of proving it, but I believe this is symptomatic – certainly of the Arabic dubbing in the cartoons I used to watch in the early 1990s, and plausibly of Modern Standard Arabic discourse in general: an imagination based on recitation rather than visualization, preferring stirring abstractions to concrete details. After all, concrete details travel poorly in this diglossic context.

From Ilan Pappe’s The Idea of Israel (p. 199):

In fact, the Mizrachi Jews had not only lost their Arabic or French; they also lost their ability to speak Hebrew in an accent that could capture the similarities among the Semitic languages, especially the closeness of Arabic to Hebrew. This loss is beautifully expressed in a poem by Sami Shalom Chetrit:

On the way to ‘Ayn Harod [a veteran Zionist settlement] [N.b.: I have emended the incorrect ’ in the text to the standard/academic ‘; note also that the other bracketed remarks in this blockquote are in the original text -LH]
l lost my trilled resh [the letter ‘r’ in Hebrew].
Afterwards I didn’t feel the loss of my guttural ‘ayn
And the breathy het [the letter ‘h’ in Hebrew)
I inherited from my father
Who himself picked it up
On his way to the Land.

The rest of the poem can be found here:

On the way to ‘Ayn Harod
I lost my ‘ayin
I didn’t really lose it –
Guess just swalled it.

Ruth Tsoffar explains the odd “swalled it” thus (in Life in Citations: Biblical Narratives and Contemporary Hebrew Culture): “We see the devastating effects of this whitewashing even in the structure of the poem: bala’ati (swallowed) becomes balati (swalled).” And the whole thing is in Hebrew here:
[Read more…]

Last night my wife and I watched our favorite Yuletide movie, The Shop Around the Corner, which is set in prewar Budapest, and as always I was deeply pleased that all the signs were in actual Hungarian, from the “pengő” and “fillér” on the cash register to the “NAGY ÁRUHÁZ” ‘big department store’ on a building sign. Which prompts me to share some quotes from Victor Sebestyen’s Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West that Joel has been posting at Far Outliers.

From Liszt’s Languages:

Liszt had tried a few times to learn Hungarian and employed as language tutor a young academic reputed to be a brilliant teacher who had managed to get several dignitaries from the court in Vienna to at least utter a few sentences in Magyar. But, as he once admitted, he gave up the effort after five lessons when he encountered the word for unshakeability – tántorithatatlanság. Many of those trying to learn the language would have lost the will to carry on well before then. Liszt wrote to a newspaper after the National Theatre debacle: ‘Notwithstanding my lamentable ignorance of the Hungarian language, I am and shall remain until my end, a Magyar heart and soul.’

(Go to the link for a story about how he ended up making an impassioned Hungarian nationalist speech in French.) From Magyar’s Main Modernizer:

In 1801, after serving 2,387 days in jail for a minor walk-on part in the Jacobin movement, Ferenc Kazinczy was released from prison. He felt no bitterness. ‘Examples had to be made to frighten the people,’ he wrote to a friend shortly before he was freed. He was forty-one, an erudite polyglot – translator of, among others, Shakespeare, Goethe, Molière and Schiller – and proprietor of a modest estate close to Buda. He still burned with a zeal for radical change in Hungary, but during his years of incarceration he abandoned an overtly political programme and any ideas of rebellion against the Habsburgs as impractical gestures that were bound to fail. From prison he had been corresponding with a group of like-minded Enlightenment figures, who came to the conclusion that the way to modernize Hungary, to create a new nation, was through its language and culture. Out of prison, he withdrew to his estate, Széphalom, and for the thirty years up to his death he devoted himself to a single passion: the renewal of the Hungarian language and literature. […] A twenty-first-century Hungarian would be hard-pressed to understand the archaic, formal and inflexible Magyar used in the eighteenth century – they would feel it was almost entirely foreign, rather as though Chaucer’s English were still being used today. ‘Magyar is half dead, atrophied…worn out. It has lost all vigour and freshness of the centuries long gone,’ he said when he embarked on his undertaking. […]

Kazinczy and his collaborators created new words based on Hungarian roots, borrowed foreign words and ‘Magyarized’ them, or used image association. For example, the word secretary (tiktár or titoknok) was derived from an existing word for secret: titok. The Hungarian word for theatre was taken from two existing ancient words for ‘colour’ and ‘house’. The word for revolution came from the existing word to boil, ‘forr’, so revolution – a rather useful word in Hungarian as the country lived through so many of them – became forradalom, which translates as ‘on the boil’. The Hungarian word for isolation is taken from the ancient Magyar word for island. A beautiful Hungarian word for wife or female partner was invented: feleség, which literally means ‘my halfness’ – a noun, not an adjective. More than 8,000 new words came into common usage in colloquial and literary Hungarian within a generation.

And from Language Change in Budapest:
[Read more…]

I recently saw a reference to a “Maghrebi doughnut” called sfenj: “a light, spongy ring of dough fried in oil. Sfenj is eaten plain, sprinkled with sugar, or soaked in honey.” Sounds delicious! That Wikipedia article is full of interesting stuff (e.g., Moroccan Arabic idioms like “Give someone a sfenj and he’ll say it’s ugly” and “As if hitting a dog with a sfenj”), but of course I wanted to know about the etymology, for which I had to go to Wiktionary, which gave the overall meaning of the Arabic word as ‘sponge’ and said “From Ancient Greek σπόγγος (spóngos).” The best part is the list of Descendants:

• Maltese: sfinġa
• Libyan Arabic: سفنز‎ (sfinz)
• Moroccan Arabic: سفنج‎ (sfanj)
• → Persian: اِسفَنج‎ (esfanj)
 • → Hindustani:
    Hindi: इस्फ़ंज (isfañj)
    Urdu: اسفنج‎ (isfanj)
• → Sicilian: sfincia
  • → English: sfincia
  • → Italian: sfincia, sfincione

Note that none of them is spelled or transliterated “sfenj”; ah, the joys of rendering Arabic into the Latin alphabet! (That “English” sfincia is pretty marginal; it seems to be used only of the Sicilian dessert, and the Wiktionary link goes to the Sicilian entry, just like the one above it. The OED knows nothing of such a word.)