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Having touted George Oppen in my previous entry, I realized I’d never posted any of his poetry and decided to remedy the omission. Here’s the last poem in his great book Of Being Numerous (I presume the fifth line refers to Swan’s Island, Maine; the poem was originally published in Poetry, December 1967):

BALLAD

Astrolabes and lexicons
Once in the great houses—

A poor lobsterman

Met by chance
On Swan’s Island

Where he was born
We saw the old farmhouse

Propped and leaning on its hilltop
On that island
Where the ferry runs

A poor lobsterman

His teeth were bad

He drove us over that island
In an old car

A well-spoken man

Hardly real
As he knew in those rough fields

Lobster pots and their gear
Smelling of salt

The rocks outlived the classicists,
The rocks and the lobstermen’s huts

And the sights of the island
The ledges in the rough sea seen from the road

And the harbor
And the post office

Difficult to know what one means
—to be serious and to know what one means—

An island
Has a public quality

His wife in the front seat

In a soft dress
Such as poor women wear

She took it that we came—
I don’t know how to say, she said—

Not for anything we did, she said,
Mildly, ‘from God’. She said

What I like more than anything
Is to visit other islands…

The Academy of American Poets has selected “31 groundbreaking books of poetry“; I was looking down the list and nodding (yup, the usual suspects, all good stuff but no surprises here) when I hit Of Being Numerous by George Oppen (1968). Any list that includes the unjustly neglected Oppen is worth posting about, so here ’tis. (Via Ramage.)

Another goodie via Derryl Murphy, “Expos’ move marks end of baseball era in French,” by Christopher J. Chipello of The Wall Street Journal:

For more than three decades, Jacques Doucet was the French-language radio voice of Major League Baseball.
Many Montreal baby boomers grew up listening to his mellifluous descriptions of lanceurs staring into home plate, frappeurs swinging for the fences and voltigeurs tracking down fly balls at la piste d’avertissement, or warning track.
But the Expos migrated south and started playing this spring as the Washington Nationals — the first move by a major-league team since the Washington Senators became the Texas Rangers 33 years earlier. That meant the disappearance of big-league baseball in French from North American airwaves.
Mr. Doucet and other announcers from the Expos’ early days were more than just broadcasters. They also helped hone modern French baseball lingo, polishing terminology that had been adapted from English over the course of a century.
A 1935 French-English lexicon put out by the Societe du Parler francais au Canada rendered the game, literally if awkwardly, as jeu de balle aux buts, and featured such quaint translations as batteur risque-tout (literally, daredevil batter) for “slugger” and gardien de but, (goalkeeper) for “baseman.”
In 1969, the Expos’ first season, the brewery sponsoring the team hosted a symposium for journalists and commentators to hash out terminology for le baseball. The recommendations included such colorful and enduring turns of phrase as balle papillon (butterfly ball) for “knuckleball” and vol-au-sol (theft at the ground) for “shoestring catch.”
But in a game of tactical nuance and long pauses, it often fell to the radio play-by-play men to figure out how best to paint word pictures in respectable French. Over the decades, Mr. Doucet, a former newspaper reporter who switched to broadcasting in 1972, became the acknowledged master of that art.
When Mr. Doucet described infielders moving to serrer les lignes de demarcation in the late innings of a close game, listeners would envision the players hugging the foul lines to guard against an extra-base hit. And if a frappeur de puissance (as sluggers are now known) hit a fleche (an “arrow,” or line drive) into the right-center field allee, listeners held their breath to hear whether the coureur (base-runner) would round third base and file vers le marbre (dash toward the “marble,” or home plate).
Mr. Doucet, “created the perfect words” to bring the action to life, says Jean Lapointe, a popular Quebec entertainer who is now a member of Canada’s Senate. “The quality of his language in French was incredible,” says Mr. Lapointe, who used to have aides record games during his stage performances so he could listen to them later…

A wonderful piece of nostalgia, both baseball and linguistic.

Incidentally, there’s a tornado watch over the Berkshires for the next hour, so if the house gets reduced to a pile of bricks, there may be a delay in posting…

Update. No tornado, just a rainstorm. And I was all prepared to blog from the cellar, too.

Back in April I took William Safire to task for peddling the nonexistent “Russian word” razbliuto (and I’m happy to report that that post is now the #1 Google hit for razbliuto, so seekers will find the information they need); his latest column ends with the following plangent paragraph:

In an article on the need to steal words from other languages to fill our vocabu-gap, I noted references to razbliuto, ”a feeling a person has for someone he or she once loved but no longer feels the same way about.” It came to me from some Russian speakers but generated a dozen letters from others who insist that the word does not exist. These nyet-sayers are joined by the two experts I consulted, Austin and Patera at McGill. Others write that the word my original sources must have had in mind is the verb razliubit, which means simply ”to stop loving.”

Now, I don’t believe for a second that “Russian speakers” told him this word exists (and in fact in his original column he said he got it from Christopher Moore’s book In Other Words), but it’s mildly impressive that he’s taking the trouble to correct himself. Two cheers for Bill!

You may or may not know that the verb atone comes from the phrase at one (it originally meant ‘to be reconciled’); now that you do (if you didn’t before), it may strike you as strange that the “one” part is pronounced so differently from the number. Well, that’s the “correct” pronunciation; the one for the number has undergone a dialectal shift that also produced /wət/ for oat, although the latter has stayed dialectal. And the OED says: “The orthoepist C. Cooper (Grammatica (1685)) draws attention to the latter development when he describes the pronunciations wun for ‘one’ and wuts for ‘oats’ as ‘barbarous speaking.’” So there you have it: those who dutifully obey the dicta of modern orthoepists of the Safire variety should immediately cease using the barbarous pronunciation that has so unfortunately overtaken the word one. What matter if no one understands you? A small price to pay for knowing your usage is unimpeachable!

Derryl Murphy, a writer and editor who lives in Prince George, BC, and writes the blog Cold Ground, has a post about a couple of curious usages he’s noticed among the kids of his neighborhood:

It’s now proper to tell kids who jump the queue not to budge. Don’t budge in line. Hey, no budging.

Also, when teams face each other in a sporting event, or when there is any other sort of contest, it’s now Us verse Them. I versed him shooting hoops today. We’ll verse the Lions in soccer tomorrow.

He asks “Is it a Prince George thing?” and I’m curious too: is anybody familiar with either of these innovations?

On page 195 of Mason & Dixon, Pynchon writes: “Thro’ the Efforts of Count Paradicsom, in any Case, a Band of these Aliens the Size of a Regiment, were presently arriv’d in Gloucestershire.” Noting that the M&D index of references has not managed to find anything helpful to say about this in the eight years the book has been available for study, I thought I’d better point out here that paradicsom is the Hungarian word for both ‘paradise’ and (more commonly these days) ‘tomato’ (the latter comestible used to be called paradicsomalma ‘paradise apple’ until the mid-19th century). Since the Count was referred to just a few paragraphs earlier as “an Hungarian Intermediary,” this should not have been too hard to figure out.

[Read more…]

I’m sorry to be so late with this—you’ve only got another day to get this week’s New Yorker—but it has a moving piece by Elizabeth Kolbert, “Last Words,” about the Eyak tribe of Alaska and the last native speaker of their language, Marie Smith Jones:

When I asked her how she felt about [being the last speaker], she said, “How would you feel if your baby died? If someone asked you, ‘What was it like to see it lying in the cradle?’ So think about that before you ask that kind of a question.”

(One interesting point about the article is that it reproduces the scientific transcription of Eyak, which has things like an x with a dot under it.)
Update. Marie Smith died on January 21, 2008.

Still reading Mason & Dixon, and I’ve hit the following passage:

Below them the lamps were coming on in the Taverns, the wind was shaking the Plantations of bare Trees, the River ceasing to reflect, as it began to absorb, the last light of the Day. They were out in Greenwich Park, walking near Lord Chesterfield’s House,— the Autumn was well advanced, the trees gone to Pen-Strokes and Shadows in crippl’d Plexity, bath’d in the declining light. A keen Wind flow’d about them. Down the Hill-side, light in colors of the Hearth was transmitted by window-panes more and less optickally true. Hounds bark’d in the Forest.

The word “plexity” stopped me cold. It’s not in the OED or the big Webster’s, it’s not from a Latin *plexitas (-plex is only a suffix in Latin) and thus is not a plausible 18th-century formation, and the only modern use of it I can turn up is a sociological one that seems extremely unlikely to be relevant here: “Plexity refers to the type of transactions that we are involved in with other people. If, for example, Tom only ever plays squash with Barbara, the relationship would be considered a uniplex one. If however, Tom and Barbara lived, worked and socialised together it would be a multiplex one.” (From “Language, Society and Power” by Rachael-Anne Knight: .doc file, HTML.) So what’s going on here? Is it simply a nonce abbreviation for complexity, or something more… significant?
Addendum. The word occurs again on p. 505: “Yet aloft, in Map-space, origins, destinations, any Termini, hardly seem to matter,—one can apprehend all at once the entire plexity of possible journeys, set as one is above Distance, above Time itself.”

A couple of years ago I linked to Lameen Souag’s Grammar of Algerian Darja; now I’m delighted to report he’s started a language blog, Jabal al-Lughat, which means ‘mountain of languages’ in Arabic. Both his posts to date are extremely interesting: one is on the N’Ko alphabet invented by Soulemayne Kante in 1949 for the Manding languages Malinke, Bambara, Dyula and their dialects (Lameen explains “N’Ko is an old Manding term, meaning ‘I say’ in each of the mutually comprehensible Manding languages… and hence traditionally used as a general term to cover Manding”), and the other is on Rastafarian “blin’ty,” which they substitute for city:

The people of the city, from a Rasta perspective, are “Babylon”; they don’t see the truth, so why should the word “city” contain the sound of “see”? (In a Jamaican pronunciation, anyway…) Rather, they substitute the more appropriate syllable “blind”…

Ahlan wa sahlan!