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The UniLang Wiki is “a database of language- and linguistic-related information which anyone can easily edit online.” Unfortunately, you don’t seem to be able to do much else but edit; if you try to go to most pages, you get “You have to login to edit pages.” (Note to Unilangers: the verb is “log in,” two words.) But it looks like an interesting project and they have quite a list of languages, so I thought I’d mention it.

Before the meeting ended, which was not long after, I was set thinking of Despard-Smith’s use of the phrase ‘the men’. That habit went back to the ’90’s: most of us at this table would say ‘the young men’ or ‘the undergraduates’. But at this time, the late 1930’s, the undergraduates themselves would usually say ‘the boys’. It was interesting to hear so many strata of speech round one table. Old Gay, for example, used ‘absolutely’, not only in places where the younger of us might quite naturally still, but also in the sense of ‘actually’ or even ‘naturally’ – exactly as though he were speaking in the 1870’s. Pilbrow, always up to the times, used an idiom entirely modern, but Despard-Smith still brought out slang that was fresh at the end of the century – ‘crab’, and ‘josser’,* and ‘by Jove’. Crawford said ‘man of science’, keeping to the Edwardian usage which we had abandoned. So, with more patience it would have been possible to construct a whole geological record of idioms, simply by listening word by word to a series of college meetings.
      – C. P. Snow (The Masters, 171)

From the eudaemonist, who footnotes as follows:

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You will often see references to the alleged fact that the Chinese character for ‘crisis’ is made up of the word for ‘danger’ plus the word for ‘opportunity’ (or, as here, that the Japanese character is so composed). I have no idea how this claim became so popular, but Victor H. Mair at Pinyin.info has done a thorough debunking:

The explication of the Chinese word for crisis as made up of two components signifying danger and opportunity is due partly to wishful thinking, but mainly to a fundamental misunderstanding about how terms are formed in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages… The third, and fatal, misapprehension is the author’s definition of jī as “opportunity.” While it is true that wēijī does indeed mean “crisis” and that the wēi syllable of wēijī does convey the notion of “danger,” the jī syllable of wēijī most definitely does not signify “opportunity.”… The jī of wēijī, in fact, means something like “incipient moment; crucial point (when something begins or changes).” Thus, a wēijī is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry. A wēijī indicates a perilous situation when one should be especially wary. It is not a juncture when one goes looking for advantages and benefits. In a crisis, one wants above all to save one’s skin and neck! Any would-be guru who advocates opportunism in the face of crisis should be run out of town on a rail, for his / her advice will only compound the danger of the crisis.

There is much more at the linked page, including some “Pertinent observations for those who are more advanced in Chinese language studies.” Many thanks to Grant Barrett for alerting me to the link; I should add that Pinyin.info has all sorts of goodies, including a list of Taipei street names in Chinese characters and Hanyu Pinyin.

From the BBC comes a report on how Londoners speak:

Voices is the biggest-ever survey of how we speak. From January 2005, you can take part and add your voice to the picture.

There’s a page of “facts” (some of them dubious: “Women talk ‘posher’. In every studied language of the world, females use more ‘prestige’, ‘standard’ forms of language”), one on Hackney, and others, but the most interesting one from my point of view is an essay by linguist Laura Wright:

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The hotel is humongous
as high as clouds
the clouds are not small
nor yellow with a picture of blueberries.
They are pink but they still
are not weird like blue
string wrapped around it with
people on top.
Nobody is jumping on them. There is only
a window next door in
the hotel and light pink with
yellow light on
this rainy day.

  —Julia Mayhew

A NY Times story by David W. Dunlap in today’s Metro section, “Restoring Elegance Underfoot on a Street Long Past Its Prime” (about the restoration of the cobblestone surface of Bond Street), ends with the following admirable paragraph:

What New Yorkers call cobblestones are more accurately described as Belgian blocks — true cobblestones being rounded and irregular — but saying so is the province of a scold. And it is probably no more effective than insisting that the horse-drawn carriages on Central Park South are not hansom cabs.

That’s what I try to do here on Languagehat: provide accurate information without pretending that accuracy is always to be worshiped. I’m glad to know the correct term is “Belgian blocks,” but I will go on calling them cobblestones, just as I call tsunamis tidal waves. Let them scold who will!

A New York Times story by Edward Wyatt reports on the belated lawsuit by Pearson Education, the publishing company that owns the copyright to the Dick and Jane primers, against a division of Time Warner in Federal District Court in Los Angeles claiming that the book Yiddish With Dick and Jane violates Pearson’s copyrights and trademarks.

The brisk-selling book examines adultery, drug use and other tsuris that afflict Dick and Jane as adults. When it was published in September by Little, Brown & Company, part of the Time Warner Book Group, Pearson was farmisht and did not take any action. After an Internet video promotion of the book began attracting hundreds of thousands of viewers and the book’s sales topped 100,000, however, Pearson decided that the fun was over.
The book, by Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman, with illustrations by Gabi Payn, states on the front and back covers, spine and copyright page that it is a parody. But the lawsuit says the book “is not a parody, but is an unprotected imitation” because it does not use the copyrighted characters “for the purpose of social criticism.”…

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Having moved to Pittsfield, I naturally made it a priority to get a library card (the library is wonderfully called the Athenaeum), and the first order of business once I had it was to check out a few local histories. I have just begun reading The History of Pittsfield, (Berkshire County,) Massachusetts, from the Year 1734 to the Year 1800, by J.E.A. Smith (1869, repr. [1990?]), and I cannot resist passing along this sentence and footnote from page 7:

On the heights where Greylock lifts the topmost summit of the State, along the valleys of the Hoosac and the Housatonic, up the rude but flower-fringed wood-roads which penetrate the narrowing opes¹ of the Green Mountains, beauty is everywhere the prevailing element.

   ¹ The reader will pardon to necessity the employment of a word of merely local authority and very infrequent use. A hope — or more descriptively, without the aspirate, an ope — is a valley, which, open at one end only, loses itself at the other, sloping upward to a point in the mass of the mountains. The word is quite indispensable in the description of scenery like that of Berkshire; and its disuse has resulted in the adoption of such vile substitutes as “hole,” “hollow,” or even worse. Thus we have Biggs’s Hole and Bigsby’s Hollow, or more probably “Holler.” Surely neatly descriptive ope should not be displaced by such abominable interlopers as these.

   WEBSTER has “HOPE, n. — A sloping plain between ridges of mountains. [Not in use.] Ainsworth.” — But English local topographical writers sometimes use the word in the sense given it in the text.

Now, that’s interesting enough, but when I went to the OED (a resource not yet available to the good Mr. Smith), I found entries for both spellings—with no indication that they are related.

The second noun hope:

[OE. hop app. recorded only in combination (e.g. fenhop, mórhop: see sense 1). It is doubtful whether all the senses belong orig. to one word. With sense 3 cf. ON. hóp ‘a small land-locked bay or inlet, salt at flood tide and fresh at ebb’ (Vigf.).]

1. A piece of enclosed land, e.g. in the midst of fens or marshes or of waste land generally.

2. A small enclosed valley, esp. ‘a smaller opening branching out from the main dale, and running up to the mountain ranges; the upland part of a mountain valley’; a blind valley. Chiefly in south of Scotl. and north-east of England, where it enters largely into local nomenclature, as in Hopekirk, Hopetoun, Hope-head, Dryhope, Greenhope, Ramshope, Ridlees Hope, etc.

And the entry ope, a. and n, definition B.2.a:

2. a. Eng. regional (south-west.). An opening; spec. a narrow, usually covered, passage between houses; = OPEWAY n.

Note the 1886 citation: W. BARNES Gloss. Dorset Dial. 85 Ope, an opening in the cliffs down to the water side. Coincidence, or a misplaced unaspirated form?

Perhaps frequent commenter Eliza can provide information as to whether either of these forms is still in use.

Incidentally, the Smith book is the source of the recent fuss about Pittsfield having the first recorded reference to baseball in America; as the SportsLine story says:

The evidence comes in a 1791 bylaw that aims to protect the windows in Pittsfield’s new meeting house by prohibiting anyone from playing baseball within 80 yards of the building…

Historian John Thorn was doing research on the origins of baseball when he found a reference to the bylaw in an 1869 book on Pittsfield’s history.

And there it is, at the top of pate 447: “…the exterior [of the meeting-house] was protected by a by-law forbidding ‘any game of wicket, cricket, base-ball, bat-ball, foot-ball, cats, fives, or any other game played with ball,’ within eighty yards of the precious structure.” Whatever they were playing in Pittsfield in 1791, however, it was certainly not the game of baseball as we know it, which was created (in primitive form) by Alexander Cartwright half a century later in Manhattan, true home of the game [just one of the forms taken by the English game of the same name, which was brought to America in the eighteenth century and developed various names, including “townball” and “roundball,” and various regional rules and styles of play; see David Block’s Baseball before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game].

I plagiarize that title from Gail Armstrong [N.b.: As of April 2012, Open Brackets appears to be long defunct], who borrowed it from Mark Ford, who stole it from Bob Dylan, who swiped it from Eric Lott, and who knows where Lott got it? Plagiarism, or more broadly the appropriation of previously written material for one’s own purposes, is Ford’s subject, and he starts off with the usual suspects (Sterne, De Quincey, Coleridge) before going in a surprising direction: Wallace Stevens’ magnificent “Sunday Morning,” with its unforgettable ending (which may or may not refer to the extinction of a species; the poem “was composed not long after the death of the last passenger pigeon, named Martha, in Cincinnati zoo on 1 September 1914. The world’s attention was fixed, of course, on other events…”). Ford used some of Stevens’ imagery for a poem of his own, which is how he shoehorns it into the essay; whether it’s a good idea to juxtapose your own stanzas with those of Stevens is another matter entirely. At any rate, Ford then goes on to an excellent example, and one that warms my heart:

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We Yanks say the first, the Brits (if I understand correctly) use the second; in any case, that’s what we’re doing tomorrow. The movers are coming first thing in the morning, we close on the house we’re selling in the afternoon, we close on the house we’re buying the next afternoon, and Wednesday morning the movers deliver our stuff to the house in Pittsfield. After that a new life begins, and I’m going to have to devote a lot more time to trying to find clients and earn a living on my own. It’s exhilarating but nervous-making; the salient point here is that any time spent on surfing and posting will be time not spent paying the mortgage, so posting frequency may fall off until I get my feet on the ground, and in any case it’s unlikely I’ll be back online before Wednesday. Bear with me, and try to ignore whatever spam accumulates in the crevices of old threads…

Update. Thank you all for your good wishes. I know you’ll be relieved to hear that the move went smoothly; in fact, let me put in a plug for City Moves while I’m thinking of it. They did just what they said they would, were friendly and professional, and didn’t break a thing. We’re getting acquainted with Pittsfield (the supermarket has a good wine department!), and I just bought a do-it-yourself book that will be vital for the series of home improvements we’re planning to perpetrate — in fact, my wife is in the basement replacing a gizmo on the washer as we speak. (We have a basement! And a fireplace!) Unfortunately, something seems to have gone awry with the wireless connection to my laptop, so I’m having to borrow my wife’s computer, but I’m sure that will be remedied soon, and I can get back to semi-regular posting. Meanwhile, I miss NYC but I think I’m going to like it here.