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James Kilpatrick explains how the word bootylicious (‘sexually attractive, sexy; shapely’), apparently new to him despite its ubiquity over the last decade, entered the OED, a canonization that filled him with horror (“I asked, ‘The booty-what?’ I cried, ‘C’mon, Don!’ I said, quietly, ‘Aaargh!'”). He draws a veil over the dirty bits (“does not qualify for quotation in a family newspaper”), but Nicole provides the full Monty at her excellent copy-editing blog A Capital Idea.

My favorite of the OED citations:

2001 Sunday Herald (Glasgow) 20 Dec. (Mag.) 29 (caption) It’s Hogmanay, time to party and look bootylicious for the Bells.

The Glossaire franco-canadien et vocabulaire de locutions vicieuses usitées au Canada is a Project Gutenberg reprint of an 1880 book by Oscar Dunn explaining, and frequently deploring, the local form of French. Anyone interested in the subject should find it useful and occasionally amusing; my favorite entry so far is:

U. Il est grand temps pour nous d’apprendre que l’u diffère de l’ i, et que le premier jour de la semaine est lundi, non pas lindzi, V. D.

‘It is high time that we learned that u is different from i, and that the first day of the week is lundi, not lindzi; see D.’ The D entry is:

D. On serait tenté de dire que le d n’existe pas dans la langue franco-canadienne, car, dans la prononciation, nous remplaçons cette lettre par une autre qui renferme un son sifflant et que l’on pourrait indiquer par dz. Bien peu de personnes au Canada prononcent correctement le verbe dire. Nous prononçons dzire. Cet accent passe inaperçu chez nous, mais écorche l’oreille de l’étranger. C’est dans les écoles primaires qu’il nous faut commencer à le combattre.

‘One might be tempted to say that d does not exist in Canadian French, because in pronunciation we replace this letter with another which includes a sibilant and which one might indicate by dz. Very few Canadians pronounce the verb dire [‘to say’] correctly; we say dzire. This accent passes unnoticed among us, but grates on the ears of foreigners. We should begin combatting this in primary school.’ (Via wood s lot.)

I’m glad to see Grant Barrett’s new book, Hatchet Jobs and Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of Political Slang, getting play in today’s NY Times. It’s featured in Slang Only a Velcroid Would Love (by Tom Kuntz) in the Week in Review section:

Those seriously concerned with the vitality of our wonky Beltway blather may want to skip the next agriculture-subsidy roundtable to train their bifocals on “Hatchet Jobs and Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of Political Slang,” edited by Grant Barrett (Oxford, 2004).
There, with some imagination, you can freshen your lexicon with some forgotten or fairly obscure, but nevertheless serviceable, bits of political argot. Impress your fellow sheeple!
Actorvist A politically involved actor. (Also, raptivist, the hip-hop version.)
Bafflegab Confusing or unintelligible speech, doublespeak…

And William Safire’s “Battleground” column quotes Barrett extensively on the phrases red state/blue state and swing voters.

Today is the anniversary of the birth of Wallace Stevens, so I’ll give you a taste of one of my favorite 20th-century poems, “Sunday Morning,” and send you here for the rest:

II
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

So happy birthday, Wallace (and Bonnie to boot)! And there’s much more Stevens at today’s wood s lot.

As a pendant to my recent post on historical linguistics, here’s a charming epigram by the 17th-century poet Jacques de Cailly (also known anagrammatically as d’Aceilly):

Les Dérivations

Alfana vient d’equus sans doute,
Mais il faut avouer aussi
Qu’en venant de là jusqu’ici
Il a bien changé sur la route.

(‘[The Spanish word] alfana comes from [Latin] equus, no doubt, but one must admit that in getting from there to here it has changed quite a bit along the way.’ The alleged derivation, proposed by Gilles Ménage, is of course entirely spurious.)

The First Idea, by Stanley I. Greenspan and Stuart G. Shanker, has the subtitle “How Symbols, Language, And Intelligence Evolved From Our Primate Ancestors To Modern Humans,” and that’s pretty much what it’s about. I opened it at the bookstore with a sinking feeling of “here we go again,” but was surprised to find that their ideas seemed pretty sensible. As I said in my MetaFilter post, “I don’t think we’ll ever know where language came from, but this sounds like a more fruitful line of thinking than Chomsky’s deus ex machina ‘language gene’ mutation.” Certainly the sections on child development will be of interest to anyone who has a child (or, er, a stepgrandson). The Christian Science Monitor review gives an idea of the authors’ approach, with a handy summary (“The Ascent of Human Thinking”) at the end.

Bill Poser at Language Log has a wonderful post laying out the basics of historical linguistics that should be required reading for anyone even thinking about pontificating on the field, and it should be memorized by anyone actually working in it. I want to single out here a quote from Georg von der Gabelentz’s Die Sprachwissenschaft (1901) which is as pertinent today as it was when he wrote it:

It is terribly seductive to roam the world of languages comparing words from them at random and then to bestow upon scholarship a series of newly discovered relationships. Very many stupidities also result from this; for the most urgent discoverers have unmethodical minds. He who, endowed with a good memory for words, has gone through a couple of dozen languages from different parts of the Earth, – he need not at all have studied them -, finds familiar forms everywhere. And if he records them, investigates them, tests intelligently whether the indications pan out, he does only what is right. Only logically correct thought belongs here, and where it is not absent from the outset then he gladly gets lost in the giddiness of the mania of discovery. Thus it went, as we saw, with the great Bopp, when he sought to assign Caucasian and Malayan languages to the Indo-European language family. Fortune had decreed him a curious fate. It was, to have to prove the correctness of his principles twice, first positively through his magnificent main work, which is based on them, then, negatively, by coming to grief as soon as he was unfaithful to them… Languages are different because sound change has taken different paths. But it has gone its way consistently hither and thither; therefore Order reigns in differentiation, not Chaos. Language comparison without comparison of sounds is irresponsible game-playing.

Poser provides the German original, and also links to a pdf file of his and Lyle Campbell’s paper “Indo-European Practice and Historical Methodology,” which I commend to your attention if you’re interested in more details. The fight against sloppiness is endless but must continually be fought.

I’m reading Russia, by Donald Mackenzie Wallace, an indispensable text for any English-speaker who wishes to understand the country in tsarist times (there were three editions, in 1877, 1905, and 1912; I’m reading an abridgment of the last, but the 1905 is online here and here); I wish to present here an amusing anecdote from near the start of Chapter IV:

According to this custom, when a boy enters the seminary he receives from the Bishop a new family name. The name may be Bogoslafski, from a word signifying “Theology,” or Bogolubof, “the love of God,” or some similar term; or it may be derived from the name of the boy’s native village, or from any other word which the Bishop thinks fit to choose. I know of one instance where a Bishop chose two French words for the purpose. He had intended to call the boy Velikoselski, after his native place, Velikoe Seló, which means “big village”; but finding that there was already a Velikoselski in the seminary, and being in a facetious frame of mind, he called the new comer Grandvillageski—a word that may perhaps sorely puzzle some philologist of the future.

Aside from the story, I had not realized priests were given new family names, and I thought it was interesting enough to pass along.

Last year I reported on James Murray’s letter of application to the British Museum Library, which did not get the future editor of the OED a job despite his acquaintance with “the Romance tongues, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Latin & in a lesser degree Portuguese, Vaudois, Provencal, & various dialects… Dutch …, Flemish, German, Danish… Anglo-Saxon and Moeso-Gothic… Celtic… Sclavonic… Persian, Achaemenian Cuneiform, & Sanscrit… Hebrew and Syriac… to a less degree… Aramaic Arabic, Coptic and Phenician.” Now I find the following remarkable passage in an obituary quoted in a Transblawg post: “He could have aspired to a professorial chair—after all, he had even written on word formation in Gothic, an extinct language, mastery of which was once deemed essential to academic preferment in London…” So we learn that Gothic, though clearly not sufficient (vide supra), was a necessary job qualification in the Good Old Days! Ah, to have lived in those times, when philology was valued as the Queen of Sciences…

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Mark Liberman of Language Log has taken my post on the names for the capital of Kyrgyzstan and run with it. After a brief post focusing on a recipe for kumiss (which is what you make with a bishkek), he quoted a series of passages from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (a wonderful book, which these tastes make me want to reread) dealing with the “mad scavenger” Tchitcherine, sent to Seven Rivers country (south of Lake Balkhash: Semirechye in Russian, Zhetysu in Kazakh) “to give the tribesmen out here, this far out, an alphabet.” Madness ensues:

There is a crisis over which kind of g to use in the word “stenography.” There is a lot of emotional attachment to the word around here. Tchitcherine one morning finds all the pencils in his conference room have mysteriously vanished. In revenge, he and Radnichny sneak in Blobadjian’s conference room next night with hacksaws, files and torches, and reform the alphabet on his typewriter. It is some fun in the morning. Blobadjian runs around in a prolonged screaming fit. Tchitcherine’s in conference, meeting’s called to order, CRASH! two dozen linguists and bureaucrats go toppling over on their ass. … Could Radnichny be a double agent?

Now, in an effort to get to the historical truth behind Pynchon’s fireworks, he gives us a post presenting the history of language reform in Central Asia, as told in Mark Dickens’s 1989 paper “Soviet Language Policy in Central Asia.” I won’t summarize it here; go and read the whole sordid saga, and be grateful you weren’t trying to become literate in that part of the world in the 1930s.