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Our local newspaper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, recently had a story “Old playbill keys concert revival” that describes a concert inspired by “a tattered but still readable playbill from a concert apparently staged at the property in 1873”; about halfway through, we get:

The thematic link to the past could extend to performers appearing in period costume, while publicity for the shows might include the dated writing style and unorthodox spelling and capitalization that appears on the 1873 playbill.

For instance, the playbill notes that a certain “Goodman Stone,” the proprietor of “ye Big Tavern on ye main road to Williamsburgh, will supply all ye people who may be Hungerie with Pork & Beans, Rhyneinjun Bread also Good Cider.”

What on earth was “Rhyneinjun Bread”? My first thought involved the Rhine, but a little googling revealed that it was an odd spelling of “Rye & Injun Bread”: “The name comes from the rye flour and cornmeal (Indian meal) used.” So now all is clear, and you can see a picture of the thing itself at that last link.

Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it today; my wife and I are off to her sister’s for the traditional excessive meal, so I won’t be around to rescue comments from moderation (and provide occasional acerbic rejoinders) until sometime this evening. Don’t break the furniture!

Geoff Lindsey, a British writer, director, and pronunciation coach with degrees in linguistics, has a very interesting YouTube video (26:42) in which he discusses changes in pronunciation in the younger generation, as compared with what dictionaries prescribe. (There are a couple of minutes of plug for the sponsor near the beginning, which you can skip using the handy chapter listings underneath.) I liked his saying he has to check “indispensable” to make sure he’s spelled it correctly, and needless to say I identified with his plaint “All too often I’ve found out that my own pronunciation is no longer the majority one.” Some things I learned: harass with initial stress (HA-rass) has been obsolete for many years in the UK, aeon is now AY-on (EE-on is “very old-fashioned”), cure is now /kyo:/ (given as an alternative by Daniel Jones back in 1917!), “mischievious” can be found in print going back at least to 1867, and “gotten” has pretty much taken over from “got” in the UK (Lindsey says “I don’t have that word at all — for me it’s completely American”). There’s a discussion of tr, dr and their apparently universal pronunciation as chr, jr; one of the discussants said “When I was a kid I always wondered why my name, A/j/rian, had a d in it.”

One thing that bothered me was his account of the history of garage — Lindsey thinks the American quasi-French pronunciation with final stress is new, but the 1911 Century has it as the first pronunciation (p. 2454). But he’s focused on the present, of course, and the website he runs (and plugs), CUBE (Current British English searchable transcriptions), seems to be quite up to date. (Just for fun, I put in the most obscure unpronounceable word I know, congeries, and it gave /k ɔ n ʤ ɪ́ː r ɪj z/, with stress on the second syllable; the video clip it coughed up as illustration, however, had a guy saying /ˈk ɔ n ʤ ɪ r ɪj z/, with initial stress. Still a few bugs in the system! As I wrote here, “I may be the only living English speaker who uses the four-syllable pronunciation /kənˈdʒɪəɹɪˌiːz/.”) Thanks, Bathrobe!

Tiger Webb wrote for ABC Radio National about a mysterious Australian idiom:

Rank parochialism it may be, but I’ve always felt Australian idioms to be particularly inscrutable. Blessed with a father whose affinity for rhyming slang and ockerisms knows no mortal bounds, as a youth I was routinely confused by words that made no sense to me yet seemed widely understood by everyone else in this wide brown land.

As our family boiled in a beach car park waiting for a spot to be vacated, I was surprised to learn that the places was not full, but chockers. Dressing for my first day of school, my sisters kindly informed me that being as flash as a rat with a gold tooth did not, in fact, mean that I resembled a rodent.

My childhood was also haunted by an unusually well-meaning spectre: that of Larry, as in as happy as. Everyone in Australia seemed to have met this Larry character, and had all independently found him to be an extraordinarily upbeat fellow. As I met Lawrences and Laurents in primary school—all of whom seemed quite dour—I began to idly wonder whether I’d ever meet this ur-Larry, ever come to behold his beaming visage.

You can imagine my surprise when I learnt that there was no Larry. ‘Why on earth,’ I began, presumably petulantly, ‘do you all say it, then?’ […]

The phrase first pops up in New Zealand in 1875, where Harry Orsman, editor of the New Zealand Dictionary of English spotted it in the writings of one George Llewellyn Meredith. Meredith, a prominent Launcestonian who spent time in Auckland engaging principally in agricultural pursuits, is reported to have written the words ‘we would be as happy as Larry if it were not for the rats.’

Orsman, the dictionary editor, supposed that Larry was a stand-in for one of two other words: larrie, a word of Clydesdale origin meaning a joke, or larrikin, a well-known Australian term for a cad. We can probably safely rule out the latter: as Melissa Bellanta notes in her history of larrikinism, the term was pejorative through much of the 19th century. Larrikins, then, were not particularly happy—on account of being frequently incarcerated.

There are more theories at the link, including an eponymous source: “Larry Foley, a man described by the Australian Dictionary of Biography as a ‘pugilist and contractor’, and in one obituary as ‘a popular citizen and old-time champion boxer’.” I like this kind of well-researched dive into origins, even if there can be no definitive answer; thanks, Maidhc!

This is one of those posts that satisfies both halves of the blog name. Trevor Joyce called my attention to Malachi O’Doherty’s recent Belfast Telegraph column “Hats off to those who make the right choice in headwear,” quoted in full at his Facebook post, knowing I would appreciate this section:

If you look at old pictures of Belfast, or any other city, you notice that everyone is wearing a hat.
There are the boaters of the dandies, the dunchers of the working men, the caps on the boys, the bonnets on the ladies. Caps were still a standard part of a school uniform up to the 1960s.
At church, the women were obliged to cover their heads and the men to uncover theirs, the implication perhaps being that a woman looks more like a sinner without a hat whereas a man looks more dashing and daring with one.
The hat, more than any other garment, was a badge of class, from the top hat of the arrogant to the pork pie of the humble.
I wear a duncher, perhaps more commonly called ‘a cloth cap’. It keeps my head warm since I don’t have enough hair to do that for me.
Mine are all made with Donegal tweed so they suggest ethnicity. They were also regarded as the hat of the working classes though they seem popular among horse breeders.
A fuller, larger duncher than mine is called the newsboy, presumably because it was worn by the boys who sold newspapers on the streets, without whom journalism wouldn’t have functioned. With their folded bundles of papers under one arm, they shouted ‘Sixth Tele!’ and ‘Ulster!’, and they could peel off and fold a paper for you with one hand while counting and pocketing your coins with the other.
I see the duncher as unaffected. At least, I wear it to affect the impression that I am unaffected.

Trevor had never come across the term “duncher” before, and no more had I; the OED (entry revised 2018) has:

1. A cow or sheep that is given to butting. Also (Irish English (northern)): a hornless cow. […]

2. Irish English (northern). A cloth cap with a peak; a flat cap. Also more fully duncher cap.

1914 A grey cap with a flat peak. The wee lad said it was a duncher.
St. J. G. Ervine, Mrs. Martin’s Man xvi. 205 […]

It gives the etymology as “< dunch v. [‘To deliver a short, sharp blow to; Of a cow, sheep, etc.: to butt (someone or something) with the head’] + -er suffix¹” with the note “In sense 2 apparently so called on account of its resemblance to the flat head of a hornless cow.” Is anybody familiar with this striking word?

Having read Nabokov’s 1930 novella Соглядатай, translated by his son Dmitri as The Eye, I don’t have much to say about it except that it’s the weirdest thing he’d written up till then and has surprisingly many resonances with Dostoevsky for an author who claimed to despise him (it’s been compared, with reason, to The Double, Notes from Underground, and “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” which I wrote about here). What I do have something to say about is the title, which is an obsolete Russian word for ‘spy.’ As I wrote Lizok:

I’m also wondering how one might translate соглядатай if one didn’t want to go with “The Eye.” I checked the Oxford Historical Thesaurus and found a couple of comparably obsolete words for ‘spy’: explorator “A person employed to collect information, esp. with regard to an enemy, or an enemy’s country; a scout; a spy” and otacust “A listener; an eavesdropper; a spy.” I just know that VVN would have used one of those if he’d been translating Pushkin!

I might add that since the Russian word is made up of the prefix со- ‘with, co(n)-‘ and the verbal root гляд- ‘to look,’ one could repurpose the rare Latin word conspector ‘one who looks at, overseer’ (which never seems to have been borrowed into English); Tertullian says “Deus conspector est cordis.” Expand the wordhoard!

My wife asked me how many languages use the word for ‘tongue’ to mean ‘language’ — as do, for instance, the Romance languages — and furthermore, why ‘tongue’? Obviously the tongue is involved in speech, but so are various other parts of the mouth, and ‘mouth’ itself might seem a more obvious metonym. I gave her the easy answer, which is that a lot of modern languages do so because Greek and Latin did, but that just pushes the problem back (and did Latin imitate Greek, or is it an Indo-European thing?), so I thought I’d toss it out there for consideration by the Hattery.

Back in 2011 I wrote “I don’t play Scrabble much any more, though I’ve always enjoyed it (very amateurishly), so my reaction to the expansion of official vocabulary is muted,” and I don’t think I’ve played it since then, but I admit I’m taken aback by the new expansion described by Stefan Fatsis for Slate:

The linguistic tumult began in September, when NASPA Games, the organization that maintains the word list used in club and tournament Scrabble, published a draft of its update. The NASPA list includes all of the words in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, the go-to source for living-room and app players in North America, plus a lot more. Although the seventh edition of the OSPD, which I wrote about last year, ushered in more than 500 newbies, NASPA added more than 4,700. […]

When players, including me, started combing the list of additions of words up to 15 letters long—the OSPD stops at eight—they found a bunch of head-scratching stuff, mostly involving the inflected forms of words, with the plural endings -s and -es and the comparative and superlative endings -er, -est, -ier, and -iest.

Inflections can be tricky. Dictionaries have rarely listed every inflected form of root words—in the print age, for reasons of space and expense; now, online, because of convention. So [NASPA chief executive John] Chew and his colleagues on NASPA’s dictionary committee did what Scrabble players have done since the first OSPD was published by Merriam-Webster Inc. 45 years ago: They tried to apply rules enumerated by dictionaries to guide decisions on the validity of a word.

[Read more…]

Brad Bigelow of The Neglected Books Page wrote an essay on a writer about whom he says, correctly, “Her name means nothing to you. I can say this with confidence because it meant nothing to me and I have been studying English novels and novelists great and obscure for over forty years.” She has a Wikipedia page only because he created it. Her life was awful, but her novels sound remarkable:

Kathleen Sully’s writing is almost addictively readable. Her prose is spare, unstudied, brisk. She relies heavily on dialogue—but not on deep conversations. Scenes move quickly. Emotions run close to the surface. Merrily to the Grave was fuelled by a raw energy, a brutal honesty I’d only seen in Orwell or Patrick Hamilton. […]

There were hints of Joyce’s rawness, of Lawrence’s bluntness and, in Sully’s use of dialogue, of Ivy Compton-Burnett, but only hints. Her first novel, Canal in Moonlight, opens: ‘Bikka’s rats are large, fierce and tenacious. They find rich pickings in the garbage of the extravagant Bikka poor which nourishes bodies and whet appetites for yet more.’ […]

Kathleen Sully’s 1960 novel, Skrine, set in the aftermath of some unspecified global apocalypse, opens with a woman murdered for a pack of cigarettes. A Man Talking to Seagulls opens—and closes—with a body lying dead on a beach. In Through the Wall, little Celia Wick shivers outside while her parents fight, throwing plates and punches. ‘The Wicks were the scum of Mastowe: drunkards, loafers, petty thieves, and worse,’ Sully writes. And yet through this grim world flows a current of magic and spirituality. At night, Celia rises up from her miserable bedroom and flies above her street, up into the moon, ‘a million years away to where tigers ate apricots, and birds, honey-coloured and smelling of wall-flowers, flew in and out of her heart.’

The nameless madwoman in ‘The Weeping and the Laughter,’ one of the short novels in Canaille, tells how she used to ‘flow through the top of my head, go to the window, jump off into space and fly about like an owl.’ In A Man on the Roof, a dead husband comes back to his wife as a ghost and the two carry on as if nothing had happened. One of Sully’s later novels, A Breeze on a Lonely Road, is about a solicitor searching for the people and places he dreams about each night. As a man stands over a dead body at the end of A Man Talking to Seagulls, he suddenly realizes ‘that he beheld a husk—that the man was elsewhere—no matter where—but somewhere—and that life was life and could not be denied or extinguished—ever.’ The only equivalent I knew to this combination of realism and the fantastic was the magical realism of Latin American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez—but Sully began publishing a decade before these works were known in England. […]

[Read more…]

I decided to reread Dostoyevsky’s 1877 story Сон смешного человека, translated by Constance Garnett as “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” and was struck by the truth of what Rosamund Bartlett said in the interview I posted here: “it presents Dostoevsky’s major themes in microcosm, anticipates their amplification in The Brothers Karamazov, and is a perfect distillation of his art.” It’s about a guy who thinks nothing matters and is planning to commit suicide until a dream in which he is whisked through space to a planet that is exactly like the earth — except that its inhabitants turn out to be sinless (compare James Blish’s A Case of Conscience). You can read more about the plot at Wikipedia; the essence is that the dream turns him away from suicide and leads him to help a suffering little girl whose appeals he had previously rejected. It’s brilliantly written (and a wonderful change after slogging through a chunk of Ovadii Savich’s 1928 novel «Воображаемый собеседник» [The imaginary interlocutor], which sounded interesting but turned out to be tedious reading), but what leads me to post about it is its treatment of the two Russian words for ‘truth,’ discussed in this 2011 post. In the first paragraph, the narrator says people consider him ridiculous and laugh at him; he would laugh with them, but they make him sad: “Грустно потому, что они не знают истины, а я знаю истину. Ох как тяжело одному знать истину!” [Sad because they do not know the truth and I do know it. Oh, how hard it is to be the only one who knows the truth!] (I’m using Garnett’s renditions.) Here istina is used for ‘truth.’ Later, when he starts describing his dream, he uses the same word: “Но неужели не все равно, сон или нет, если сон этот возвестил мне Истину? Ведь если раз узнал истину и увидел ее, то ведь знаешь, что она истина и другой нет и не может быть, спите вы или живете.” [But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth? If once one has recognized the truth and seen it, you know that it is the truth and that there is no other and there cannot be, whether you are asleep or awake.] In ch. V, we have it again:

Они стали говорить на разных языках. Они познали скорбь и полюбили скорбь, они жаждали мучения и говорили, что Истина достигается лишь мучением. Тогда у них явилась наука. […] «Но у нас есть наука, и через нее мы отыщем вновь истину, но примем ее уже сознательно.»

They began to talk in different languages. They became acquainted with sorrow and loved sorrow; they thirsted for suffering, and said that truth could only be attained through suffering. Then science appeared. […] “But we have science, and by the means of it we shall find the truth and we shall arrive at it consciously.”

And in the final section, where he’s talking about prophesying to people about the truth he has found, he uses the same word: “Истину, ибо я видел ее, видел своими глазами, видел всю ее славу!” [Of the truth, for I have seen it, have seen it with my own eyes, have seen it in all its glory.]

But at the end of ch. IV, he suddenly switches to pravda:

Пусть сон мой породило сердце мое, но разве одно сердце мое в силах было породить ту ужасную правду, которая потом случилась со мной? Как бы мог я ее один выдумать или пригрезить сердцем? Неужели же мелкое сердце мое и капризный, ничтожный ум мой могли возвыситься до такого откровения правды! О, судите сами: я до сих пор скрывал, но теперь доскажу и эту правду.

My heart may have originated the dream, but would my heart alone have been capable of originating the awful event [pravdu] which happened to me afterwards? How could I alone have invented it or imagined it in my dream? Could my petty heart and fickle, trivial mind have risen to such a revelation of truth? Oh, judge for yourselves: hitherto I have concealed it, but now I will tell the truth.

And in that final section, he joins the two: “Правда истинная [Pravda istinnaya]: я сбиваюсь, и, может быть, дальше пойдет еще хуже.” [It is true indeed: I am vague and confused, and perhaps as time goes on I shall be more so.] I frankly don’t know what to make of all this, and in general the more attention I give to the distinction between the two words, the less I understand it, but I put it out there for your consideration.

Ryan Starkey has an impressive map of British English dialects, about which he says:

The diversity of English dialects in the United Kingdom is enormous.

It’s common for people from either side of a river, mountain, or even town to speak noticeably different ways, with particular features that immediately mark someone out as being from a specific area, to those who have an ear for it.

This is pretty normal in any large region that has been speaking a language continually for 1600 years. You will find the same thing in Germany, Norway, France, and countless other countries. Languages evolve over time, and physical distance between regions means that new features often spread slowly, leading to dialectal differences. Sometimes these differences are small, and only easily recognised by people from the relevant region. Other times there are very clear distinctions, with neighbouring dialects sounding almost like different languages to those unaccustomed to them.

Here I have tried to capture as much nuance as possible. I’ve spent the last few years pooling together every study, survey, map, and database I can find, and then subjecting my image to several rounds of peer feedback. The members of my Facebook group, “Ah yes, the British accent”, were also a huge help in trying to make these borders as accurate as possible. The end result is an image which is, to my knowledge, the most detailed map of British dialects ever made. But it is still very much unfinished, and it always will be.

He then has a heading “Why this map is wrong, and always will be” that (ironically) inspires confidence, with sections titled “There’s no precise definition of a ‘dialect’,” “Borders between dialects are rarely hard lines,” and “Some dialects are not geographically specific at all.” He explains why he included Northern Ireland but not Scots/Doric, and ends with a link to his earlier post Every Native British and Irish Language. Thanks, Trevor!