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This may be the perfect rock-and-roll song:

1 2 3 4 go!
I’m going down in the middle of town
you’re going up in the middle of town
It’s all so sad ’cause we’re all going to Hell.
Oh oh oh uh uh uh
I am talking
you are yelling
he is fighting
no one’s listening.
Oh oh oh uh uh uh.
My song is dying
No one’s coming
But now everyone is coming
it’s louder it’s noisier
now the song is over so bye and thanks for coming.

I’d love to have heard the New York Dolls or the Minutemen perform that in their heyday; I can imagine it done in either of their very different styles.
I should add that I’ve normalized the spelling; you can see the original at Derryl Murphy’s Cold Ground entry—it was written by his 8-year-old son Aidan.

Reading yesterday’s NY Times story “New Generation of Leaders Is Emerging for Al Qaeda,” by David Johnston and David E. Sanger, I was brought up short by the end of the third paragraph:

“They’re a little bit of both,” one official said, describing Al Qaeda’s new midlevel structure. “Some who have been around and some who have stepped up. They’re reaching for their bench.”

Reaching for their bench? I flailed around desperately for possible meanings (benchmark?) before realizing it was a baseball metaphor. And if I, who have been a baseball fan since the days when the Washington Senators played in long-vanished Griffith Stadium with its oddly shaped right field, didn’t get it at first, what hope do non-Americans have? So I thought it behooved me to explain the reference.

Every ballpark has two areas called “dugouts,” one for the home team and one for the visitors, where those players not on the field at the moment congregate and containing benches where they can sit and converse or simply spit tobacco (or rather, in these health-conscious days, often sunflower seeds) when they are not standing at the railing cursing the umpires. By a simple enough process of metonymy, those players who are in the dugout and are available to be substituted for one of the nine in the game at any given time are called “the bench,” leading to expressions such as “their bench is depleted” (the team doesn’t have many players left as possible substitutes) and “he’ll be going to the bench” (the manager will be putting a new player in). I trust the sentence from the news story is now clear.

Incidentally, The Language of Baseball is a good source for all your baseball-term needs.

David at It’s Ablaut Time has an excellent and thought-provoking post suggesting that

the role of mistaken inferences in adding diversity to the linguistic pool is essentially analogous to the role of mutations in adding diversity to the genetic pool… In both cases, the mistransmission of a code adds to a pool of choices from which other factors (environmental factors/learnability) differentially select. The take-home message is that even optimizing changes in language are a product of our inability to completely understand one another.

I particularly like this passage: “While languages obviously serve as media of communcation, they are in many ways ill-suited to this task. Grammars are too complex, too byzantine, too intricate, and indeed too beautiful, to be optimal codes for communcation.” Yes, exactly, and for many of us it is precisely the intricate, byzantine bits that are a primary attraction. I’ve never been able to work up any interest in Esperanto and the other simplified languages, despite their theoretical value for easy communication, because they’re too damn boring. If I can’t have irregular verbs, I’d rather grunt and point.

While looking for something entirely different in the Cassell Concise Dictionary, I ran across the word adminicle, defined as:
1 an aid, support. 2 (Sc. Law) corroborative evidence, esp. of the contents of a missing document.

I particularly like the OED’s last citation:
1872 Daily News 2 Oct. 5 Floriculture and other adminicles of civilisation.

Pure essence of Victorian Latinity! The adjective, of course, is adminicular (‘auxiliary, corroborative’), which I intend to use whenever maximum obfuscation is a desideratum.

Update. Margaret of Transblawg has done some follow-up research on this irresistible word.

Further update (Mar. 2025). The OED revised the entry in 2011; it now reads:

1. Something which provides help or assistance, esp. in a subordinate or supporting capacity; an aid, an accessory; an adjunct. Frequently with to. Now rare.

1551 The auctor would haue the Sacramentes..to be adminicles (as it were).
S. Gardiner, Explicatio Catholique Fayth 14
[…]

1646 To take care of the maintenance of the Ministery, Schooles, poor, and of good works for necessary uses, that Religion and Learning may not want their necessary adminicles.
G. Gillespie, Aarons Rod Blossoming ii. viii. 263
[…]

1788 The invention contained in these verses is..so great an adminicle to the dexterous management of syllogisms.
T. Reid, Aristotle’s Logic iv. §2. 74
[…]

1872 Floriculture and other adminicles of civilisation.
Daily News 2 October 5

1900 To Dr. Osgood Classical Mythology is an adminicle to the study of Milton, and not a study in itself.
American Journal of Philology vol. 21 234
[…]

1996 The final declaration..went yet further; an adminicle to the Kadets’ commitment to active Russification of minority regions, it read: [etc.].
J. D. Smele, Civil War in Siberia iii. 295

2. A piece of supporting or corroborative evidence; something which, without forming complete proof in itself, helps to prove a point; (esp. in Scots Law) a document tending to prove the existence and tenor of a lost deed, which if it existed would have been full evidence.

1592 That the tryall..sall nocht be ressauit without verie greit adminicles.
Acts of Parliament of Scotland (1814) vol. III. 569/2

1600 The..breifs fund vpon him, and vther adminicles.
in W. Fraser, Mem. Earls of Haddington (1889) vol. II. 208
[…]

1706 Adminicle..In Civil-Law, it signifies imperfect Proof.
Phillips’s New World of Words (new edition)
[…]

1965 An accused under arrest may in Scotland be..stripped, searched and probed for marks, blood stains, and other adminicles of evidence.
Journal Forensic Sci. Society vol. 5 147

2000 An adminicle of evidence need not be unequivocally in support of the prosecution case to amount to corroboration.
P. R. Ferguson in M. Childs & L. Ellison, Feminist Perspectives on Evidence viii. 164

3. † In plural. Ornaments placed around the figure of Juno as conventionally represented on a medal, coin, etc. Cf. attribute n. 3. Obsolete. rare.

1728 Among Antiquaries, the term Adminicules is applied to the Attributes, or Ornaments wherewith Juno is represented on Medals.
E. Chambers, Cyclopædia at Adminicle

1754 Adminicles, among antiquarians, denote the attributes or ornaments wherewith Juno is represented on medals.
New & Complete Dictionary of Arts & Sciences vol. I. 46/2

(Not sure why they used both those virtually identical citations.) The etymology:

< Middle French adminicle, Middle French, French adminicule means to an end (1466; compare Anglo-Norman adminicle auxiliary right (a1315 in an apparently isolated attestation)), help, support (1555), (in law) piece of corroborative evidence (1586), attribute of Juno, as depicted on medals (1721 or earlier) and its etymon classical Latin adminiculum (also adminiclum, rare) prop, stake, support, person or thing on which one relies, in post-classical Latin also corroborative evidence (frequently from 13th cent. in British sources) < ad- ad- prefix + an element of uncertain origin (see note) + ‑culum ‑culum suffix; compare ‑cle suffix, ‑cule suffix. Compare later adminiculum n.

Notes

The second element of classical Latin adminiculum may be related to classical Latin minae threats (see minacious adj.) or to classical Latin moenia walls (see munite v.).

Interesting that they don’t know what the -min- part is from.

David Mortensen, a Berkeley grad student in linguistics (who works on STEDT, the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus Project, which must be fascinating) has started a blog with the clever title It’s Ablaut Time. While I’m glad to see linguistics blogs of all sorts, I’m particularly partial to those that specialize in my old stomping ground of historical linguistics, and there are precious few of those, so a warm welcome and tip of the Language Hat, David!

One of his less technical entries:

Language is bluffing

It strikes me that a huge number of insights into linguistic phenomena can be dervied from a few relatively simple propositions. One of these is the observation that language is a code employed only by code-breakers: that none of us knows the language we speak as a fully explicit system. Instead, we bluff our way through, filling in the gaps in our knowledge of the code with an inference here and a leap of logic there. This capacity to extrapolate from the known to the unknown is, in essense, grammar. If these inferences follow naturally enough from the parts of the code everyone around us agrees upon, they are incorporated into it. If they don’t follow at all from shared knowledge of the code, we come off looking inarticulate. The interesting thing is that the parts of the code we all agree upon were, at some point in the past, somebody’s bluff.

Update (Jan. 2021). Mortensen is now a linguist at Carnegie Mellon.

The British National Corpus is a very large (over 100 million words) corpus of modern English, both spoken and written, and you can search it for free (you get 50 random hits, with context and sources). (Via Ramage.)

I’m reading Sebald‘s The Emigrants (a birthday gift from my wife) and have gotten (along with much literary pleasure — Michael Hulse’s translation reads as if the book was originally written in English, a very rare effect) a couple of new words, both (oddly) on p. 152 of the New Directions paperback. The first is candlewick: “….she in a pink dressing gown that was made of a material found only in the bedrooms of the English lower classes and is unaccountably called candlewick.” The OED has it (s.v. candle-wick), but offers no suggestion as to the origin of the name, so “unaccountably” is the mot juste. The second is passe-partout: “Inscribed on the slightly foxed passe-partout… were the words: Gracie Irlam, Urmston nr Manchester, 17 May 1944.” This, according to the OED, is “an ornamental mat or plate of cardboard or the like, having the centre cut out so as to receive a photograph, drawing, or engraving, to which when framed it serves as a mount or border. Hence passe-partout frame, a frame ready made with such a mount for reception of photographs, etc… A kind of adhesive tape or paper used for framing photographs and for other purposes.” The phrase “slightly foxed” suggests to me that the second of these definitions is meant. I’m guessing that both words are identical in the German original, but I would be grateful if a reader with access to it would let me know.

I would also be grateful if anyone can identify for me the “hollegrasch coins” mentioned on page 199; hollegrasch gets no Google hits (and is not in my coin books), so it may be a typo or it may be an incredibly obscure coin. Whoso knows, let them speak. [It turns out this is the Jewish baby-naming ceremony usually spelled Hollekreisch; see this Wikipedia article.]

I commend to everyone’s attention The Vernacular Body, a recently (re)born blog full of spirited response to life and art. There are wonderful posts on war (I really must read Chris Hedges), Fahrenheit 9-11 (I had the same reaction to the mother’s grief), laupes (I think I may be one), and other deep subjects, but I’m going to quote a fluffy little entry, as lightweight as a souffle, because I love it so:

[Read more…]

Columbia University philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser died last weekend; he was best known for his response to J. L. Austin, “who noted that it was peculiar that although there are many languages in which a double negative makes a positive, no example existed where two positives expressed a negative. In a dismissive voice, Morgenbesser replied from the audience, ‘Yeah, yeah…’” I’ve quoted the anecdote (whose punchline I’ve also heard as “Yeah, right”) from Gary Shapiro’s obituary in the New York Sun, where you will find many other “Sidney stories” (“asked about Mao Tse Tung’s view of the law of non-contradiction, Morgenbesser replied, ‘I do and do not agree.’ Asked why there is something rather than nothing, he replied, ‘Even if there were nothing, you’d still be complaining!'”). I would have enjoyed taking a class from him. (Via Mark Liberman at Language Log, who adds still more stories and links.)

Addendum. Shapiro has a new Sun piece about a Columbia gathering to remember Morgenbesser, with plenty more good stories:

Aesthetician Arthur Danto, who got to know Morgenbesser in 1952, recalled one imperturbable scholar making the distinction that a religious man never doubts but a philosopher doubts.

Turning to Mr. Danto, Morgenbesser said sotto voce, “The Lubavitcher Rebbe has had more doubts in a single night than that man has had in his entire life.”

Thanks, Gary!

I quickly weary of long theoretical treatises, but I never tire of reading detailed histories of the forms and usages of vocabulary items, and many such are available at W. Rothwell’s Anglo-Norman On-Line Hub [2023: original URL now redirects to the AND site]. I discovered this through a reference to his “The Missing Link in English Etymology: Anglo-French” in a Wordorigins thread (by the indefatigable aldiboronti, who I should make a Contributing Editor to LH); checking the “Hub” link at the top, I discovered the mother lode, whose original purpose was “to support the preparation of a substantially revised and greatly expanded edition of the Anglo Norman Dictionary, whose first edition was published between 1977 and 1992 by the MHRA.” Besides the Articles on Anglo-Norman Topics (so far all by Rothwell), there are Anglo-Norman Source Texts:

As part of the ANH project, this site will progressively place on-line the source materials on which the Anglo-Norman Dictionary draws, to the extent that project resources and copyright considerations allow. These primary texts will be accessible and searchable in their own right, but beyond that, wherever the dictionary cites them, it also will be possible to follow up the references directly from within the dictionary entry concerned.

Probably the best place to start is the article aldi sent me to, from which I will quote enough bits to whet your appetite (if you have an appetite for this stuff):

That the Norman Conquest profoundly affected the vocabulary of English is no new discovery, but the precise nature of that transformation has so far been only imperfectly examined and its implications for the study of English etymology only partially understood. Up to the present time there has been no unequivocal acknowledgement that as a result of the events of 1066 there can be no rectilinear approach to the history of English as there is to the history of French. The French language can be taken back in a straight line without any breaks from the present day to The Strasbourg Oaths of 842. At no time during this whole period was the langue d’oil ousted in the northern half of the country from its position as the spoken and written language of the kings and nobles, the judiciary, the Church, the national and local administrations or the mercantile class. Dialectal variations were not lacking, but all were dialects of the langue d’oil, what has become modern French. The only rival to French was the Latin used as a formal language of record, but never as a vernacular. In England the situation was vastly different. For some three centuries after the Conquest all the literate classes used French, both spoken and written, very often alongside their native English: a Romance language overlaid the original Germanic one. Written French was especially important in medieval England as being a principal language of record – alongside British Latin – so that the sheer volume of surviving documentary evidence in Anglo-French for this period is overwhelmingly greater than that left behind in English, especially up to the late fourteenth century. No less important than the quantity of Anglo-French is the the breadth of its use. Although scholarly attention has focused largely on its literary productions from the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the later non-literary works are arguably of greater importance for the development of English culture as a whole. The law, from Parliament down to the lower courts, the administration of government at national and local level, the commercial and financial framework of the country, all worked through French rather than English. What is more, French was used extensively for all the arts and sciences long before English. This penetration of French into the whole fabric of civilization in medieval England means that the study of English etymology cannot safely confine itself to tracing words back to a cut-off point in Middle English, or even to making a leap across the Channel in search of a ‘borrowing’ from medieval French in order to reach the origin of English terms. The Middle English Dictionary reveals on virtually every page the massive and very obvious debt owed by English to French: less obviously, however, it also reveals that this debt was not built up by ‘borrowing’ in the conventional sense and that in literally thousands of cases forms and meanings were adopted (not ‘borrowed’) into English from insular, as opposed to continental French. The relationship of Anglo-French with Middle English was one of merger, not of borrowing, as a direct result of the bilingualism of the literate classes in medieval England. Terms were adopted often unchanged, sometimes in translation – ‘hot-foot’ (chaut pas), ‘beforehand’ (avant main), ‘behindhand’ (ariere main), ‘send for’ (mander pur) etc. – but always as part and parcel of a living language in daily use in England, not as isolated, static units of a foreign language borrowed from across the Channel…

The failure of scholars to appreciate fully the importance of Anglo-French in the making of the English lexis extends from individual words right up into whole areas of the culture of medieval England. For example, for the authorities on English etymology ‘troglodyte’ is adapted from the Latin and first attested in the middle of the sixteenth century – an example, one might be tempted to conclude, of the well-known re-birth of scientific interest in many fields that characterized this period. However, the term is found in French, only thinly disguised, in a Cambridge manuscript that may date from the late twelfth century and that has been available in published form for nearly seventy years. The adaptation of the word from the Latin took place in England some three and a half centuries before the date given by the authorities, but it was taken into the vernacular of the literate laity – French – not English. This example shows that a more measured approach may perhaps be called for when contrasting the ‘darkness’ of the Middle Ages with the ‘light’ of the Renaissance. Similarly, the noun ‘crescent’ is recorded in a twelfth-century Anglo-French medical work centuries before being attested in English and wrongly ascribed by the authorities to continental French. Again, the ‘spaniel’ and the ‘terrier’ are both found in Anglo-French before appearing in Middle English, indicating that their names are not borrowed directly from continental French. Only the MED, however, amongst the English authorities refers to Anglo-French in connection with these words, and only for ‘spaniel’. Another simple example is the humble ‘dandelion’, said by the authorities to be first found in English in the sixteenth century and to be an adaptation of the French dent-de-lion. Yet Godefroy’s sole example of dandelyon (IX, Comp. 304b) comes from the Englishman Palsgrave, a dating which clearly refutes the claim that the sixteenth-century English word is ‘adapted’ from continental French. Even the authoritative Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch cannot be relied on in this case, with its rather desperate claim that the form comes wahrscheinlich from Lyon in the fourteenth century. Once again, the neglected Anglo-French has new evidence to offer. On p.99 of his Plant Names of Medieval England (Cambridge, 1989) Tony Hunt gives numerous examples of the word in various spellings in both Anglo-French and Middle English going back to the late thirteenth century, with others of roughly similar date in his Popular Medicine in Thirteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1990), pp.317 and 324. Both these fundamental research books provide a wealth of new linguistic evidence across the whole spectrum of botanical and medical terminology that must inevitably lead to a far-reaching revision of attitudes towards the degree of knowledge possessed by doctors/herbalists in the Middle Ages, towards the vocabulary of Anglo-French through which much of their teaching was transmitted and, consequently, towards the importance of Anglo-French in the historical development of both French and English. In this area historical linguistics still offers a great deal of scope for basic research…

A more complicated case is presented by the English verbs ‘to hack,’ ‘to hash’, and the nouns ‘hash’ and ‘haggis’, whose relationship the authorities find confusing. Indeed, the origin of ‘haggis’ is usually said to be unknown, and connections with the French hachiz ‘hash’ are denied. If, however, we bring some Anglo-French and Middle English evidence to bear on the question, a different picture emerges. Whilst the new OED still persists in deriving ‘to hack’ from Germanic sources, without any mention of French, the Middle English Dictionary is nearer the mark in attributing it to ‘O.F.’ (but not ‘A.F.’, as it should). Amongst the quotations in the OED is one from a book of cookery recipes dated c.1440 in the sense of ‘to cut up into small pieces’, i.e. ‘to hash’. The MED takes this sense back in time to c.1325, but still without any mention of Anglo-French. Yet in an Anglo-French medical text from the second half of the twelfth century a mixture of herbs is to be hachez sur un ais (‘chopped up on a board’), an expression repeated a little farther on. About a century later a verse recipe for staunching blood from a wound recommends that: ‘Le ortie menuement hagee En eisil fort seit destempree’ (‘Finely chopped nettle should be soaked in strong vinegar’). The form of the verb here – hagee – is worth noting in view of the OED‘s form ‘to hag’. As for the assertion that the origin of ‘haggis’ is unknown, the clear refutation of this has been in print for close on a century and a half in the first edition of one of the manuscripts of the Anglo-French Treatise of Walter of Biblesworth, with a reminder being printed from another manuscript in 1929…

The danger of failing to appreciate the true nature of the linguistic situation in medieval England, however, goes beyond individual words, doublets and faux amis. Without an understanding of insular French, English scholars are liable to go badly astray in assessing the history of whole areas of their native language. French cooking has long enjoyed a high reputation, but authorities are not agreed as to when it first came into prominence in England. Dr. Burchfield writes that: ‘The culinary revolution, and the importation of French vocabulary into English society, scarcely preceded the eighteenth century’. Professor Hughes, in his Words in Time, would move the date of this ‘culinary revolution’ back to the fifteenth century (p.43), but both these dates accord ill with two recently-published thirteenth-century culinary collections in Anglo-French, which contain sufficient new terms and new techniques specific to England, as the editors emphasize, to show that an important advance in this area of domestic science had taken place centuries before. This is hardly surprising in the light of the close connections of all kinds between medieval France and England. False chronology leads to another serious error of cultural interpretation when Professor Hughes refers on p.60 to our modern meaning of ‘courtesy’ being recorded c.1513 and deriving ‘from the pragmatic Renaissance ethos of self-improvement, evidenced in the publication of numerous courtesy-books.’ Without waiting for the Renaissance, this type of book, written in Anglo-French, had been currently in use by the educated classes in England from the first half of the thirteenth century.

I find myself wanting to quote more and more, but I’ll desist. This is the sort of thing that makes me wish I’d stuck with historical linguistics.