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Three items of interest from Sunday’s New York Times Magazine:

1) From a very interesting Peter Maass article on Vagit Alekperov, the president of Lukoil and a living example of How to Get Rich Without Getting Tossed in Jail by Putin, I learned the kind of thing I’m always looking to learn, namely where the company name comes from: “The company combined three of the largest fields of the Soviet oil industry — Langepas, Urai and Kogalym — as well as several refineries, and its name derives from the first letter of each field.” (The name always sounded funny to me, because luk means ‘onion’ in Russian.)

2) William Safire’s column is actually informative without being obnoxious; he investigates various occurrences of the phrase “(behind) the green door” (including the movie — ah, ’70s memories!), ending with a link to an online collection of O. Henry stories, among which is a delightful tale of adventure called “The Green Door.”

3) An article by John Hodgman on the fantasy writer Susanna Clarke contains the following sentence: “When we were shown the preserved cat that was said to have been found in the pub’s wall, where it had been bricked in generations before to ward off evil spirits, Clarke pointed out that in East Anglia, it would have been far more likely to find a horse’s head: ‘Horse magic had much more of a hold there.'” Does anyone else find the second “it” as awkward as I do?

That’s the special of the day I saw on a menu board as I walked up Lexington Ave. today. I would like to think this meant the pasta was served by bongo-playing beatnik waiters, but I’m afraid the explanation is much more prosaic: most low-level jobs in New York restaurants are filled by Spanish-speakers, and in Spanish b and v are purely graphic variants for the same phoneme, which is pronounced [b] at the start of a word. (And, in case you didn’t know, vongole are clams in Italian.)

Russian-speakers will find much hilarity in this list of “translators’ pearls.” My favorite so far: “I’m not a woman you can trust – Ya ne zhenshchina, pover’ mne [‘I’m not a woman, believe me’].” (Via Avva.)

Verbatim is “working towards having the complete run of VERBATIM back issues available online, and searchable, too” (in the words of Mark Liberman at Language Log, from whom I got the link).

Verbatim is the only magazine of language and linguistics for the layperson. We write about words and their uses with verve and humor, concentrating on English in all its variety and all the fun parts of other languages. Names, palindromes, puns and proverbs are also topics of interest. Puzzles, book reviews, SIC! SIC! SIC! and more round out each issue.

The back issues so far available are here; there looks to be a lot of interesting stuff.

I apologize for the recent difficulty accessing LH; it turns out my untended @languagehat inbox was accumulating so much spam it used up my allotment of memory. Fortunately, the generous and indomitable Songdog once again reached into his bag of tricks and made everything better. Now let us never speak of this again. I’m going to bed.

In the course of trying to find an online reference for the Great Hungarian Curse (for a MeTa comment), I came across a funny and occasionally informative National Review article by John Derbyshire that starts off with some dismissive remarks about Lenny Bruce that would have infuriated me a few decades ago and continues with some much more interesting stuff about Chinese, which I’ll quote here:

In Mandarin Chinese, the only foreign language I know much about, the all-purpose expletive is tamade, pronounced “tah-MAH-duh,” which translates as “his (her, its, your) mother’s.” His mother’s what? The great 20th-century writer Lu Xun — he was a sort of Chinese Orwell in his broad outlook — wrote a witty essay on this topic, which somehow manages not to be offensive at all. You hear tamade all the time in Chinese street talk. Often it is just used in isolation. After hitting your thumb with a hammer, for example, it would be appropriate to say Ta-MA-de!! — “Oh, pop!!” The expression can also be heard in more complex forms, sometimes truncated, as in Shei tama zhidao? — “Who the pop knows?”
Lesser Chinese dialects are usually much more foul-mouthed than the official national language. Dogs, mothers, popping, and, for reasons it would take much too long to explain, turtles feature largely in various combinations, some of them physiologically very improbable. In South China, where you can get three mutually incomprehensible dialects within ten miles of each other, the locals tweak their neighbors with expressions that sound obscene on this side of the mountain but harmless on the other. Taishan people, for example, will mutter Kip ma-go hoi! among speakers of “regular” Guangzhou Cantonese, to whom it sounds like “Go ride a horse across the river.” To a Taishanese ear it is actually much more potent than that.

(I guess I should add that he’s using “pop” as a euphemism for what he calls “the common f-word.”)

I don’t know how I’ve missed Alan Hartley’s Home Page until now, but thanks to intrepid internet explorer aldiboronti at Wordorigins, here it is. Aldi cites in particular his Maritime History Citations for the OED, but there are all sorts of other things, including From reading-slips to dictionary entry (Hartley’s raw slips for the new entry Otoe, plus a sample entry he created to show how the material could be boiled down), his Proposal for an historical dictionary of Mediterranean nautical terms, Loanwords in Modern Nautical Greek, and much, much more. A remarkable man, clearly, and I’m glad he’s making his word research available to us all.

A nice obit (with lots of links; I’ve copied only the first) for lexicographer Robert Burchfield at The Blog of Death:

If you’ve ever wondered how to spell or define a word, Robert William Burchfield was the ideal person to ask for help.
Burchfield had a passion for the constantly evolving nature of the English language. A pre-eminent lexicographer, he became the editor of the four-volume “Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary” in 1957. During his three decades in publishing, including 13 years as the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, Burchfield spearheaded a campaign to expand the OED’s World English offerings to include terminology from Australia, the Caribbean, India, North America, Pakistan and South Africa. He even published words in Maori, the language of a tribe from his native New Zealand.
Despite what may have appeared to be a rather tame desk job, Burchfield occasionally received death threats from folks who were offended by his decision to publish sexist slang and racial/ethnic colloquialisms. He even went to court to defend the OED’s right to define terms some people felt were derogatory…

Thanks to samuelad for the link.

As a follow-up to my LITSEI/GIMNAZIYA post, another example (also from The Russian Language Today) of convergence of originally distinct terms:

The title of the head of city administration, previously predsedatel’ gorodskogo soveta ‘Chairman of the City Council’, has been changed to mer ‘mayor’, a loan word [from French maire] which imparted a European flavour to the title of the city head. However, for some reason this was considered not to be good enough, and in 1995, in many towns, people found themselves electing not a mer but a gubernator ‘Governor’, a title dating back to the nineteenth century. This old name, exorcised in 1917, has now come full circle. In 1995 it caused some confusion among the population at large, because for many Russians casting their vote the word gubernator sounded outlandish and dated, and prompted a humorous reaction. The situation was all the stranger as there was no unified standard terminology: the head of the Moscow administration is called mer, while in St Petersburg the name of the same post is gubernator.

Well, since my last anniversary post, the country list has almost doubled, now standing at around 120 (I may have mistakenly included a territory or two, but then I may have missed a name or two); hello Cambodia, Albania, Libya, and all the other far-flung dens of LH readers! A year ago France was the non-English-speaking country that turned up most frequently in the logs, but it’s been overtaken by the Netherlands, Japan, Germany, and Sweden, with Poland hot on its heels. As always, I thank all those who read and comment on my entries; without the feedback, maintaining the blog would not be nearly as rewarding. In that connection I direct any readers who may have missed it to my entry Contacting Languagehat, and I emphasize you need not leave an e-mail address or any other personal information (aa, come back!). It’s been a tremendous amount of fun (and educational to boot), and I hope to keep it up for a long time to come.