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Alan Rusbridger writes for Prospect about what must now, alas, be considered a rara avis:

Forget your Iron Age settlements and your crumbling monasteries. I have an urgent nomination for a Unesco World Heritage Site listing. You will find it in an unprepossessing street not far from Marylebone Station in central London. […] Every town used to have at least one rambling bookshop like Archive Books on Bell Street—a haphazard emporium of the treasured, the rare, the tatty, the forgotten, the never-read and the waiting-to-be-discovered. They were—before business rates and the internet combined to snuff them out—little oases of musty calm away from the unforgiving high streets and identikit chains outside. […]

At Archive Books, the curator—it feels a little vulgar to call him a mere bookseller—is Tim Meaker, 71. He is a benign, lived-in figure who should be played by Bill Nighy if Stephen Frears ever makes a film about a picaresque second-hand bookshop. Tim took over the business nearly 45 years ago and, in the event that Unesco agree to list Archive Books, should be part of that deal.

When the Unesco inspectors arrive they will find Tim and/or his longstanding assistant Jeffrey in an uncomfortably full room that feels as though it has been artfully constructed as a set for a Dickensian period drama. In addition to the floor-to-ceiling books, two broken wooden tennis rackets adorn a shelf-end. Buffalo horns dangle from the ceiling, along with a bit of a whale, assorted puppets (“they represent the Luddites”), a boomerang and what could be a wire wastepaper bin.

When Tim and his wife Michèle, a bookbinder, first took over the shop in 1979, they sat at a table in front of the rare books section. But the table long ago disappeared under a haphazard avalanche of books, packaging, papers and music. Fetching a rare book now involves a hazardous climb over this teetering mountain without ropes or oxygen. “It’s a bit tidier than it was,” notes Tim in a distracted way.

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Via Joel at Far Outliers, a nice quote from Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, by Andrew X. Pham:

Tam, a musician my age, introduces himself. Solely on his salutation, I know we will be friends. This is easy because the Vietnamese form of address allows two people to assess each other and extend overtures of friendship. It has several tiers, each indicating the nature of acquaintance (informal, formal, business, friends, intimate) as well as the hierarchy. Just by pronouns used, one can discern the type of relationship between two people. For instance, if Tam refers to himself as toi (I) and calls me anh (big brother, or, in this context, you), then the relationship is formal and equal, with neither having the upper hand despite age; however, if Tam is in fact younger than me, then unless there is something else—social, economic status—to normalize the age difference, Tam is being disrespectful by not referring to himself as em (little brother). And if I were, say, fifteen years older than he, Tam should use chu (uncle) and chau (nephew). There are many forms, including regional variations.

Tam calls me ban: friend.

I like him instantly. He reminds me of an old childhood friend from my days at the French Catholic school in Saigon, who used his own name, in the third person, instead of “I” and called me “friend” rather than “you.” Tam invites me to one of his regular gigs at a hotel disco.

This stuff fascinates me, but I’m glad I don’t have to navigate it in daily life.

Ben Lindbergh at the Ringer asks “When did jerk stop meaning ‘stupid’?” He starts with the Steve Martin movie The Jerk, saying of its protagonist:

Navin is oblivious, not obnoxious. He’s ignorant, not intolerant. He’s naive, not intentionally cruel. He’s a bumpkin, a rube, and a moron, maybe, but a jerk? For the most part, no, I wouldn’t say so.

There he is, of course, using the current sense of jerk:

“There’s definitely been a semantic shift in ‘jerk’ over the years,” says linguist, lexicographer, and Wall Street Journal language columnist Ben Zimmer. The Oxford English Dictionary, which dates “jerk,” an American colloquialism, back to 1935, reports: “Originally: an inept or pathetic person; a fool. Now: an objectionable or obnoxious person.” Green’s Dictionary of Slang, which traces “jerk” back to 1934, defines its original meaning as “a fool, an idiot, a failure.”

He goes into the change in some detail, and it makes fascinating reading, but here’s the part that grabbed my attention and made me post it:
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Y wrote me as follows:

Semiticist Benjamin Suchard retired his Twitter account in favor of a blog. His specialty is biblical Hebrew, but he’s interested in everything else Semitic and Afro-Asiatic. Check it out.

(The site design is awful but I’m sure it’ll get fixed sooner or later.)

The design really is awful, and there’s not even an About page [There is, just click on WHO? — thanks, Jen! –LH] where one might hope to learn why it’s called Bnuyaminim (if indeed it is — that’s in the URL but not on the blog itself), but never mind, the posts look interesting: August 10, Is Arabic Cushitic?; August 9, Is Beja Berber?; August 8, The genitive in Semitic and Cushitic (and Beja), etc. His now abandoned Twitter page said:

Comparative Semiticist trying to leave his dark Indo-Europeanist past behind him. /⁠ˈsuʃɑɹd/⁠, /⁠ˈsyʃɑɹt/⁠, or /⁠syˈʃaʁ/ preferred; /⁠ˈsʌkhɑɹd/ dispreferred.

Which is fun, but I kind of wish he’d said which of the three preferred versions is his own usage. Thanks, Y!

A correspondent writes on behalf of a researcher of his acquaintance:

The researcher asks about the composition of the audiences in Ottoman gazinos (cabarets/nightclubs) in Istanbul/Constantinople ca. 1908-1910. If a prominent Sephardic singer such as Haim Effendi were performing, what might the audience have consisted of (in terms of nationalities, religions, etc.)? Would women have attended, too? Would Haim have performed songs principally in Judeo-Spanish, in Turkish, or both? Would any of these answers change after the revolution of summer, 1908?

The question about songs in Judeo-Spanish and/or Turkish is of course of Hattic interest (though perhaps unanswerable by anyone present), as is the word غازینو‎ (gazino), from Italian casino — I wonder why the initial consonant got voiced? (We talked about Ottoman Turkish in 2007 and 2017.)

Part of Simon Willison’s Catching up on the weird world of LLMs (Large Language Models) is about language, which makes it Hattic material; a great deal of it is about coding, which is Greek a mystery to me but of interest to a lot of Hatters, so it’s worth posting for that as well. Consider it also as a public service message — I draw your attention in particular to the “Prompt injection” section at the end. It’s written so clearly and conversationally that even I was able to get a lot out of it. Here’s a passage with some good stuff:

I’ll talk about how I use them myself—I use them dozens of times a day. About 60% of my usage is for writing code. 30% is helping me understand things about the world, and 10% is brainstorming and helping with idea generation and thought processes.

They’re surprisingly good at code. Why is that? Think about how complex the grammar of the English language is compared to the grammar used by Python or JavaScript. Code is much, much easier.

I’m no longer intimidated by jargon. I read academic papers by pasting pieces of them into GPT-4 and asking it to explain every jargon term in the extract. Then I ask it a second time to explain the jargon it just used for those explanations. I find after those two rounds it’s broken things down to the point where I can understand what the paper is talking about.

I no longer dread naming things. I can ask it for 20 ideas for names, and maybe option number 15 is the one I go with. […]

Always ask for “twenty ideas for”—you’ll find that the first ten are super-obvious, but once you get past those things start getting interesting. Often it won’t give you the idea that you’ll use, but one of those ideas well be the spark that will set you in the right direction.

It’s the best thesaurus ever. You can say “a word that kind of means…” and it will get it for you every time.

An important bit that he mentions in passing: “they don’t guess next words, they guess next tokens.” These models don’t know anything about words or meaning, they just predict token use. Which brings me to what is to me a very basic and important point. I got this via MetaFilter, where one user commented:

But, is that different than me? My words aren’t numbers, but they are squeeks and hoots and grunts that, when strung together, have meaning. As I read this section, I swung between “it’s fake” to “I’m fake”.

And another said “that applies to a lot of people as well.” No! Stop thinking like this, people! I know it feels edgy and cool, but it reinforces an already too common tendency to degrade people’s humanity. Saying “how do I know I’m not a Markov chain?” is like saying “How do I know I’m conscious?”: it’s stupid and self-defeating. The world is hard enough to decipher without pulling the wool over our own eyes.

I found the image in Slavomír Čéplö (bulbul)’s Facebook post so delightful I had to bring the text here even though I have to copy it out word by word; it’s a page from Winnie-da-Pooh in Singlish, translated by Gwee Li Sui (and claimed to be “First translation of A.A. Milne’s classic children’s book into a creole language,” though who knows?):

“Oi!”
“I think the bees suspect something!”
“Suspect what thing?”
“Dunno leh. But I fewl they suspicious!”
“Maybe they think you wan their honey.”
“Maybe. With bees, you dunno one.”
After diam-diam a bit, he cow-pehed to you again.
“Christopher Lobin!”
“Simi?”
“Your house got umbrella?”
“I think so.”

You can see (most of) the original English here, and I linked to A Dictionary of Singlish and Singapore English here. Unfortunately, the dictionary doesn’t have the words I linked above or “cow-peh,” which I suspect may be Hokkien 哭爸 kao pei ‘cry father,’ “used to describe a person who is making a complaint.”

Joshua Yaffa’s New Yorker piece on the Wagner Group (archived) has a moment of Franco-Hattic interest:

One thing, however, has remained constant: the principle of “se servir sur la bête,” as Christophe Gomart, the former head of French military intelligence, put it, an expression that means “to serve yourself from the beast,” or, better yet, to get your pound of flesh.

But the expression (alternatively “se payer sur la bête“) means “en parlant d’un créancier, se faire payer en prenant directement sur le salaire, les revenus de son débiteur” [of a creditor, to take payment directly from the salary or income of the debtor], so “to get your pound of flesh,” which implies unjust and cruel extraction, is not right. I think the best English equivalent in this context would be simply “getting paid.”

Olly Richards has an 18-minute YouTube video featuring “11 Difficult English Accents You WON’T Understand.” Clickbait title, sure, but it’s fun to test your ear; I thought at first I was going to go 0-for-11, since the first four baffled me, but then I got 5, 6, 7, and 9, so I felt better. (For the others, I usually got the general area but not the specific country/dialect.) Warning: the dude says things like “this patois is not considered a dialect of English because it has too many loan words” and “speaking just the way your ancestors did,” but never mind, he supplies a lot of useful historical information, and the dialects are great. (I expect there will be spoilers in the comments, so if you want to test yourself, maybe do so before you dive into the thread.)

I ran across a reference to the wee Scottish town of Lesmahagow and (of course) wanted to know how it was pronounced, and Wikipedia told me that it was /lɛzməˈheɪɡoʊ/ (which I would never have guessed). But it also had a startling etymology section:

The name means “Enclosure (meaning a walled area, like a monastery or fort) of St Machutus”. The saint was born in Wales and may originally have been known as “Mahagw” prior to emigrating to Brittany where he became known by the Latinised form of the name and also as “St Malo”. It is also possible that the first syllable may mean “garden” rather than “monastery”, although Mac an Tailleir (2003) believes the former was altered from the latter in Gaelic.

So off I went to investigate the saint, and found:

Saint Malo (French pronunciation: ​[sɛ̃.ma.lo]; also known as Maclou, Maloù or Mac’h Low, or in Latin as Maclovius or Machutus, c. 27 March 520 – 15 November 621) was a Welsh mid-sixth century founder of Saint-Malo, a commune in Brittany, France. He was one of the seven founding saints of Brittany. […]

Malo’s name may derive from the Old Breton machlou, a compound of mach “warrant, hostage” and lou (or loh) “brilliant, bright, beautiful”.

All those “may” and “possible” make me itch, but it’s certainly an intriguing tangle. From Lesmahagow to Saint-Malo in one easy step!