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John Hardy has a magnificent entry at Laputan Logic, explaining in more detail than I’ve ever seen how “Arabic” numbers evolved. I won’t bother trying to permalink, just scroll down to Tuesday, June 03 (and down past the “Fun with numbers” box, depending on your tolerance for whimsy); as usual, he has lavish and highly informative illustrations. (Warning: the page is slow to load.)

Before going off to the Guggenheim to meet the visiting Juliet after her immersion in Matthew Barney and sweep her from the sterile Upper East Side to the lively East Village for dinner (ah, the life of a New York City blogger!), I rummaged through her archives and came across this site dedicated to Anna Akhmatova, which includes a short video clip of her reading. (I also found this moving reminiscence of James Tiptree, Jr., the first thing I’ve read that gives me any sense of why she—that’s right, she—killed her husband and herself in 1987.)

The Discouraging Word today has an entry about the lexical item “defugalty.” Not only am I unfamiliar with it, so are all my dictionaries, and yet it exists—barely. Google turns up half a dozen examples, all of them using it as if it were a pre-existing word, not something that needs to be defined. Here are the contexts:

1. “As I was reading Mr. Norr’s article about the situation here at JSC, I noticed an interesting defugalty. Mr. Garman pointed out that the difference between platforms was only a few hundred dollars. I noticed he forgot that this was a ‘per platform’ cost.”
2. “I must be one of those complaining nitpicky, whining people who go to any length to imagine or try to trump up some ailment or defugalty. Chicken Little syndrome.”
3. “The pork checkoff defugalty had both winners and losers. Opponents wanted an end to the checkoff, but USDA says it will continue.”
4. “But, to his surprise, he found two white families, by the names of Fulbright and Campbell, already there and arguing over possession of the spring…. Springfield History records the defugalty between Fulbright and Campbell but omits mention of Samuel Martin in connection with the spring.”
5. “I went on the school board in 1929. I didn’t file for the election. Someone else put my name in;I think it was either Van Buren or Westhoff. Mrs. Sando and Mrs. Ravenscraft were both on the boardand were fighting…. It seems there was always some sort of ‘defugalty.'”
6. “Again…I am truly sorry you’re having this luck. I am here! While I was out (Okla.) I called the office every day and spoke to everyone there. Maybe you’re dialing the wrong extensions. Mine won’t work when I’m not there…. Sorry about the defugalty…but I received and aswered 50+ phone calls and 350 e-mails in the past 5-6 days.”

I think we can dismiss out of hand the speculation by TDW’s correspondent that the word (if we can call it a word) is derived from “fugue.” My Sprachgefühl tells me it’s a deformation of “difficulty”; compare the substitution of “definootly” for “definitely” (HDAS, Vol. I, p. 576). But we need data, citations, research! Anybody have any?

I thought the antiquity of blogging was common knowledge (among those with a decent education, needless to say), but Dorothea has insisted that I make an entry of this, so here ’tis; observe and learn. From Aristotle’s attack on the Pythagoreans in the Metaphysics:

All the same, as we have said, the causes and principles which they describe are capable of application to the remoter class of websites (topoi tou histou) as well, and indeed are better fitted to these. But as to how there are to be updates, if all that is premissed is the Linked and the Unlinked, and Present and Past, they do not even hint; nor how, without updates and change, there can be generation and destruction, or the activities of the links which traverse the web. And further, assuming that it be granted to them or proved by them that blogs (blogoi) are composed of these factors, yet how is it to be explained that some are lesser, and others greater? For in their premisses and statements they are speaking just as much about virtual as about mathematical objects; and this is why they have made no mention of markups (anasemeia) or links or other similar phenomena, because, I presume, they have no separate explanation of virtual things. Again, how are we to understand that number and the modifications of number are the causes of all being and updating, both in the beginning and now, and at the same time that there is no other number than the number of which the universe is composed? Because when they make out that Opinion and News are in such and such a region, and a little above or below them Controversy and Disharmony or Flames, and when they state as proof of this that each of these abstractions is a number; and that also in this region there is already a plurality of the magnitudes composed of number, inasmuch as these modifications of number correspond to these several regions,—is the number which we must understand each of these abstractions to be the same number which is present in the virtual universe, or another kind of number?

At this point he goes off into an excursus about number and never really gets back to blogs, but I think we have a pretty good analysis there. I might also point out that in Greek blogos is phonesthetically related to phlox, phlogos ‘flame,’ which gives rise to an entirely different set of responses and analogies. As I told Moira, I hope they covered all this at St. John’s; young people these days don’t even seem to realize that the Greeks had blogs.

Harry Hoijer’s Chiricahua and Mescalero Apache texts, with analysis, have been put online:

The Electronic publication of Harry Hoijer’s Chiricahua and Mescalero Apache Texts is a web-accessible Apache language linguistic database and text archive available to the public at no charge as part of the multilingual collection at the University of Virginia’s Electronic Text Center at Alderman Library. The metadata scheme used is an extension of the Text Encoding Initiative. It is a republication of Hoijer’s 1938 monograph originally published by the University of Chicago.
Hoijer’s original monograph is a complexly annotated document built around a set of 55 Apache language texts, including mostly narratives, but also songs, prayers, and speeches, elicited from nine different Apache speakers. These are accompanied by English translations and cross-referenced with a grammatical outline of the language, as well as linguistic and ethnological notes.

An amazing resource; many thanks to wood s lot for the link.

Once again, William Safire goes wandering through the vast countryside of the English language, stopping here to pluck a daisy and there to misidentify a tree. Today’s column begins with a thoroughly tedious mastication of the “Near East” vs. “Middle East” issue. Can there be anyone who hasn’t come across this before, either choosing one phrase or the other or deciding that it isn’t worth spending valuable brain cells on? But good W.S. can’t find anything else to maunder about, so he chews on this for awhile, citing uninteresting quotes and coming to unsurprising conclusions. There is, however, one novelty: after quoting several definitions of “Near/Middle East, now used interchangeably,” all variations on “the countries of Southwest Asia and Northeast Africa,” he delivers himself of the following thought: “I’d toss in Morocco and Tunisia.” Morocco and Tunisia? Does anybody reading this think they’re part of the Middle East? Bizarre, that’s what I call it.

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Gather round, children; it’s time once again to hurl insults at that bastion of smug insularity, the New York Times. In today’s Metro section there’s a touching story by Corey Kilgannon about a NYC doctor, Ian Zlotolow (a gold star, incidentally, to anyone who can explain to me the morphology of that name, which is clearly based somehow on Slavic zlat-/z(o)lot- ‘gold’), who first treated and then adopted a boy from Sierra Leone. So far, so good, but in an attempt to dramatize the boy’s change of surroundings, the reporter produces the following:

Early last year, Lansana spoke only his tribal dialect, Mende, and hoarded food in the house. He had never been to a city, watched television, flushed a toilet or taken a shower. He had never had a real change of clothing.
But once in New York, the boy picked up English quickly, and, with his magnetic personality, made friends just by walking down the block…. When some West African cabdrivers and a college professor engaged him in dialect, he ignored them.

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My wife asked, out of the blue, “What does ‘it stands to reason’ mean? When you think about it, it doesn’t make any sense.” I thought about it, and sure enough, it didn’t make any sense. So I did a little research and discovered that it’s a reminder of an obsolete phrase “to stand to,” meaning (in the OED’s words) ‘To submit oneself to, abide by (a trial, award); to obey, accede to, be bound by (another’s judgement, decision, opinion, etc.).’ So originally something “stood to (obeyed) reason” in the same way as a person “stood to a judgment”; when the verbal phrase was eroded by time, the cliché remained behind, a lone outcropping, as puzzling as one of the oddly shaped mesas of Coconino County.

Some examples of the earlier usage:

1584 LYLY Campaspe I. iii. 76 In kinges causes I will not stande to schollers arguments.
1616 A. CHAMPNEY A Treatise on the Vocation of Bishops 21 Such a Reformer is not bound to stand to the judgement of the Church.
1692 BENTLEY Boyle Lect. vi. 5 Will they not stand to the grand Verdict and Determination of the Universe?
1700 J. TYRRELL Hist. Eng. II. 889 The King summon’d [them] to appear.., and stand to the Law

The estimable Invisible Adjunct has an entry expressing her distaste for the word “blog.” This is a distaste that many other people seem to share, but I’m at a loss to account for it. Phonetically, it’s a perfectly standard English word, stop + liquid + vowel + stop; I fail to see how it’s any uglier than, say, “block,” “plug,” or “log.” To my mind, it’s a clear improvement over “weblog,” which is harder to use as a verb or combine with other words. It’s a nice short English monosyllable. True, it’s new, and the new always makes people nervous, but I would think the blogging community would embrace their very own novelty. At any rate, I wanted to get some feedback: any thoughts on why the word is disliked? If you dislike it, how do you feel about the comparison with the phonetically similar words I mentioned?

I have absolutely no comment on this story, for which I have Maureen to thank (thanks, Maureen!):

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