languagehat.com

Sarah Thomason (see this LH post) posted on Facebook as follows:

It occurred to me the other day that almost all of my handful of publications on Selis-Ql’ispe (a.k.a. Montana Salish) are in Festschrifts and conference preprints and other not-widely-distributed volumes. So I just revised my website for the first time since 2012 (!!) (O.K., I admit it, I’m lazy) and added (almost) all the papers, plus a few additional non-Salish papers, like the one on editing Language (2020) and the autobiographical article (2022).

Needless to say, I was intrigued, and I followed the link to her Home Page and thence to Sarah Thomason’s Online Papers; even if you’re not interested in Salishan you might enjoy “On the ?joys? of editing Language“:

My seven years as editor involved an immense amount of paper. Those were still the dark ages before submissions, referee reports, and other official journal communications were all handled electronically. All the routine correspondence went into the LSA archives long ago, but copies of most of the interesting non-routine correspondence remain in my personal files: complaints about editorial bias, correspondence with authors who tried to engage in duplicate publication, the three lawsuits threatened by disgruntled book authors who hated the published reviews of their books, correspondence with authors who wouldn’t check their data properly, and miscellaneous complaints about this and that. […]

I will report on some of the lessons I learned in my editing days, focusing on five main areas: referees and referee reports (§2); how to interact effectively with journal editors (§3); how to handle data responsibly (§4); the sin of attempted duplicate publication (§5); and book reviews, book reviewers, and threatened lawsuits (§6).

I’m glad I didn’t have to try to do that job!

I saw a mention of a Boris Vian novel called Trouble dans les andains and was troubled by the fact that I had no idea what andains were. Wikipedia gave me an idea, with illustrations, and when I went to the English article I discovered that they were windrows. Ah (said I), now I not only know what andains are but I have a clearer idea of what windrows are! The OED (entry revised 2024) defines windrow thus:

1.a. A long line into which mown grass, hay, barley, etc., is raked before being gathered into heaps or cocks (cock n.³); a row of sheaves of corn, heaps of turf or peat, etc., set up to be dried by exposure to the wind. Also in extended use: a pile of dead branches, vegetation, etc., gathered to be burnt.

?1523 On the next day turne it agayne towarde night and make it in windrowes and than in small hey cockes.
J. Fitzherbert, The Book of Husbandry f. xv
[…]

2. Originally and chiefly North American.

2.a. A long line or elongated pile of something, formed by the wind, resulting from other natural processes, or gathered together by human intervention; spec. (a) a row or pile of trees blown down by the wind (cf. windfall n. A.1a); (b) a long pile of leaves, dust, etc., heaped up by, or as if by, the wind.

1829 Here and there a wind-row, along which trees had been uprooted, by the furious blasts that sometimes sweep off acres of our trees in a minute.
J. F. Cooper, Wept of Wish Ton-Wish vol. I. ii. 28
[…]

2.b. A long ridge of earth, gravel, etc., displaced by a grader or similar machine; esp. (chiefly Canadian) a ridge of snow heaped along the side of a road by a snowplough.

1907 The cross-town trolley-cars glided along between the windrows of the snow the big plow had whirled from the tracks.
Evening Mail (Halifax, Nova Scotia) 2 November 7/4
[…]

The etymology is boring (wind + row), but to make up for that the French one (from the above-linked Wikipedia article) is unexpected:

Latin ambitanus de ambire : aller des deux côtés (mouvement de la faux) : mesure équivalente à un pas, puis surface de céréale ou de fourrage abattue d’un coup de faux.

The Russian equivalent, валок, is a straightforward derivation from вал ‘rampart, dyke, wall.’

Incidentally, you may think, as I did, that the Fenimore Cooper novel quoted in the 1829 cite has a very odd title, and Wikipedia provides confirmation: “The title puzzled the public and did not satisfy them so it was only used in the United States.” It appears to mean ‘someone who was wept over’; from the novel: “The wept of my household is again with us.” He may have been wildly popular, but a competent wielder of the English language he was not.

Joel at Far Outliers posts excerpts from Aleksandra Jagielska’s Culture.pl article on entomological etymology:

The word pszczoła [‘bee’] has Proto-Slavic origins, probably even Proto-Indo-European – if we go back that far in the language, we will discover that the Polish pszczoła and the English bee most probably come from the same Proto-Indo-European form *bhiquelā! In Proto-Slavic, the proto-word was *bьčela or *bъčela (they differ in the quality of the yer – a Proto-Slavic vowel). If we wanted to discover the etymology of Polish pszczoła (bee), we’d discover that it is an onomatopoeic word: probably the Proto-Slavic root was an onomatopoeic *bъk-, *bъč-, related to the Proto-Slavic verb *bučati, brzęczeć – to buzz (about bugs). The suffix *-ela would indicate the meaning of *bъčela as ‘that which buzzes’.

The name of this bug was initially pczoła in Poland, with the consonant š (sz) eventually inserted. Language strives for economy, also in terms of articulation, hence the consonant group pč- (pcz-) was expanded to pšč- due to the desire to avoid excessive articulatory energy input. This also explains why the spelling of the word pszczoła is an orthographic exception, since there was never any ‘r’ in this word that could become a ‘rz’.

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Two trivial but entertaining items:

1) Ian Frazier’s NYRB review (archived) of Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science by Alicia Puglionesi, an account of the American Society for Psychical Research, includes this piquant bit:

The society also set up such Borgesian-sounding entities as the Committee on Phantasms and Presentiments, the Census of Hallucinations, and the Committee on Thought Transference.

Unfortunately, the archives of the ASPR turn out to be incredibly boring: “As the hours went by, Puglionesi found herself confronting a tedium requiring a ‘devotion to something beyond the self, something so vast that it can only be glimpsed through the labor of many human lifetimes.’”

2) Our old friend Conrad sent me this Guardian link with the comment that he “felt this was one for you”; after discussing the phenomenon of the apparently near-universal opinion in the UK that “Keir Starmer’s a wanker” (commonly sung at sporting events to the tune of the riff of the White Stripes’ 2003 “Seven Nation Army,” with which I was completely unfamiliar even though not only did it receive “widespread critical acclaim” but it is “arguably… the world’s most popular sports anthem” — I have to agree that the riff is catchy as hell), Jonathan Liew provides a semantic analysis that makes it Hattic material:

Let’s start with the word choice, which feels subtly telling in this case. If Boris Johnson was, as the darts crowd sang in late 2021 at the height of the Partygate scandal, a “cunt”, then somehow calling Starmer a “wanker” is altogether more piteously dismissive – insinuating not just degeneracy but a kind of bashful cowardice. The first word imputes a straightforward roguishness, perhaps even a grudging regard; the wanker, by contrast, is essentially beneath contempt.

Thanks, Conrad!

When I’m feeling low I like to pull a book off my poetry shelves and immerse myself in something completely different; as often as not it’s one of Trevor Joyce’s, and just now I was flipping through What’s in Store (see this post) when I was caught by his lovely version of the sorrowful old Irish ballad “Seán Ó Duibhir a’ Ghleanna” (sometimes Englished as “Seán Dwyer of the Glen”). You can see the whole thing in Irish with a literal translation (and some YouTube links) here; I’ll quote the first and last stanzas of Trevor’s version:

Through the early sunshine
of this summer morning
hounds raise up their howling
   while the sweet birds sing.
The small beasts and the badger
keep covert with the woodcock,
all lie low from the echo
   and the booming of the guns.
Fox red on rock keeps lookout
on the horsemen’s hurly-burly
and the woman by the wayside
   lamenting scattered geese.
But now the woods are levelled
let us leave familiar landmarks
since, Séan, my friend, it’s over,
   the game is up and gone.

[…]
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I recently looked up the word ipecac (an emetic), which turns out to be short for ipecacuanha, and found that although the OED’s ancient (published 1900) entry gives this etymology:

< Portuguese ipecacuanha /ipekaˈkwanja/ , < Tupi-Guarani ipe-kaa-guéne.

Notes
According to Cavalcanti, cited by Skeat Trans. Philol. Soc. 1885, 91, the meaning of ipe-kaa-guene is ‘low or creeping plant causing vomit’. The word is said to be a descriptive appellation applied to several medicinal plants, the proper name of the Cephaëlis, which produces the ipecacuanha of commerce, being poaya.

…the currently accepted one is much more interesting; Wiktionary:

From Brazilian Portuguese ipecacuanha, from Old Tupi ypekakûãîa, from ypeka (“duck”) +‎ akûãîa (“penis”).

Also, my wife and I watched Sentimental Value last night; it’s a terrific movie, and all the acting is good, but Renate Reinsve is spectacularly good and should get all the prizes. My question, of course, is about her surname; this site says “The name is derived from the Old Norse elements reinn, meaning reindeer, and sve, which can be associated with to be or to dwell,” but there doesn’t appear to be an Old Norse sve, and I’m wondering if anybody has any better information.

The French writer and scholar Chloé Thomas has a remarkable essay in Arts of War and Peace called A Wilderness of Mirrors: Eliot, Max Frisch and the C.I.A. that starts:

In 1964, Swiss author Max Frisch published the novel Mein Name sei Gantenbein, commonly regarded as one of his greatest achievements. The title, using a form of subjunctive associated with reported speech, which knows no strict English or French equivalent, translates literally as Let’s pretend my name is Gantenbein. Although difficult to summarize, the novel revolves around an unnamed narrator who, after having been left by his wife, invents a number of fictitious characters to help him account for his experience, “trying out stories as if they were clothes” […]

The 1966 French translation of the book was published as Le Désert des miroirs […], a title that, at first glance, seems to be meant as an echo to the “mirroring” theme of the novel, with its interplay of identities, at least one explicit mirror scene (when Gantenbein actually tries out clothes in a shop), and an experiment with mirroring names in an Oriental tale made up by Gantenbein for Lila, with characters named Ali and Alil. Gantenbein’s French translator was André Coeuroy. […] The French title, however, stems directly, it seems, from the one that had been chosen for the English translation by Michael Bullock, which appeared in 1965, a year before the French version: The Wilderness of Mirrors […]. It was T. S. Eliot, obviously, who provided Frisch’s novel with both its English and, indirectly, French titles. Here is the passage from “Gerontion” from which it was taken, towards the end of the poem:

These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations, will the weevil
Delay? […] (Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays 38)

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I was rereading one of my favorite Pasternak poems, Зеркало (Mirror) (that webpage has the original Russian alongside an abridged translation by Peter France and Jon Stallworthy), when I stuck on an unusual word I had hurried over before in my attempt to make sense of the whole thing: саднят [sádnyat]. I had scribbled ‘smart, burn’ above it in my copy, which was all I really needed in context, but what kind of verb was it, and where was it from? Before proceeding with those issues, though, I’ll quote the relevant section from Jean Marie Schultz, “Pasternak’s ‘Zerkalo’” (Russian Literature XIII [1983]: 81-100), as a sample of how much work it is to figure out what’s going on in his early poetry:

Here the verb “sadnit'” compacts two distinct sensations, one tactile and one olfactory. First, with its meaning of “to smart” or “to burn”, “sadnit'” indicates the feeling that an abrasion might produce; thus, the verb conveys the sensation the trees (if personified) might be expected to have as their sap flows out over the broken limbs. Second, that the trees burn the air with their sap relates possibly to the very pungent odor that pine resin from newly broken limbs has as it fills the air, particularly after a rain (VIII:iii) when all smells are intensified.⁴

fn 4: Sap is a tree’s natural antiseptic, and the burning sensation produced by the application of an antiseptic to a wound is well known. However, it must be remembered that this is a humanly perceived feeling so that we have here, as throughout the poem, the human experience imposed upon a seemingly impersonal description. Furthermore, the allusion to the “medicinal” function of sap prefigures the medicine, “lekarstvo”, introduced in the next stanza. Likewise, the underlying evocation of the sap’s odor here also works toward the development of a sub-motif revolving around scent (V:iii).

OK, so what’s the story with the verb? Well, Wiktionary provides help with its usage;
it occurs in collocations like но́гу са́днит [nógu sádnit] ‘my leg is sore’ and на се́рдце са́днит [na sérdce sádnit] ‘my heart hurts.’ But what’s really interesting is the etymology, given in Russian Wiktionary: it’s derived from Old Russian садьно ‘wound,’ which in turn goes back to Proto-Slavic *saditi, from Proto-Indo-European *sodéyeti, causative of *sed- ‘to sit.’ The English verb sit is from that root, but cast your eyes down that page and see how much else is! The thematic root present *séd-e-ti gives Proto-Celtic *sedeti, which with a couple of prefixes gives us Welsh eistedd and hence eisteddfod; the -ye- present *sédyeti gives Greek ἕζομαι (as well as sit); *séd-os ~ *séd-es gives Welsh hedd ‘peace’; *sod-ó- gives Proto-Slavic *xodъ and Greek ὁδός; *sōd-o- gives Proto-Germanic *sōtą ‘soot’ (“reflecting the nature of soot as accumulated particles that sit on surfaces”); *sōd-u-s gives Proto-Slavic *sadъ ‘grove; garden’ (hence Russian сад, which also features in the poem); *sod-yo-m ‘seat’ gives Old Irish suide and Latin solium; *sed-lo- ‘seat’ gives Proto-Germanic *setlaz; *ni-sd-ós ‘nest’ (with zero grade) gives Proto-Balto-Slavic *nísda (leading to Russian гнездо) and Proto-Germanic *nestą (leading to nest)… well, I could spend all day lost in the web of connections. In Russian alone, the root is the ultimate source of посадить/сажать ‘to seat, plant,’ сиделка ‘(sick-)nurse,’ седло ‘saddle,’ село ‘village,’ сажа ‘soot,’ досадный ‘annoying,’ наседка ‘brood-hen,’ население ‘population,’ осадки ‘precipitation,’ осада ‘siege,’ председатель ‘chairman, president,’ расселина ‘crevice, fissure,’ сосед ‘neighbor,’ ссадина ‘scratch,’ усадьба ‘farmstead, country estate,’ and всадник ‘rider, horseman’ (as well as many others). This is the kind of thing that made me want to be a historical linguist.

Louis Menand’s recent NYkr review essay (archived; ostensibly a review of Stefan Fatsis’s Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary) has some good things to say, but on the whole it irritated me, so (as is my wont) I will share my irritation here. Mind you, this is the same Menand who so sharply took Lynne Truss to task for her idiocy about language, so it’s not that he’s ignorant, in this essay he just doesn’t pay attention to what he’s writing beyond making sure it sounds clever. At any rate, I’m going to go through and pick out idiocies to flog, much as I did with Simon Winchester back in 2004; I do not regard Menand as a terrible writer tout court, like the egregious Winchester, but that’s all the more reason he shouldn’t have perpetrated this stuff.

There was good money in the word business. Then came the internet and, with it, ready-to-hand answers to all questions lexical. If you are writing on a computer, it’s almost impossible to misspell a word anymore. It’s hard even to misplace a comma, although students do manage it.

What? Words are misspelled and commas misplaced all the time; I guess what he means is that if you care about such things and pay attention to the squiggly red lines, you can avoid many mistakes, but if you care about such things you weren’t going to make many mistakes in the first place. Has he ever looked at internet sites other than carefully curated ones like newyorker.com?

As Fatsis tells the story of his lexicographical Bildung, he makes genial and informed digressions into controversies in the dictionary racket, some possibly overfamiliar, like how to label ethnic slurs and whether to include “fuck,” others more current, like the crusade to come up with a gender-neutral third-person-singular pronoun (after many failed launches, we appear to be stuck on “they,” which seems kind of lame) and whether or not large language models can create a dictionary (so far, not). He has a section on our contemporary speech wars, showing that many of the most radioactive words—“woke,” “safe space,” “microaggression,” “anti-racism”—are much older than we might assume.

We’ll let the pointlessly exotic Bildung slide, but what on earth does he mean by “which seems kind of lame”? Does he mean it seems like a normal word? Yeah, that’s the point. And what does he mean by “radioactive”? Is it just a fancy would-be synonym for, say, “contentious”? Frankly, the only thing that unites those words is that they were created by progressives, which, well, I will be charitable and not be mean about. But I wrinkle my brow.
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You know how sometimes you look at a word or phrase you’ve known all your life and suddenly wonder about it? That happened to me with by and large, and it turns out to have such an unexpected background I thought I’d post it. OED (entry from 1933):

1. Nautical. To the wind (within six points; cf. by prep. A.I.ii.7) and off it.

1669 Thus you see the ship handled in fair weather and foul, by and learge.
S. Sturmy, Mariners Magazine 17
[…]

2. In one direction and another, all ways; now esp., in a general aspect, without entering into details, on the whole.

1707 Tho’ he trys every way, both by and large, to keep up with his Leader.
E. Ward, Wooden World Dissected 35

1769 Miss Betsey, a charming frigate, that will do honour to our country, if you take her by and large.
in Southern Lit. Mess. vol. XVII. 183/2
[…]

The relevant senses are by 1.d. “Nautical. Close to the wind. Chiefly and earliest in full and by” (c1500 “What worde to sey, he [sc. the loodsman] is in doute, Eyther warae the lof, or ells full and by”; 2001 “With a foul wind, the boat was sailed full and by, and estimates made of the deviation from the direct track”) and large III.18. “Nautical. Of a wind: crossing the line of the ship’s course in a favourable direction, esp. on the beam or quarter” (1578 “Hauing a large winde, we kept our course vppon our saide voyage”; 1984 “With the wind large, and the yard braced in a little, it [sc. the tack] lay directly under the yard”). I expect AntC already knew this, but nautical terms are mare incognitum to me.