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Jonathan Taylor’s TLS review (archived) of Peter Brooks’ Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative makes it sound worth reading; I was particularly taken with this passage:

Better storytelling, then, does not necessarily make the listeners or readers better people. While we cling to the age-old assumption that storytelling might be a good in itself – that stories are “improving”, making people more empathetic and wiser – twenty-first-century storytelling might just make some people richer, others poorer. Storytelling is incredibly powerful, as Simmons claims, but this is an amoral power that can be used for good or ill, for profit or loss, in the name of self-interest or selflessness, conservatism or radicalism: “There is nothing inherently worthy or unworthy about narrative”, Brooks states. “It’s the uses it is put to that count.” Narrative has “no special privilege” and is by no means

immunise[d] … from unethical uses. On the contrary, because it is intended as an act of communication, narrative is subject to all the abuses of language itself. Language was given to man in order to lie, said Machiavelli; and the ability of language to use counterfactuals inhabits narrative as well.

Of course, lying is fundamental to many of our culture’s principal modes of narrative. By definition the novel – our culture’s “dominant form” of storytelling for Brooks – is counterfactual. There is a key difference, though, between a novel’s fiction and a brand’s, politician’s or lawyer’s lie: that is, a novel brings attention to its own fictionality, while the others do not. They have to efface any counterfactuality, pretending to their audiences that their stories are the whole truth and nothing but the truth. By contrast, a reader reads a novel – even a nineteenth-century realist novel – with a sort of double consciousness, somehow both suspending disbelief and being aware that what they are reading is fiction, both immersed in the “novelistic illusion” and standing outside it. Just as a child playing “make-believe” or “let’s pretend” is “capable of holding simultaneously belief in the fiction and awareness of reality”, so an adult reader brings a “willing suspension of disbelief” to the novel “not … from naiveté or stupidity but because that is part of the intellectual and emotional pleasure of reading … Even though you know it to be fiction you need to submit to its simulations of the real”. For Brooks it is precisely this double consciousness on the part of the reader that makes the novel so valuable. It means that novels exist in the playful world of “half-belief”, a “space in which the human mind can deal with reality, speak of it, reshape it imaginatively, ask ‘what if’ questions about it”.

Serious problems arise, Brooks argues, when half belief becomes full belief – when readers lose sight of the fictionality of fiction. “One must use fictions always with the awareness of their fictionality”, he warns. “They are ‘as if’ constructions of reality that we need, that we have to use creatively in order not to die of the chaos of reality – but they are not reality itself.” In Seduced by Story Brooks explores various fields – including psychoanalysis, legal practice and modern political discourse – in which the distinction between narrative and “reality” has been eroded, or even collapsed. He warns us that: “the universe is not our stories about the universe, even if those stories are all we have. Swamped in story as we seem to be, we may lose the distinction between the two, asserting the dominion of our constructed realities over the real thing”.

Those are important distinctions that are too often lost sight of. (We’ve discussed Dostoevsky’s thoughts about the importance of lies more than once, e.g. here and here.)

David Elkin at the Cork Daily Edge reports on a pleasing phenomenon:

Over the past week or so, there have been some sightings on social media of a few very Cork sayings painted on to electricity boxes around the city. Not only that, but they’re painted in the vibrant rebel red and white colours you’ve come to associate with the city.

Like this definition of “langerload” [‘large amount of something’] And “bazzer” [‘haircut/hairdo’]

It’s all part of the #ReimagineCork project put together by volunteers who set out their purpose as:

a community effort focused on making Cork beautiful by rejuvenating laneways, urban green spaces, & derelict buildings.

[…]
Excellent work all

Alas, the only lexicographical source I can find for the excellent word langerload is Urban Dictionary, so I have no etymology for you. Thanks, Trevor!

Ben Zimmer explains the origin of the term hip-hop for the WSJ:

This summer marks a vital anniversary in the history of American music. Fifty years ago, on Aug. 11, 1973, a Jamaican-born DJ named Kool Herc helped his sister throw a back-to-school party in the community room at their apartment building in the South Bronx. There, Herc came up with an innovative approach on the turntables that allowed him to isolate and repeat the musical breaks on records that got people dancing. Over those breaks, he and a friend, Coke La Rock, added another innovation: the rhythmic vocal delivery of rapping. That unique combination of DJ’ing and emceeing is widely credited as the baptismal moment of hip-hop.

At the time, this was a musical culture without a name; “hip-hop” would not become associated with the scene until several years later. Who introduced those syllables into rap parlance is a matter of some debate, but hip-hop historian Jeff Chang credits two key rhyme-slingers emceeing parties in the late ’70s: Keith Cowboy of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and rapping DJ Lovebug Starski. The story goes that a friend of theirs was shipping out to the army, and at a party sending him off, Cowboy poked fun by chanting syllables like a drill instructor: “Hip-hop-hip-hop-hip-hop.” Cowboy and Starski were soon trading variations on the theme.

Performance tapes from 1978 bear out that both Cowboy and Starski incorporated those nonsense syllables into their vocal routines. In February 1979, an article in the New Pittsburgh Courier about Starski’s coming concert stated that “he is responsible for the derivation of the ‘Hip-Hop’”—the first known print appearance of the phrase in a musical context. Later that year, at the start of Sugarhill Gang’s hit single “Rapper’s Delight,” group member Wonder Mike repurposed Cowboy and Starski’s rhymes: “I said a hip, hop, the hippy, the hippy, to the hip-hip-hop and you don’t stop.”

[Read more…]

The Australian author Gerald Murnane (“regarded by many as Australia’s most innovative and important writer of fiction”) has a long essay called “The Angel’s Son: Why I Learned Hungarian Late in Life” which is perhaps a tad self-indulgent, but I guess if you’re that innovative and important you have a right to indulge yourself, and there’s plenty of material of Hattic interest:

Many persons are fluent in more than one language, but my setting out some years ago at the age of fifty-six to teach myself Hungarian provokes comments and questions from those who get to hear of it.

Like much else seen in hindsight, my enterprise seems to me now to have been inevitable. In my early years I envied various persons for various reasons, but my strongest envy was always directed at those who could read and write and speak and sing in more than one language.

The first such persons that I was aware of were the Catholic priests who celebrated the mass and other services in the churches that I attended in the 1940s. […] I was only seven when I resolved to learn the sonorous Latin language. I found in my father’s missal pages with parallel Latin and English texts. I imagined I could learn the language simply by finding which word in the Latin text was the equivalent of one or another word in the English text and so accumulating a Latin vocabulary to be drawn on as required. I was brought up short when I found that the Latin for God might be Deum, Deus, Dei, or Deo. This and other problems made Latin seem to me perverse and arbitrary by comparison with my native English but only increased my desire eventually to master Latin. In the meanwhile, I derived unexpected pleasures from hearing or, more often, mishearing the language.

[Read more…]

Karin Kaneko’s Japan Times article ChatGPT, Bing, Bard and DeepL: Which one offers the best Japanese-to-English translation? provides some detailed comparisons:

As a reporter in Japan working in both English and Japanese, I was keen to test these tools and see which might be best for my line of work, and whether they offer benefits for Japan Times readers. […] Specifically, we wanted to see which one of the AI-assisted tools best understands context in Japanese, a language in which sentences sometimes lack a subject, and accurately translates it into natural English.

Kanako Takahara, a senior bilingual Japan Times editor, compared Japanese-to-English translations from ChatGPT-4, Bing and Bard, along with DeepL, an AI-based machine translation service, using Japanese text in three different categories:

• Literature: The opening lines of “Snow Country,” authored by Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata
• Lyrics: Japan’s national anthem “Kimigayo”
• Speech: Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani’s speech to his teammates just before the World Baseball Classic final against the United States in March

She scored on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest based on accuracy, how natural the English was and whether the translation reflected the context. […]

[Read more…]

I liked very much these passages from Hugh Trevor-Roper’s “Apologia transfugae” quoted at Laudator Temporis Acti:

From our present position there is unquestiably something very arrogant in the old claims of classical humanism to be the necessary centre of our studies. The supposition that the seeds at least of all knowledge, all wisdom, all philosophy, are contained in the brief experience of a chosen people is no more defensible in secular studies than in theology. Why should two ancient cities, minuscule by the standards of our provincial towns, be the repositories of truth, the sources of civilization, any more than a fanatical semitic hill tribe in Palestine? Such a concept, however it may be sophisticated, is repugnant to those who believe in progress; and it had to be defeated before the idea of progress could be denizened in European thought.

[…]

I suppose I really ought to modify my irrational antipathy to Wilamowitz. He did. after all, affect my life. It was because of him that I learned German. Brought up, as I was, in the extraordinary and indeed, it now seems to me the ludicrous belief that one could not be a good classical scholar unless one read the works of this Prussian high-priest of the subject, I obediently set myself, as a first year undergraduate, to master his rebarbative language. After spending the best part of vacations in Germany learning it, I returned to Oxford somewhat disillusioned. With undergraduate confidence, I decided that Wilamowitz, whose works I had now read (or perhaps only tasted) was a fraud and that Nazi Germany was not only very disagreeable itself but also a menace to the world. I therefore used up the linguistic expertise which I had so mistakenly acquired to read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which was not then available in translation. I found it very rewarding, in a certain sense, and the experience has had some influence on my later career. Since war I have occasionally dipped into Mein Kampf again. I have not found any occasion to reread Wilamowitz. My view of him, however erroneous, was fixed in 1934, and I saw him now only as a salutary warning. He symbolised to me the barrenness of a purely literary and philological approach to the classics, and indeed to literature in general, and the absurd pretentiousness of assuming that so narrow an approach can have any wider meaning. He warned me to turn away from line of study which, within those limits, led nowhere. […]

[Read more…]

Hannah Jane Parkinson reports for the Guardian on something that has become vital to modern communication:

There have been plenty of, shall we say, unusual or eye-raising legal decisions around technology. […] But the thing that caught my eye last week was a Canadian court decision that ruled a thumbs-up emoji is legally permissible as contract assent. There are more examples of emojis finding their way before the bench. In 2014, a Michigan court tried a defamation case involving a stuck-out tongue emoticon (rendered as :-p). In Ohio, a judgment in a harassment case queried what, exactly, the rat emoji meant in that context.

This is because emojis – as many unfortunates have discovered (often gen X parents, but that I, a millennial in her early 30s, am increasingly, devastatingly, discovering) – do not always have clearcut meanings. This is true of all language of course – and emojis are a type of language, despite what the likes of John Humphrys et al have sneered in the past. A thumbs-up emoji, to take the example from the Canadian case, can, just as in offline life, be used sarcastically. (This was noted in the court ruling.) In some regions such as in the Middle East a thumbs-up can be offensive. […]

Particularly interesting is the way in which emojis are approved, which is by an industry body called the Unicode Consortium; I like to imagine its members as a bunch of normal-looking suits sitting around a table – except they all have giant yellow heads and love hearts for eyes. The emoji-accepting process is not simple – it’s basically the emoji equivalent of winning a place at Oxbridge. This is why the subjects of the “two dancing girls” emoji look so pleased. It can take two years for submitted emoji proposals to be accepted and completed, and there is often a public clamour for new additions. […]

The language we use in tech, then, is just as important as that coming from our mouths, or our hands, or any other form of IRL communication. And, as with those forms, a lot can be said about a person’s age or social demographic in their use of emojis. Gen Z thinks the crying-with-laughter emoji terribly uncool, and more often uses the skull emoji (as in, “I’m dead”, when finding something amusing or out there). I’m not sure if we’ve moved on from using the painting nails emoji as a sort of jovial smugness to signify one’s own achievement or moment of aptitude, but I hope not. I think, by now, we all know what the aubergine emoji means – and it isn’t an aubergine. […]

Never got around to reading Moby-Dick? Well, it’s since been translated into emoji. As have the lyrics to a number of pop songs. To not know the latest emoji use or etiquette has almost become a modern form of illiteracy.

I remember when I first became aware of emoji, I sneered; now I use them frequently and shamelessly in my messages. So thanks, Trevor, for the link, and happy Emoji Day to all!

We’ve discussed Jhumpa Lahiri’s switch to writing in Italian before, and I’m freshly impressed every time I read something by her (I really should acquire one of her books instead of depending on the New Yorker to feed stories to me); I’m shoehorning her latest, “P’s Parties” (translated by Todd Portnowitz; archived), into LH because language is something of a plot point:

They came from different countries, for work or for love, for a change of scenery, or for some other mysterious reason. They were a nomadic population that piqued my interest—prototypes, perhaps, for one of my future stories, the kind of people I’d have the chance to meet and casually observe only at P’s house. In no time at all they’d manage to visit nearly all parts of our country, tackling the smaller towns on the weekends, skiing our mountains in February, and swimming in our crystalline seas in July. They’d pick up a decent smattering of our language, adapt to the food, forgive the daily chaos.

[…]

My memories of the past five or so parties had blurred together. Each year was different, and each year, for the most part, was the same. I made the same small talk I’d forget a minute later, I practiced my two rusty but still passable foreign languages, which I’d always brush up on a bit.

[…]

The woman spoke in a strange mix of her language and ours, but it was easy enough to follow.

[…]

Because of the girlfriend, we never spoke to each other in Italian. He gushed about the multiethnic neighborhood where they lived, where they’d go out every night of the week to eat food from seven different countries. His answers to my questions were polite but brief. We conversed in a language I struggled to keep up with, a sensation that I enjoyed at P’s house but that here, with my own son, felt frustrating and artificial.

But really, I’m just hoping to entice people to read it; it reminds me of Virginia Woolf, and I don’t have much higher praise than that.

I have to apologize up front, because those of you who aren’t subscribers won’t be able to read Gabriel Gianordoli and Robert Ito’s NY Times article in the interactive way it’s meant to be read, seeing the original Japanese pages morph into the translated ones and selected areas highlighted; the archived version has only the text. But that text is interesting enough I figure it’s worth passing along:

Open a Japanese comic in a bookstore — say, the latest edition of “Dragon Ball Super” — and you’re likely to find a note saying, “Stop! You’re reading the wrong way.” That’s because manga begins where all Japanese books do: on what, to Western readers, would be the last page. The text then moves right to left. Try reading manga in the Western way and you’re likely to spoil a great ending.

Since manga was first introduced to the U.S. in the 1980s, American companies have wrestled with how to adapt the genre for their readers. It requires taking into account not only art and visual concepts that are unique to Japanese, but also an entirely different system of reading.

Today manga is enormously popular in the U.S. and is published in something close to its original form: in black and white, on inexpensive paper stock, to be read in the Japanese style. But this wasn’t always the case.

[Read more…]

I am experiencing a lexical/botanical crisis, and I hope the Hattery can help. I’ve long been vaguely familiar with the Russian word шиповник, defined by my trusty Oxford dictionary as ‘wild rose’; I knew it mainly as the name of a Silver Age publisher, and thought of it as “some kind of plant.” But having just run across it in a novel I’m reading, I thought I’d better refresh my memory, and when I googled it the page said prominently “Rose / Plant.” “It’s not just a rose, is it?” thought I, but when I went to the Russian Wikipedia page I discovered it was the equivalent of the English one for Rose, and said “Запрос «Rosa» перенаправляется сюда” [The query “Rosa” redirects here]. So it is just a rose? But checking the Russian corpus got me citations like “Изредка, там же, растет и шиповник ― дикая роза; чаще всего это роза собачья” [Occasionally, there is also a шиповник, the wild rose, growing there; most often it is the dog rose]. So it’s a special variety of rose? But then why is the Wikipedia article called Шиповник and not Роза? And what is a “wild rose” anyway? That is not an English lexical item (at least it’s not in any of my dictionaries, even the OED), it’s just a collocation — a rose that happens to be wild. Can anyone who knows more about botany than I disentangle this for me? And can my Russian-speaking readers tell me how they think of шиповник and роза? Are they pretty much the same thing, used in different contexts, or distinct plants?