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Roger Angell, in this week’s New Yorker, discusses the old-time telephone exchanges, with their evocative names:

Growing up, I began to apprehend that Manhattan telephone exchanges, which were geographically assigned, were a guide map and social register to my delightful city. West Side school friends of mine could be reached at the MOnument or CAthedral or RIverside exchange. My father worked at the WHitehall exchange, down near Wall Street, and my mother at the mid-West Forties’ BRyant 9. BUtterfield 8 was just south of us on the Upper East Side, with TRafalgar, REgent, and RHinelander not far away. When my parents were divorced and my mother moved to East Eighth Street, she became a SPring 7, and neighbors and stores and movie theatres in that neighborhood had lively ALgonquin, CHelsea, and WAtkins handles. If you called up one of the Times Square movie theatres, to find the next showtime for “Cimarron” or “Rasputin and the Empress,” the exchange was probably LOngacre.

(In explanation of that last name, I should point out that Longacre Square was the original name for Times Square, before the Times moved there.) There is a site that collects such exchange names; here is their New York list [you can now (2022, apparently since 2006) search their database].

This stuff is way beyond me, but there’s a two-step discussion going on over at Jonathon Delacour’s the heart of things (with its lovely rendition of the ‘heart’ character) about the proper way to mark up transliterated/foreign words (his example is Japanese nejimakidori): lang attributes? span tags? cite? (this last apparently a no-no)… me, I just use itals, but if this sort of thing is your idea of a good time, for heaven’s sake go on over there and help out the gang, so that by the time it all means something to me I’ll know how to do it.

“The visual and tactile aspects of the written word are explored in this exhibition. Although the subject is words, we have avoided textual content in favor of physical context. In presenting written texts that differ from the familiar, we intend to show that, far from being a uniform box of rows and columns, the written word has been recorded historically in a variety of shapes, sizes, and materials.” Gorgeous, amazing stuff [from the Cornell University Library] (via the always amazing Plep).

I would like to thank Don Blaheta, a linguistics grad student at Brown, for posting an explanation of why “people who persist in going on and on about how dumb the President is for being unable to say the word ‘nuclear'” are wrong. As he says,

There are excellent linguistic reasons why people (and it’s a whole lot more people than just the President) do this. The process is called metathesis, and it is one that happens in many languages. It tends to happen where the reversed syllable ends up making the word easier to pronounce—in the case of “nuclear”, the standard pronunciation has a front vowel between two back vowels, but the metathesised version has all back vowels. Another commonly-cited example in English is the word “comfortable”, where the T and R are switched, allowing the following schwa vowel to drop out entirely and reducing the word to three syllables. Crucially, this is a regular phonological process affecting speakers of many languages, and not something that is indicative of intelligence.

Well said, and the next time I get into a discussion of the matter I’ll just point to your crystal-clear statement.
Update. Don is now (June 2008) an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois, and he revisited the “nucular” issue in 2005.

Via La grande rousse, excellent sites for Flaubert and Perec (the latter including a lexique perecquien; by the way, the name Perec is originally Polish/Jewish, and is the equivalent of the Anglicized Peretz).

It’s funny ’cause it’s true:

All lyric poems are narcissistic. They are the earliest form of the personal ad. They’ve been saying for more than a thousand years, “I’m a sensitive, vulnerable, misunderstood, barely solvent, lovable little fellow who would like to meet a person of exquisite taste who is not averse to an occasional roll in the hay.” –Charles Simic

(Via Giornale Nuovo, which I found through Caterina; it’s written by misteraitch, who lives “in an apartment in an hotel in a town on the Baltic coast of southern Sweden” and posts all manner of good and beautiful things.)

Avva posts the first attested use of one of the less frequent but more amusing four-letter words; the entry is in Russian, but even those without the use of that remarkably obscenity-rich language will enjoy the Fletcher translation of Martial whose last line provides the historic reference—it is given both in transcription and in an image of the original book. (It should be noted that this word was, as the OED puts it, “Erroneously used… by Browning Pippa Passes iv. ii. 96 under the impression that it denoted some part of a nun’s attire”; let this be a lesson to all of us to always look up words we don’t understand.)

Baldur asks a good question: what should a translator do about personal names that bear a meaning in the original language? I reached his entry via Dorothea, who says:

It’s a wicked translation problem. Translate the names by meaning, and you make the original sound like a bigoted nineteenth-century impression of Native Americans. Worse, you give the names’ meaning too much prominence in the reader’s mind; as Baldur says, these names are names first and meanings second….
The opposite danger, though, is considering meanings—well, meaningless. If you don’t translate the name, how do you get across its echoes?
One possibility is the name-pair, the name in the original language paired with a translation…. The downside is that this is slightly misleading; it’s easy for the reader to believe that the translation is part of the name in the original…. (In an electronic edition, I would be tempted to include the translated name as a pop-up note or in a lighter text color. The latter might be possible in print also; depends on the publisher.)…
If all else fails, there’s always the footnote. In this specific case, though, I myself would prefer an annotated name glossary; it’s a darned shame to have to hunt through the entire book for the first instance of a name just to find out what it means.

Obviously, each case is different and has to be addressed on its own merits, but I wonder if readers have general thoughts on the subject? For me, this is a case where the internet has obvious benefits: a scrollover note on the name’s meaning would be unobtrusive in a way that can’t be matched in print. (Personally, there are few things I love better than an annotated glossary, but I recognize that it’s a love not shared by the majority.)

This pleasing page renders the phrase “Made with Macintosh” into various languages; I probably wouldn’t link it just for that, but its creator, Carl Edlund Anderson, takes the trouble to explain the translations linguistically; sample: “This [Proto-Germanic “Tawidu mith Macintosh”] is a guess but there are very few native speakers around to complain! This expression is suitable if the word for the “made” object is feminine—as the proto-Germanic *síðó would be were it used to mean “page” (in the sense of “home page”). The verb *tawjan was used in a runic inscription from South Jutland c. AD 400 to describe the crafting of a pair of golden horns, so it seemed fair to use it to describe making web pages as well.” I like your style, Carlaz!

William Safire’s column in today’s NY Times Magazine has a useful discussion of the well-known bynames of the late Kim Il Song and his son and heir Kim Jong Il:

In 1994, Kim Il Sung (Great Kim) died and was succeeded by his son, whom Western writers continued to refer to, tongue-in-cheekily, as Dear Leader. But the son, Kim Jong Il (Dear Kim, in Kempton’s simplifying formulation), soon changed his sobriquet to fit his new position.
He stopped having himself called Dear Leader (in Korean, ch’inaehanum chidoja) and assumed his father’s informal title, Great Leader (widaehan, ”great,” yongdoja, ”leader”). But that was confusing whenever the two men were spoken of in the same sentence. To which one—the late Great Kim or the former Dear Kim, now elevated to titular greatness—did the compound proper noun Great Leader refer?
Solution: subtly demote the dead Old Man. The deceased Kim Il Sung, formerly widaehan yongdoja, is now remembered in North Korea as widaehan suryong, ”major chieftain, big boss,” important, but a linguistic cut below Great Leader. It is the son, whose leadership title is no longer encumbered with childlike endearment, who has taken his father’s widaehan yongdoja, the top of the Communist Korean pecking order.

For more, I direct the reader to Andrei Lankov’s article (originally published in Russian in 1995, thus now somewhat outdated) on North Korean official propaganda; this paragraph has further linguistic information:

When Kim Chong Il’s ascent to supreme power had just begun, he was given a title which might at first seem a little strange—the “Centre of the Party” (Kor.: Tang chungang), although finally the title “Dear Ruler” (Kor. ch’in’ae’ha’nun chidoja) has prevailed. Even if the names of Kim Il Song or Kim Chong Il are not mentioned specifically, every North Korean knows what titles go with whom and would never mix the “Great Leader” (Kim Il Song) with the “Dear Ruler” (Kim Chong Il). Special words and even grammar forms have been established which may only be used in relation to these two personages. Their names along with any quotation from their writings are always printed in a special bold font. Starting from the primary school, North Koreans are taught how to make correct sentences in which the leader and his son are mentioned. According to this “court grammar”, these two sacred names must not be put in the middle or, God forbid, at the end of a phrase, but always at the beginning.

Safire, by the way, goes on to provide further Korea-related details (on the origins of the word “Korea” and the descriptive “Land of the Morning Calm”; I was especially proud of him for sticking with “etymology unknown” with regard to gook—I know how he loves dubious etymologies). But it wouldn’t be a Safire column without at least one mistake, and although this one is minor, it’s interesting fodder for discussion. He refers to “the naming of Japan, or Nippon, from ni-pon, ‘sun-rise,’ which we recognize as ‘the Land of the Rising Sun.'” The attempted clarity of the hyphenated ni-pon betrays an understandable, but false, assumption; in fact, the first part of the compound is not ni but nichi, which represents the Japanese reading of the Chinese character for ‘day, sun’; the character was pronounced *nyit in Old Chinese, which was borrowed into Japanese as nichi and later (when the pronunciation in Chinese had changed) as jitsu (it is also read as hi as a native Japanese word, and the Chinese word itself is now pronounced r in Mandarin… but that’s another story). It happens that when syllables ending in -chi are combined with a syllable beginning with a voiceless consonant, the -chi drops out and the consonant is doubled, hence {nichi + pon} = Nippon. It’s all too complicated for a newspaper column… but that’s what Languagehat is for.