languagehat.com

I was having a nostalgic look through the blog of the late lamented Ray Girvan, a valued contributor to the Hattery back in the day, when I hit on this post about an obscure but apparently real expression:

I remember from childhood a cowboy comic where an Indian character shouted “Onhey!” as he attacked. If I ever recalled it, I just assumed it was made up. To my surprise, it turns out to be authentic (or at least sourceable to period accounts). It turns up in a number of accounts of the Battle of Little Big Horn, as in that reportedly told by White Bull to Stanley Vestal:

White Bull said, “I saw a mounted soldier waver in his saddle. I quirted my pony and raced up to strike him and count the first coup on this enemy. Before I could reach him, he fell dying from his saddle. I reined up my pony, jumped down and struck the body with my quirt. I yelled, ‘Onhey! I have overcome this one.’ I took the man’s revolver and cartridge belt.

He gives another example of use and continues:

It all sounds plausible enough for closure for the moment, though both of these sources come via Stanley Vestal; it’d be nice to see independent confirmation. I don’t know what language it would be; “Sioux” covers three main languages (Lakota, Western Dakota and Easten Dakota) with multiple dialects.

So I thought I’d bring it here and ask if anyone knows anything about it; I’m sure Ray’s shade would appreciate answers.

I got an e-mail from rozele alerting me to Zora Neale Hurston’s nine-page typescript titled “Harlem Slanguage,” available online at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library site; rozele says:

as you might expect, it’s much more than a simple lexicon – there are idioms, proverbs, usage notes, illustrative citations from songs and folklore, and a full-on narrative. plus, as you’d expect, it’s funny as hell.

sadly, it’s not dated, and i don’t know my hurstonania well enough to match the address she gives to a year (but it would definitely be possible).

there are at least a few items that’ve been of interest to the hattery, including “29. GUT-BUCKET, low dive, type of music or expression from same”, which is a professional folklorist’s vote for the place coming first in the semantic development.

An item that struck my eye was this, on p. 3:

JOOKING, playing the piano, guitar, or any musical instrument in the manner of the Jooks. (pronounced like “took”) (2) dancing and “schronching” in the manner. A player may be “getting low-down” at the piano and his listeners may yell out in admiration, “Jook it, papa! Jook!”

I was surprised at the “pronounced like ‘took,'” since I would have guessed it would have a long u (as in juke joint), but no, the OED has an entry for it (from 2008):
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I wish Alex Foreman were blogging rather than casting his seeds on the stony soil of Facebook, but I will rescue a couple of thought-provoking recent posts from there:

1) You can see phonemic vowel length disappearing in real time over the course of the 20th century in Korean. It’s really well documented. It’s fascinating, and suggests a lot about what analogous processes in languages like Latin or Greek must have looked like. The loss of the length-system is preceded by a period of length instability, during which length is strongly subject to frequency effects and analogy, and all kinds of other interesting stuff happens. Speakers may retain the ability to produce length contrasts consciously for at least a generation after they stop producing them under normal conditions.
Like other sound changes, it did not happen all at once.

2) My favorite example of how versification does not simply flow inexorably from the aurally perceptible, innate rhythmic properties of language is Hindi vs. Urdu.
Urdu and Hindi are, phonologically, basically the same language, and yet their versification systems are really quite different. Hindi meters are basically moraic, whereas Urdu versification draws on Persian metrics and so is much less so.
The result is that Urdu speakers have a hard time sensing the rhythm of a Hindi poem, or figuring out how to scan its lines.
To the “Urdu ear” unaccustomed to Hindi poetry, the verses are often bizarrely long, and the syllable pattern can feel alarmingly erratic. The Urdu listener must get the “feel” of it, learn to hear all over again. Even though the phonology is identical.
It is of course possible to use Hindi meters in Urdu and vice versa. Experimenters have done so. But the difference in rhythmic sensibility is real and stark.

(I have quoted the entirety of each post, so in case they are private on FB you aren’t missing anything.)

I had been looking forward to Marina Stepnova’s 2020 novel Сад [The orchard] (the word сад can mean either ‘garden’ or ‘orchard,’ but since this one is full of apple trees I have preferred the latter), because it’s set in Russia in the late 19th century and I am especially interested in that period these days; now that I’ve finished it, I have mixed feelings, which (as usual) I will try to disentangle here. In brief, I started out enchanted and ended up disenchanted; my discussion will (as usual) include spoilers.

There are five chapters, whose titles translate to Mother, Father, Daughter, Brother, and Son; the first, which makes up almost a quarter of the book, is to my mind far and away the best. It focuses on a rich aristocratic woman, Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Boryatinskaya (née von Stenbok), in her early forties, who is leading a pleasant life with her older husband Vladimir, a military man — their two children, one of each sex, are grown and living their own lives. They live in Petersburg but are visiting their recently acquired (third) estate near Voronezh, called Anna, when the novel opens; the first line is “Что за прелесть эта Наташа!” [What a delight this Natasha is!], and it turns out Nadezhda is reading the hot-off-the-presses novel by Count Tolstoy, War and Peace — it is 1869. Her husband makes gruff but loving fun of her addiction to reading (which she does in French, German, and “even Russian”; all of their estates are chock full of books). After describing the mute, hopeless passion of the “boring German youth” hired to catalogue her library (he moons over a pair of pink ball slippers he finds in a closet, unaware that they have never been worn by his employer but belong to one of her nieces), Stepnova has the one-sentence paragraph:

Россия, Лета, Лорелея.
[Russia, Lethe, Lorelei.]

Which is the last line of Mandelstam’s 1917 poem Декабрист [The Decembrist]; reading it, I found myself falling for the book as hopelessly as the poor pimply German fell for his boss.
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The Internet Surname Database says of the surname Threadgold:

This unusual and interesting name is of early medieval English origin, and derives from an occupational nickname for an embroiderer, specifically one who embroidered fine clothes with gold thread. The name derives from the Middle English “thred(en)”, to thread, from the Olde English pre 7th Century “thraed”, thread, with “gold”, gold. Occupational surnames were originally acquired by those who were employed in that specific occupation, but later became hereditary. The development of the surname include Walterus Tredegold (1273, Kent), Robert Dredegold (1328, Somerset), Edmund Thredgall (1674, Suffolk), Daniel Thredkill (ibid.), and John Thridgale (1681, Suffolk). The modern surname has forms ranging from Threadgold, Threadgould, Threadgill and Threadgall to Threadkell, Tridgould and Tre(a)dgold.

And thus we learn that one of my favorite Byzantine historians, Warren Treadgold, and one of my favorite jazz musicians, Henry Threadgill, have what is originally the same family name.

I must have been introduced to the Parable of the Tares in Sunday School (when I was a wee lad and had such experiences imposed on me); my vague memory jibes with Wikipedia’s summary: “The parable relates how servants eager to pull up weeds were warned that in so doing they would root out the wheat as well and were told to let both grow together until the harvest.” But that’s not actually what’s going on, as I learned from this Facebook post by Rebecca Stanton, a Russianist who lives in New Zealand and sings in a choir:

I’ve always wondered what the reference was for this window at St Mary of the Angels, Wellington, which is toward the back of the church on the Mary chapel side, right where the sopranos can stare at it. Who are these sleeping people? Who is the cartoonishly malicious “baddie” in the middle and what is he holding/throwing? Finally today I found out, when the Gospel reading centered on the parable it illustrates — commonly known as the Parable of the Tares (Mt. 13:24-43), though the translation used at SMotA rendered the latter word as “darnel,” leaving me absolutely none the wiser…..either way, it is apparently a translation of the Greek ζιζάνια, which “is thought to mean darnel (Lolium temulentum), a ryegrass which looks much like wheat in its early stages of growth.”* (Most modern translations render it as “weeds,” which though more immediately understandable to the non-botanists in the congregation, misses the nuance that the “weeds” resemble the actual crop, and the historical context that this sort of thing was apparently enough of a problem that Roman law explicitly forbade sowing darnel in someone else’s wheat field — making this parable a particularly plausible and topical one for its original audience.)

The point, anyway, is that the sleeping people are the farm workers who have just planted a field of wheat, and the mean baddie is sneaking into the field to spoil their work by sowing a whole shitload of darnel — which looks like wheat but is toxic, apparently — and will be impossible to weed out. What a bastard!

(Her footnote is to the Wikipedia article I linked.) What a bastard indeed, and thanks to that lively account, I’m unlikely to forget how the parable works. And of course I had to look up the unfamiliar word darnel ‘Any of several ryegrasses, especially Lolium temulentum’:

[Middle English, of Old North French origin; akin to French dialectal darnelle, from darne, dizzy, dazed (darnel being so called because L. temulentum, a common weed of wheat fields, is often rendered toxic by a fungal infection similar to ergot, and consumption of bread made from flour contaminated with toxic darnel causes dizziness and lethargy), of Germanic origin; akin to -daert in Middle Dutch verdaert, dazed, and -turni in Old High German biturni, dazed, both perhaps akin to Middle Dutch deren, and Old High German tarēn, tarōn, to harm, ultimately of unknown origin.]

Tare ‘Any of several vetches native to Europe; any of several weedy plants that grow in grain fields,’ however, has no etymology beyond “[Middle English.]”

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.

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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.”

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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.

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