Every once in a while I find myself trying to disentangle the history of a familiar but complicated word, and this time it’s post — not the long piece of wood but the (“Chiefly British”) term for the mail. What I doubtless once knew but had forgotten is that it originally referred to a person, or to quote the OED (entry updated 2006):
Any of a series of men stationed at suitable places along appointed post-roads, the duty of each being to ride with, or forward speedily to the next stage, the monarch’s (and later also other) letters and dispatches, and to provide fresh horses for express messengers riding through. to lay posts: to establish a chain of such riders and horses along a route for the speedy delivery of dispatches. Obsolete.
These chains were at first laid only temporarily, when occasion demanded direct communication with a distant point, but eventually they were established permanently along certain routes. From the 17th cent. the men were also known as postmasters (see postmaster n.¹ 1b, 2), and were the precursors of the postmasters in charge of local post offices. In the 16th and 17th centuries, they usually had also the exclusive privilege of providing ordinary travellers with post-horses, and of conducting the business of a posting establishment (as a posting-house or inn), which was later separated from that of the Post Office.
It then became “A person who travels express with letters, dispatches, etc., esp. along a fixed route,” “A vehicle or vessel used to carry letters and other postal matter,” “A single collection or delivery of mail,” and finally “A national or regional organization for the collection, transportation, and delivery of letters, parcels, etc. (= post office n.¹).” All clear enough, but what I want to complain about is the etymology. As is usual now that the online status of the dictionary allows near-infinite discursiveness, it is quite full:
< Middle French, French poste (feminine) series of men on horseback responsible for transporting letters along a route, each of the intermediate horses and riders responsible for transporting letters in this way (both 1480; compare Old French poeste de chevaus place where horses are stationed for riders transporting messages along a route (1298 in Marco Polo, apparently a calque on an Italian expression with posta in this sense: see below)), messenger, courier (c1500; from c1480 also masculine in this sense), passenger coach (1572), post office (1655) < Italian posta (feminine) stopping place for coaches, travellers, or messengers along a long route of communication (14th cent. in Marco Polo, although earlier currency is probably implied by post-classical Latin posta: see below), place where letters are deposited for transport, post office (1585), originally specific senses of posta station, designated stopping place (c1300; compare post n.⁵), use as noun of feminine of posto placed, situated, past participle of porre to place, to put (see post n.⁵).
The “post n.⁵” they keep wanting us to see is “An office to which a person is or may be appointed; a position of paid employment, a job,” whose etymology likewise is taken back to Italian posto, past participle of porre, but now they add “(see ponent n.).” So fine, let’s see ponent (“The west”):
< Middle French ponent west (1240 in Old French; Middle French, French ponant (1549); the form ponent is now archaic or literary in this sense, and now regional in sense ‘west wind’ (1606)) < Old Occitan ponen west (c1300), west wind (late 12th cent.; also as ponent (14th cent. or earlier); Occitan ponent), ultimately < uses as noun of present participle of classical Latin pōnere to put, place, set, lay down < po-, preverb (< the same Indo-European base as Hittite pe-, Old Church Slavonic po-, Lithuanian pa-) + sinere to put, place (see sited adj.). Compare post-classical Latin ponent-, ponens west, west wind, sunset, setting (late 13th cent. in an Italian source).
Which is pleasingly detailed, but the one thing that is omitted from all these histories is the immediate source of those Romance post- forms, which the dusty old first edition managed to include: “late L. or Rom. posta n. from postus (Lucretius) = positus, pa. pple. of pōnĕre to place.” Why would you not think it worth your while to include positus, which explains the -t- in post? Especially when you’re sprinkling in all sorts of stuff from Marco Polo to Hittite? Ah well, I’m sure they have their reasons. But AHD does it right in a much smaller compass:
[French poste, from Italian posto, from Old Italian, from Vulgar Latin *postum, from Latin positum, neuter past participle of pōnere, to place; see apo- in the Appendix of Indo-European roots.]
Russian почта is borrowed from Polish poczta, says W-ary. Fine. It then says that the latter is a borrowing of Italisn posta. Why would Italian [s] be borrowed as [t͡ʂ]?
More modern “postmaster” would typically be understood as the guy in charge of dispatching and supervising the riders (or deliverers using other means of transport), but not actually riding/delivering himself. How long ago did bare “post” referring to an individual human being (in lieu of compounds like postmaster, postman, postboy, postrider, etc.) fall out of usage?
Last five cites for sense I.2.a. (“person who travels express with letters, dispatches, etc.”):
I love the name Aberdeen Bon-accord; looking it up in DSL, I find Bonaccord is “The motto of the city of Aberdeen, and hence substituted for the name of the city”:
I bet the authors of the first version simply assumed their readers would know that much Latin (the word is fairly basic), and the revisers, who also knew that much Latin, forgot to make it explicit.
Transeamus usque ad Betle-ehem
et videamus infantem quod natum est!
Ma-ariam et Ioseph et i-infantem
po-o-si-itum i-in praesepio!!!
The key probably lies somewhere in the forms with just [ʃ], found in some other Slavic languages and Hungarian. They look suspiciously like southwestern German, but probably they’re just straight from Latin by an established correspondence historically founded by a retracted /s/. Presumably, [ʃt] was at some point interpreted as a simplification of [tʃt] and hypercorrected accordingly – but it’s not like I know anything worth mention about Polish dialectology or whatever.
But the first version did include it, and why would you delete it when revising the entry?
It may have been otherwise in Aberdeen or Donegal, but the fact that Cooper needs to explain the meaning of the word to American readers of the 1820’s suggests it was no longer particularly current by then.
@Y: Why is Italian S borrowed into Polish as Č?
I suspect for the same reason why we have POŠTA in Croatian and POSTA in Hungarian (different spelling but the pronunciation is the same).
From the Venetian dialect, where the S became something like Š.
It would’ve been easy enough for the Poles to get the word from neighbouring Hungary.
PS
Indeed, the Croatian Ecyclopaedic Dictionary has this etymology:
Venetian posta < It. posta < Med. Latin posita: postaja (meaning: station) < posita statio
Aha! I knew levans (“rising”) for east, but ponens (“setting”) for west is news. Now I find ponent (modern French ponant) all over the place in Marco Polo’s Le devisement dou monde:
Matching ubiquitous use of levant:
Compare oriens, Russian восток, and of course Anatolia “from Ancient Greek ἀνατολή (anatolḗ, ‘sunrise, place from where the sun rises, the east’ ” ( Wiktionary).
zyxt:
POSTA in Hungarian (different spelling but the pronunciation is the same)
Well, the A is different. But near enough.
Especially in New England, Route 1, which runs more or less along the coast, is known in many places as the Post Road. There are numerous adjacent sections with the name Old Post Road, which follow the original route before it was relaid along a straighter path.
There is a broken Post Road milestone from 1734 right north of Harvard Square.
Especially in New England, Route 1, which runs more or less along the coast, is known in many places as the Post Road. There are numerous adjacent sections with the name Old Post Road, which follow the original route before it was relaid along a straighter path.
Exactly! And to tie it still more closely to the original post definition provided by Mr. Hat, that Post Road/Old Post Road is often named The King’s Highway. Long ago, I lived in a town in Connecticut where all three names were used for the same road in a one mile stretch: The King’s Highway, The Boston Post Road, Old Rt. 1.
Wikipedia has an entry for the King’s Highway:
“ The King’s Highway was a roughly 1,300-mile (2,100 km) road laid out from 1650 to 1735 in the American colonies. It was built on the order of Charles II of England, who directed his colonial governors to link Charleston, South Carolina, and Boston, Massachusetts.
The section north of New York City, laid out on January 22, 1673, became the Upper Boston Post Road.[1] The road was finally completed in 1735. Much of the Post Road is now U.S. Route 1 and U.S. Route 20.
Following a trail known as the Pequot Path, the Upper Post Road was first laid out on January 1, 1673.[8] Used by post riders to deliver the mail, it was later widened and smoothed so that horse-drawn wagons or stagecoaches could use it. During the 19th century, turnpike companies took over and improved pieces of the road. Large sections of the various routes are still called the King’s Highway and Boston Post Road.“
You can find bits of narrow lane called The King’s Highway from Mid-coast Maine to Florida.
Russian почта is borrowed from Polish poczta, says W-ary. Fine. It then says that the latter is a borrowing of Italisn posta. Why would Italian [s] be borrowed as [t͡ʂ]?
I did a little looking around, and I found the account I outline below. It seems that the latter part of the story is something like this:
Italian posta originally reached Polish (via Czech pošta?) in the form poszta. However, this form collided with a pre-existing Middle Polish poczta ‘gift brought to a lord by a peasant when he appeared before him with a request or complaint’. This Middle Polish poczta is equivalent to present-day Czech pocta ‘sign of respect, customary honor (paid to someone), (one’s last) respects, military salute, etc.’) and is a derivative with the prefix po- of the same root as Polish cześć ‘honor, reverence’, also ‘Hi!’, czcić ‘to worship, venerate, revere’ (OCS чьсть, чьтити, Russian честь, чтить, etc; cf. also Czech poctít ‘to honor, recognize’). The notion expressed by Middle Polish poczta, appearing before somebody with a gift or expression of reverence in order to ask a favor or make a complaint, could easily be associated to that of poszta, the postal service by which salutations along with requests and complaints are sent, and so the form poczta replaced poszta in Polish. And then Russian borrowed the form poczta as почта.
Mahon has the Moll de Ponent and Moll de Llevant, which is where I first came across the word – it seems fairly common in Catalonia. But I didn’t know Anatolia was a direction name, that’s a new one for me.
New York City still has streets named Boston Post Road (one in Bronx County) and Kings Highway (one in Kings County).
The street I live on just a little bit outside the Bronx dead-ends at the north end of the block into Boston Post Road. Although that’s the “modern” (probably meaning since sometime in the 19th century) BPR alignment; the colonial-era alignment is a bit further north and is currently named “Colonial Avenue” where it passes through our town but “King’s Highway” the next municipality over. The pretty obvious reason for the change, which I expect is recurrent along the route, is the colonial alignment squiggled more to deal with rivers – cutting inland to get far enough upstream that either the stream was shallow enough to be forded on horseback or narrow enough to be bridged in a way that was feasible/affordable in colonial times. The modern alignment depends on much more substantial bridge further downstream where the relevant river is wider and deeper, thus enabling a straighter/shorter route. It’s possible that before the predecessor to the current bridge was built there was an intermediate stage where traffic had increased to the point of making a full-time ferry economically sensible.
EDITED TO ADD: But to get back to the original, um, post: there’s nothing about “post road” that particularly requires or to my mind even implies an etymology where the “post” part of the compound refers to the humans who were the paradigmatic intended users of the road when first laid out as opposed to referring to the mail they were going to be carrying.
Re “chiefly British” for “post” referring as a bare noun to “mail,” I think what is even more British (or at least more completely absent from AmEng) is the verb “to post” as a synonym for “to mail.” At least I assume that’s what’s going on in the sentence “Let’s post Mr. Daniel a snowball through his letter box,” which caught me short the first time I read “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” many decades ago.
more completely absent from AmEng
Have you heard a native-born non-Anglophile Yank talk about “the post” instead of “the mail”? I’m pretty sure I haven’t.
But your mail is famously delivered by the postal service.
@hat, Well native-born Yanks use compounds like “parcel post.” Not to mention “postman.” (He always rings twice, at least if he’s the noir sort.) Maybe my claim is more of a higher American likelihood of having “post” for “mail” as a noun in their passive lexicon so it seems fine if they hear or read it even if they wouldn’t naturally say or write it themselves.
Well native-born Yanks use compounds like “parcel post.” Not to mention “postman.”
Yes, but that’s not the same, is it?
Maybe my claim is more of a higher American likelihood of having “post” for “mail” as a noun in their passive lexicon so it seems fine if they hear or read it even if they wouldn’t naturally say or write it themselves.
Now that I can believe.
But yes, you can post things that are not actually post through a letter box in a door – or a vote into a ballot box, or a shape into a shape sorter, or similar.
What word would you use? And do you actually post your mail through a slot to send it, or does it go in some other way?
But yes, you can post things that are not actually post through a letter box in a door – or a vote into a ballot box, or a shape into a shape sorter, or similar.
That was hard for me to parse; I hadn’t realized the verb was quite so multivalent. We mail things by putting them into a mailbox or taking them to the post office; we stick (or push or shove or slip) things into a letter box in a door (though I can’t remember the last time I saw such a thing), we put a vote into a ballot box, and I’ve never heard of a shape sorter.
“Let’s post Mr. Daniel a snowball through his letter box”
That does seem to be a straightforward use of the word that’s equivalent to US “mail”, but is that the same word being used in these sentences from two novels by Nicci French (an English husband-wife team)?
A shape sorter looks a bit like this https://www.elc.co.uk/shop-by-age/1-2-years/Woodlets-Shape-Sorter/p/560232?queryId=8b8327bb7b6bd4865129bfd405896249 (It doesn’t actually sort shapes, because they all end up together again inside it. But that’s its name.)
When you say a mailbox, do you mean what I would call a pillarbox (a (not necessarily) red thing with a mouth, either standing as a pillar or set into a wall), or one of those odd things on one leg, as seen in American films?
While I’m asking silly questions, how is your mail delivered if you live in the middle of an American town?
Letterboxes in door are pretty much ubiquitous here – even a lonely house by the side of a country road is likely to be close enough to the road that the postie will stop and take things up the path to the door, so that you have to be specially miles-up-a-track rural before you have your post left at the end of your drive.
We receive our mail at home via a slot in our front door although there isn’t a box inside to catch it and it just lands on the floor, whence occasionally items are removed by inquisitive children before an older household member picks it up. I don’t know what if any verb the USPS employee who comes up to the door and puts the stuff through the slot mentally associates with the action. I do mail things (if small enough) by putting them through the slot in a street-corner mailbox or at the post office. Unlike hat, I’m not sure if I would use more vigorous or specific verb than “put” for that specific action?
Edited to add: by “mailbox” in the above, I meant something that is functionally equivalent to UK “pillarbox” but prototypically a different shape and definitely blue rather than red. Red as a color-of-governmental-function perhaps still carries unfortunate residual associations with the soldiers of George III whom we drove out by force and arms.
When you say a mailbox, do you mean what I would call a pillarbox (a (not necessarily) red thing with a mouth, either standing as a pillar or set into a wall), or one of those odd things on one leg, as seen in American films?
Either; we call them by the same name.
While I’m asking silly questions, how is your mail delivered if you live in the middle of an American town?
If you’re in a free-standing house, it’s either popped into your mailbox (one of those odd things on one leg, with a red flag raised to indicate outgoing mail) or slipped into the mail slot in your door. If you’re in an apartment building, it’s put in your box in the mailbox unit.
In other dialect-variation news, “postie” as an informal variant of “post(wo)man” is not AFAIK current in AmEng, although in the New York region one occasionally sees capital-P “Postie,” meaning “employee of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Post.”
Yeah, and we sorely miss a “postie” equivalent — now that “mailman” is deprecated for being gendered, we’re left to fall back on “delivery person” or subject avoidance (“The mail’s being delivered”).
@ J.W. Brewer. I’m not sure if I would use more vigorous or specific verb than “put” for that specific action?
drop a letter in the mailbox
One relevant factor in the US is that the USPS will have decided in its bureaucratic wisdom on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis whether your mail is delivered by someone who walks the route, who can easily go up to front doors, or by someone who drives the route, who thus requires that all the deliverees have street-adjacent mailboxes that can be reached without disembarking from the vehicle — the USPS for a long time was the U.S.’s leading customer for British-configured vehicles with the drivers seat on the right rather than left, precisely so the driver’s-side window would be adjacent to the curb and thus the mailboxes. I presently live on a walked route; growing up I lived at various times on both sorts.
As a child I lived in a small house with a letter slot in the front door. As a young man I worked for the Post Office, subsequently renamed as the U.S. Postal Service. When I delivered mail to a house with a slot in the door, I don’t recall using any particular verb for putting letters into the slot other than ‘deliver’.
Now I live in a tiny hamlet where nearly everyone has a long one-legged box either in front of their house or across the street from the house. Letter carriers, formerly know as postmen, deliver mail and small parcels to that box. Things that don’t fit are left at the dooryard entrance or on the front or back porch, if there is one.
Snowplow drivers seem to earn bonus points for knocking down boxes on posts. People have invented all sorts of hanging mailboxes suspended from elaborate cantilevered contraptions or tree branches to address the aggressive plow truck drivers.
I normally mail a letter or parcel, but have been known to post them, likely as a consequence of having an East Midlands (UK) spouse.
@M: Hmm. “Drop” would have been a more cromulent verb in the old days before they reconfigured the mailboxes I usually frequent (allegedly for fear of terrorism?) such that you need to insert envelopes at an angle that doesn’t fit the semantics of “drop,” although I guess once you’ve done that they drop toward the bottom due to gravity.
One other US option for houses (whether internally subdivided into apartments or not) is a mailbox mounted on the wall next to the door, with the opening at the top.
Those snowplow-vulnerable house-specific mailboxes are also attractive targets for vandalism by Youths who are Up to No Good, as illustrated (with some earlier foreshadowing) just before the three-minute mark in this video, which is an impressive 2014 attempt to recreate the look and feel of being a miscreant suburban teenager in the 1980’s. (The singer/lyricist grew up in British Columbia and there are a few Canadianisms in the lyrics, but the visuals reflect a common North American miscreant-teen cultural heritage on both sides of the border.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_godfsl8CKs
I don’t think I have ever heard “postman” spoken in the U.S., only “mailman”. The James Cain novel and the Marvelettes song are before my time. That said, Google n-grams shows postman always having exceeded mailman, though much more narrowly in the US than in the UK.
Wiktionary does not have the “insert through an opening” sense.
I see that the Internet sense of “post” is listed with the mail-related word, but it seems difficult to disentangle the meanings that fall between posting notices on a post and sending letters through the post.
One other US option for houses (whether internally subdivided into apartments or not) is a mailbox mounted on the wall next to the door, with the opening at the top.
This jogged a few geriatric brain cells. Some time in the 1950s, whether at the behest of the Post Office or just parental choice, we hung one of these on the front door railing.
https://snoc.com/en-us/products/vintage-71041?variant=41812644331682&om=15869&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIzMLY9IC8gQMVDM7ICh2J0AtiEAQYASABEgIF2PD_BwE
The hooks at the bottom were, I suppose, for newspapers, which by law could not be placed in the mailbox unless they were sent to the home by the postal service.
Those hooks are still around. I didn’t know about the law, but theyt make sense for bulky newspapers (especially mammoth Sunday ones) which wouldn’t easily fit in the box. Some mailmen put magazines there, too.
I’ve no idea how they dealt with newspapers on rainy days, before they put them in plastic bags.
Wiktionary does not have the “insert through an opening” sense.
OED II.6.c.:
I wonder why they don’t give the full titles of books now that they have no space constraints?
Xerîb: thank you! But the plot is thick yet. The Czech and Slovak dictionaries linked from pošta also show /š/ and /č/ forms, in both languages. The historical Slovak dictionary (halfway down here) shows /s/ in earlier sources (and also <ss>, which I am not sure what it means). Could it all have started with the palatalization of the /t/?
Keep going, I’m learning a lot 🙂
Some of the old sources evidently used s for /s/ and ss for /ʃ/. I’ve never seen that before myself.
I’m not sure OED II.6.c. is in my passive vocabulary. I read all the examples as freshly coined metaphors.
My overridable default assumptions would be that a letterbox is for post which is finishing its journey, whereas a postbox is for starting the journey, and a mailbox is for email in either direction.
@ J. W. Brewer “Hmm. “Drop” would have been a more cromulent verb in the old days before they reconfigured the mailboxes.”
I wonder how many people think of that and decide to adjust their vocabulary accordingly.
We still say, “They hung up on me,” and so on in reference to telephones even though receivers haven’t been hung up for decades (now they are put down, are they not?).
Or, “Is the telephone ringing?” even after telephones lost their bells and “I rang the bell for three minutes but no one came to the door” even after…..
CAPTAIN: MAIN SCREEN TURN ON.
…from the times when “a simple screw will turn on the lights in our houses”.
Interesting, I would have thought that “parcel” is a Britishism. I don’t think I ever heard the word used growing up in the Pacific Northwest. I’d use “package” for all instances of “parcel”. Likewise, I’d assume someone was foreign if they said they “posted” something.
In my youth (indeed, apparently into my late forties) “parcel post” was the U.S. postal authorities’ own usual name for a particular species of service they offered, so many AmEng speakers used the phrase even if they would not have idiomatically used its component words on a freestanding basis. Sending something “parcel post” was like sending something “Federal Express.” That was just what you called that mode of sending something. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parcel_post#United_States
Some people may still call it “parcel post” even if the USPS has changed the name. My wife still mails things “book rate” and the USPS website seems to implicitly acknowledge that not all customers are on board with their renaming of “book rate” to the more 21st-century-sounding “Media Mail®.” https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-is-Media-Mail-Book-Rate
What do you call it when you take a gift and wrap it up in fancy paper as a ……………. to give to someone for e.g. a birthday or Christmas?
Jen,
In my family we call it a gift or a present. Which term prevails depends on the speaker and on the occasion.
Edited to add: If you are asking about the container, it’susually called a box.
I think she means what do you call the wrapped present. We don’t have a special word for it unless it’s put in the mail, in which case it’s a package. I agree with previous commenters that “parcel” is not a word Americans normally use except in the (apparently antiquated) expression “parcel post.”
A wrapped Christmas present can be a package for me even if not mailed. “There are lots of packages under the tree” seems normal.
“Some of the old sources evidently used s for /s/ and ss for /ʃ/. I’ve never seen that before myself.”
This used to be standard for Czech as well (along with g for modern j, j for í, w for v etc)
https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/en/view/bsb10861202?page=12,13
I agree with previous commenters that “parcel” is not a word Americans normally use except in the (apparently antiquated) expression “parcel post.”
There is another exception, or there was some decades ago. Pitney Bowes once had a major business division with the infelicitous moniker “Bopp”, short for Business Originated Parcel Processing. Its larger companion was “Boppum”, for Business Originated Physical Mail.
All of the salesforce, and thus the shipper customers, prospects, and suspects, used the parcel terminology, as did many of the carriers such as UPS, RPS, and their regional competitors.
The postage meter equivalent for the parcel shippers was called a parcel register, and the carriers used it as a reliable source of billing data.
In light of this discussion it suddenly struck me as noteworthy that an American psychedelic band had used “parcel” in a song title in 1967. Perhaps the word was less obsolete in American usage then? Or maybe they were striving for a bit of exoticism? But it turns out my memory was unreliable and they in fact used the word “package” instead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H6Gg6E9vO0
“Brown paper packages tied up with strings” —American songwriter, 1959. As Keith said, I don’t think a package has to be mailed, just wrapped.
I was aware of the red flag thing on American mailboxes, but never really wondered what it was for. So how do you pay for outgoing post, do they just send you a bill at the end of the month or something?
Other ongoing AmEng uses of “parcel” (according to my infallible Native Speaker Intuition):
A. The old-fashioned fixed phrase “part and parcel of.”
B. Wiktionary’s sense 4 of the noun (“A division of land bought and sold as a unit”), although this may be jargon limited to the legal and real estate professions.
C. The phrasal verb “to parcel out.”
And just when we thought the parcel was an endangered species, along came Parcel Monkey.
parcelmonkey.com
https://www.parcelmonkey.com
Parcel Monkey | The package shipping comparison site
Get a quote! Home · Send a Parcel · Track a Parcel · Contact Us · FAQs · Preferences · Site Search · About Us · International Shipping · Domestic Shipping
@Noetica — and Jen in Edinburgh (and Maó):
Possibly of interest: Italian has three complete series of names for the cardinal points:
1. est, sud, ovest, nord
2. oriente, meridione, occidente, settentrione
3. levante, mezzogiorno, ponente, tramontana
Subjectively, tramontana sounds too obviously a compass wind and I doubt it has any use in my active vocabulary. All the other eleven strike me as unremarkable, though I’m sure their frequency varies.
So how do you pay for outgoing post, do they just send you a bill at the end of the month or something?
You buy stamps at the post office and keep them at home to affix to outgoing letters, though nowadays people who mail a lot have ways to print postage at home. I certainly have stamps that have been sitting in a drawer for 20 years, since I rarely mail anything and when I do the old stamps don’t have the right postage for today (though the newer “forever” stamps will always work for an ordinary letter.
How do “forever” stamps work? I’ve recently read of them, but they don’t seem to exist anywhere outside the US.
They existed in the UK until quite recently, assuming we’re thinking of the same thing – they just said ‘First Class’ or ‘Second Class’ on them, rather than a specific price.
Yeah, they’ll stay valid no matter if the cost of postage goes up.
Giacomo:
1. est, sud, ovest, nord
2. oriente, meridione, occidente, settentrione
3. levante, mezzogiorno, ponente, tramontana
Gràcies i tulipes. I had thought we could work orto, australe, occaso, and boreale (or bòrea, etc.) into the mix somehow. Sono forse troppo danteschi?
Hat:
Yeah, they’ll stay valid no matter if the cost of postage goes up.
In the Great Southland we have (or had when I last checked) postage-paid envelopes that will stay valid forever. But tell me: that red flag thing on your mailboxes. To my knowledge we’ve never had anything like it in Australia. Is it a universal default across all of the US? A damn good idea. After all, the postperson is going to be around anyway – so it would save many a trip to mail letters.
Wikipedia suggests the US forever stamp is a subtype of a broader class called nondenominated postage, though its explanation of the distinction was unclear to me upon a cursory reading. It also says Ireland has had them since 2000, although they were initially rare. I buy stamps about once a year and FWIW first noticed this type this year.
@Noetica:
Those could almost make a literary fourth series, but they’re really two different pairs of poetic usages.
Orto and occaso are in Dante. Occaso is still easily understood as sunset. Orto alone is a very common word meaning “vegetable garden;” I doubt any poet is sufficiently cryptic to use outside of this pair the identical word meaning “sunrise”. Anyway, so poetic is this usage that I cannot tell if the two words mean East and West, or it they’re just traditional metonymies for East and West. One can also speak, in ordinary Italian, of something West-facing as “rivolto al tramonto,” especially if it’s something like a hotel terrace.
Ostro is an alternative to mezzogiorno in the wind rose, but like tramontana not really used outside of it. If instead of a seafarer you’re a humanist intellectual, you’ll call it austro and probably think of some Latin divinity. Those pesky classical wind gods show up throughout Italian literature, of course, but they produce weird outcomes.
Petrarch has the opposing pair austro and borea. Now I wonder if he might be responsible for us having boreal and austral hemispheres. If you think about it with the proper Victorian pedantry, that’s a mismatched pair. Greek yields noto and borea. Latin yields austro and aquilone. I wouldn’t dream of using any of these for a cardinal point, but the dictionary allows both aquilone and borea for North in literary usage (only austro for South).
Zefiro has been by far the most successful of the wind gods, now denoting any pleasant literary breeze. But it doesn’t mean West, nor does its Latin double favonio. Possibly because they lack a counterpart, since nobody can decide whether the classical euro coincides with the modern levante (E) or scirocco (SE)?
As the collective noun for, e.g., rogues, the US has morphed “parcel” into “passel”
Colors florits i gratitud, Giacomo.
Yes, I thought about Zefiro, and his variants and confrères. I must look through Petrarca (né Petracca); the relevant words do not appear in a modest florilège of his sonnets – another of those “pleasant literary breezes” – that I have translated. (Should do more; but who would read them?)
Petrarch’s great popularity escapes me, but here goes Canzoniere CCLXIX.
Is it a universal default across all of the US? A damn good idea.
Yes, it is (as far as I know), and yes it is.
Subsequent (Petrarchist?) usage is puzzling, because aquilone has on its side not only Victorian pedantry; not only Dante; but even the Vulgate (Ap 21:13)
> we put a vote into a ballot box
Perhaps, but in my experience we more often cast our ballots.
> I’ve no idea how they dealt with newspapers on rainy days, before they put them in plastic bags.
You relied on those of us who were paperboys to deliver it to a dry spot, getting off our bikes to tuck it in the screen door if necessary.
My current delivery person flings the thing from his car window, randomly to the sidewalk, the lawn, the garden ir the deep snow. Which is my excuse as a grumpy old man for ignoring the importunity of his Christmas card with reply envelope and never sending a tip.
And the plastic bag doesn’t keep the oaper dry in more than a sprinkle.
But alas we’re down to three of us getting delivery on the block and I imagine the hard copy will disappear in the next decade.
“The English steel we could disdain
Secure in valor’s station
But English gold hath been our bane
Such a passel of rogues in a nation!”
Hmm. Not quite sure if that flows?
In V.S. Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur, Partap, a Parcel Post employee and chauvinist, takes offense at anyone who suggests that he works at the Post Office.
Hmm New Zealand seems to lack any ‘Post Road’, let alone ‘Old Post Road’. (I’m looking at Land Information’s Gazetteer.)
There’s a few ‘Post Office Creek/Hill/Point’, there’s ‘Postman’s Rock’. ‘Postal River’ (barely a creek I suspect) rises at the rugged ‘Bald Knob’ and flows through entirely uninhabited wild terrain AFAICT. (It’s possible there were gold workings there once upon a time.) Named for kin of Paul Postal? [**]
There’s a Mount Mailman/Creek, almost as remote. There’s ‘Ocean Mail Point’ in the far-flung Chatham Islands.
Land travel in colonial-era New Zealand was notoriously dangerous. There’s many tales of drownings attempting estuary crossings. (The alternative was to battle your way inland through thick bush, to get to a point where the river was narrower.) So the posts were all by ship. No way the postal service was going to fight its way inland to deliver mail: you had to come into the town to collect it.
There’s a few ‘Pack Horse’ this and that — but everybody would travel those, not specifically the post. And then came the railways — motivated by getting lumber and then coal to the cities/ports.
Which led me in the usual Hattery random chain of thought to ‘The 2004 U.S. Election was stolen’ attrib. A.N.Chomsky. Seems eerily familiar. Beware what you wish for.
Perhaps, but in my experience we more often cast our ballots.
Sure, but I was trying to provide equivalents that explicitly involved a receptacle, as in the “post” example.
One of my younger offspring (the four-year-old) enjoys finding pieces of already-delivered mail imprudently left within his reach and pushing them back out the front-door mail slot so that they land outside on the front stoop. He can’t be the only child in the Anglophone world to have stumbled upon this pastime, but I don’t think there’s a conventional verb to describe it. Unposting? Contraposting?
Expostulating ?
Ha!
Re the rarity of the word “parcel” in American English outside the phrase “parcel post”: Back in the day, some less literate people would say “partial post.”
I feel like letter boxes in doors used to mostly have a flap that only swung in, and now mostly have a flap which only swings out – which does make it more difficult for unwanted things to come in, but makes the unposting easier too.
I don’t remember ever seeing mail slots with flaps that swung in. Maybe esthetics have something to do with it? A flap with an outside hinge which covers the frame of the slot looks neater, or something.
Since English has orient, occident, and meridian, (the first two are east and west to fairly educated people, though not in everyday use, while meridian only comes up when talking about longitude or noon, never the south), I took a look and saw we also have/had septentrion for north, which I’m going to try out immediately.
(Coincidentally an anagram for “pretentions.”)
I think I’ve usually seen slots with flaps on both sides of the door, both of which cover the full slot and a little below it. So there’s one flap that swings out and then another that swings in.
You’re right. I didn’t remember the inner flap. Two flaps are better for keeping drafts out, too.
New York City still has streets named Boston Post Road (one in Bronx County) and Kings Highway (one in Kings County).
I live about 2.5 km from the intersection of the Boston post road and the Albany post road, locally known as the Bowery and (anarthrously) Broadway respectively. The intersection is at the southern tip of City Hall Park; City Hall itself is along the northern edge (the park is triangular).
But your mail is famously delivered by the postal service.
Just as your post is delivered by (the) Royal Mail.
we stick (or push or shove or slip) things into a letter box in a door (though I can’t remember the last time I saw such a thing)
The house I grew up in had a slot in the front door with a hinged flap to prevent you from poking your hand in, but there was no box behind it, so the mail simply fell on the floor.
At the post office there are slots in the wall separating the General Population from the P.O. employees (not called posties in AmE), but what’s behind them is a bin on wheels (not called a wheelie bin in AmE, or anything else in particular).
It doesn’t actually sort shapes, because they all end up together again inside it. But that’s its name.
Shape sorter is the official term used by toy sellers and educators in the U.S., but I don’t think it’s known to the Gen. Pop. The entity that sorts the shapes is of course the toddler playing with it. One of these I saw online bore a review to the effect that the square hole was so large that any of the other blocks could be put into it, which defeats the purpose.
pillarbox (a (not necessarily) red thing with a mouth, either standing as a pillar or set into a wall)
Mailboxes of this type are blue, and normally stand on four legs. Over time the mouth has been shrinking to keep people from putting {bricks, bombs, bags full of garbage} into it; the most recent versions have slots suitable only for a few letters at a time.
If you’re in an apartment building, it’s put in your box in the mailbox unit.
That is again an official term; I’d simply call it the mailboxes. It is, or they are, built into the wall on the ground floor of the building. Formerly, the building key used by the letter carrier to gain access to the ground floor was kept in a tiny safe built into the outside of the building and known as the key keeper; this had a specialized lock available only to the Postal Service. There were issues, notably that the system relied on the door key being returned to the key keeper after each use.
Nowadays, letter carriers just carry around a huge keyring containing the key(s) to the building front door(s) for all the buildings on a given delivery route. (My building has two consecutive front doors, but they have the same lock.)
Alternative carriers such as Fedex and UPS ring your doorbell, or just as likely someone else’s doorbell, and either deliver the package to the apartment door, or drop it next to the mailboxes, or leave it between the front doors, or leave a note on the outside of the front door, or (worst case) just drive past the building while logging the package as delivered.
I’ve no idea how they dealt with newspapers on rainy days, before they put them in plastic bags.
They were delivered by being thrown hard at the door. When the household heard the resulting THUNK!, someone ran out the door to collect the newspaper before it turned into soggy pulp.
receivers haven’t been hung up for decades (now they are put down, are they not?
You can still get phones that hang on the wall with an actual switch hook, which when held down by the weight of the handset disconnects the call.
At the other end of the modernity spectrum, you can just put your phone back in your pocket.
tramontana
Aha!
In Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover novels, Tramontana Tower is a place in the extreme north of the habitable zone of Darkover. So I suppose she meant it to mean ‘Northern(most) Tower’; I had always understood it more literally as ‘tower beyond the mountains’. The further north you go on Darkover, the higher and more impassable the mountain ranges are (the Kilghard Hills, the Hellers, and the Wall around the World) and after Tramontana, which is in the high Hellers, the trails go no further.
Is [the one-legged and one-armed mailbox] a universal default across all of the US?
Where the population density is low enough. You won’t likely find any of them in NYC, as an obvious example.
Now I wonder if [Petrarch] might be responsible for us having boreal and austral hemispheres.
The OED first cites boreal in 1470, about a century after Petrarch, so it’s possible. This citation is the boreal sea, which of course Italy doesn’t have, and the etymology points straight to Latin with no Italian intermediate. It also cites Poe’s 1845 poem “Ulalume”, which speaks of a volcano “in the realms of the boreal pole”; obviously there are no volcanoes there, but “austral pole” would not scan. It is Mt. Erebus that is meant, although Poe calls it Mount Yaanek, presumably for both metrical and arcane reasons.
As the collective noun for, e.g., rogues,
Or anything else. I would say a whole passel of for almost any kind of things, though a raft of would be more likely.
the US has morphed “parcel” into “passel”
This is early loss of /r/, and it actually predates the separation of AmE and BrE; it just so happens that in some words it survived in theezum parts and not Over There.
@ John Cowan:
Thanks. My money is definitely on the republic of letters going straight to Latin, but why did they reach agreement on austral and boreal?
Lewis and Short, who can be relied upon for the requisite Victorian sensitivity, not only begin their entry for boreas with “The north wind; pure Lat aquilo,” but more importantly end it with “bŏrĕālis, northern (rare; perh. only in Avienus)”. On the other hand, they have a full entry for ăquĭlōnĭus with no less than Cicero (N.D. 2.50) providing the pair: “sed etiam regio, quae cum est aquilonia aut australis” (regions of the sky which the moon travels).
Hyginus (Astron. 1.3) also kept his Latin and Greek yoke-fellows evenly paired: “Huius autem cacumina, quibus maxime sphaera nititur, poli appellantur; quorum alter ad aquilonem spectans boreus, alter oppositus austro notius est dictus.” This must have been a well-read passage, because I find it plagiarized left and right. Isidore of Seville (Nat. Rer. 12.20): “Poli ex caelestibus cyclis cacumina quibus maxime sphaera nititur; quorum alter ad aquilonem expectans Boreus, alter terrae oppositus Austronotius dictus est”. Bede(?) (“De circulis sphaerae et polo,” Pat. lat. 90.0937): “Hujus autem cacumina, quibus maxime sphaera nititur, poli appellantur. Quorum alter ad Aquilonem spectans, Boreus; alter oppositus, Austro Notus etiam dictus.”
To be fair, I suppose Isidore’s copyists may have been getting confused because the critical edition has all sorts of variants (“Austronotius: -noclus -niclus -nicus -nothus -motus”) but not the original (“austro Notius”). But Isidore himself must still have read it right, because he proceeds (12.6): “Duo sunt autem, ut diximus, axes, quibus caelum uoluitur. Boreus, quem aquilonium uocamus: hic Arctoe sunt, id est septentriones, qui nobis semper apparent. Cui contrarius est Notius, qui australis dicitur.”
More broadly, Haye (2007) argues that “During the middle ages, the astronomical manual ascribed to the Roman mythographer Hyginus, served as a central reference book.” So the pairs borēus/notĭus and aquilonius/australis must have been known, if only from that source.
And yet when Europeans get to the Southern Hemisphere they quickly settle on making that pair Boreal and Austral. The TLFi first cites Jean de Vignay in 1495, and etymologizes more usefully than the OED: “Empr. au b. lat. borealis (IVe s. Avienus”). I’d never asked myself why but now I'm puzzled.
I also suddenly feel somewhat deprived of an Aquilonian Hemisphere. Or I suppose the deanthroponymic (detheonyimic?) Grecian forms would be Borean and Notian, like Augustan and Saturnian?* I’m going to lay the blame provisionally on Petrarch. Never much liked the fellow anyway.
* I realize that Boreas the wind/god naturally yields Italian buriana. Probably without the intervention of the republic of letters, since that mainly means “hubbub” (also and originally a meteorological shower).
A question for the BrEng proficient: What the heck does the participial adjective “parcelled” mean in the following: “Hendrix was always desperate to get over to the new mecca of music, London, and all its alluring delights. But even he, with all his parcelled talent, could not have expected the reception he would receive when he did eventually touch down.” Is it something like “allocated” (which seems not to add much value and a good copy editor might have deleted) or something else?
Context FWIW: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/jimi-hendrix-eric-clapton-first-performance-london-1966/
But even he, with all his parcelled talent …
All over the internet I find this quoted from The Great Gatsby:
#
… a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
#
It seems the novel was pressed into the service of vocabulary learning in (American?) schools for many years.
“Allocated” and “not adding much value” would be right on this take. Lexeme learned, felicity fail.
Not BrEng proficient here, but that’s the only instance of “parcelled talent” known to Google. Then there’s one instance of “the gods who parceled talent” in Google Books. It must be an achievement worth celebrating.
If (unlike me) you are an Ex-twitter user, you could consider contacting the author there (@JackWhatley89).
He self describes as “born and bred on the sunny south coast of England,” so probably not too traumatized by The Great Gatsby in his formative years.
For me “parcel out’ is an unremarkable phrasal verb, but it cannot be just “parcel.”
I think here the sense is more ” tightly wrapped and sealed” with an implication of “about to burst out of the confines of its parcel”.
how do you pay for outgoing post
the exception to needing to use a pre-purchased stamp is (or at least was semi-recently) living on a rural route, where the nearest post office can be quite far away. then, often, you can leave money for postage in your mailbox with an outgoing letter; sometimes the mail carrier will even leave change.
1) Long time ago I explained on here in excruciating detail how the square street grid in La Heroica Puebla carries the designations Or., Pon., Nor. and Sur. It took a long time to get an explanation for Pon.; clearly the locals don’t say poniente for West, but the city planners did. (It’s actually about 30 degrees skew to the cardinal directions, IIRC).
2) Here we can buy postage online! It works by giving you a 4×4 square of capital letters and digits that you write in the corner of the envelope where the stamp used to go. Handwriting works fine, but obviously you could set up a printer to put on address, return address, FIRST CLASS and the stamp code in one go. That would work with rural collection too.
True to form, the USPS has a regulation about that! Postal Operations Manual 151 “Stamps by Mail”.
As Rozele already noted, on rural delivery routes you can leave cash for stamps, though in theory it should be accompanied by PS Form 3227-R, Stamp Purchase Order — maybe a kind carrier just fills that out for you in the background?
On a non-rural route, you can ask your carrier for PS Form 3227-A or -B, Stamps Delivered to Your Door, mail it back with a check, and get your stamps by return of post. Or you could order them online, but where’s the fun of that?
Scandinavian-style print-your-own postage is not offered for lowly First-Class Mail, and anyway requires a printer.
The Far Out Whately piece twice uses “impresario” where I think “virtuoso” is meant, so I wouldn’t spend too long teasing out the sense of “parcelled”.
Kusaal “North, East, South, West” are respectively “Bisa Country, Behind, Hills, In Front” (from which you can deduce that few Kusaasi are Muslims.)
For Bible translation purposes, “North” is “Your Right”, and “South” is “Your Left.”
“Bisa Country, …”
An entry in Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus (Niermeyer):
For “north” Niermeyer also has northus, circius (also means “east”!) borealis, borientalis, sinistralis, and this at mons:
For “south” (to add to words in common with earlier Latin, no doubt): solivum (“< sol”) and dextralis.
Comparing Kusaal, Latin, and no doubt many others, we find that the relations between north–south and left–right are complex and variable. Whether speakers are in the boreal or the austral hemisphere is not sufficient to account for this variation. I made a study of all that once; I’ll try to find it. Easy to seek out discussion online, of course.
As I have said elsewhere, direction-talk on Borneo (in Sabah at least) is weird. I’ll make observations and experiments in Sarawak, in a few weeks.
For Bible translation purposes, “North” is “Your Right”, and “South” is “Your Left.”
Surely it is no coincidence that this replicates the Biblical Hebrew situation, in which yamīn is both ‘South’ and ‘right’, and səmoʔl is both ‘North’ and ‘left’. This synonymy is found in Ugaritic and Arabic but not in Aramaic or Akkadian, where only the ‘right/left’ meanings (seem to) exist.
The Kusaal orientation is opposite to the Biblical (and Muslim) one: it implies that you’re facing West rather than East (even without the left/right part, wbich may be translationese.)
When I was 13 and didn’t realize I was only a few months away from having the musicial orientation of my life changed by first exposure to punk rock, one of the comparatively few records I owned was this hit single of the day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Blooded, which seemed a good state-of-the-art benchmark example of what commercially successful mainstream hard rock sounded like in ’78. The b-side of the single, however, was a sorta weird synthesizer-heavy instrumental titled “Tramontane.”* Despite the fact that this was the same year of my life during which I began poking around in Calvert Watkins’ PIE roots lexicon at the back of the AHD, I don’t think I was interested enough to try to figure out the meaning or etymology of “Tramontane,” but it must be a variant of “tramontana.”
*Two of the three co-writers of “Tramontane” were at-the-time band members who did comparatively little of the songwriting – giving them an extra royalty stream by putting that number on the b-side to help mitigate intra-band financial tensions may have been the motivation for the b-side selection – that was not an uncommon factor back in those days.
I’ve done the print-prepaid-shipping-label thing as well, which at that point required specific self-adhesive labels and a laser printer (or taping plastic foil over the label because inkjet ink was not rain-resistant). As LH observes, the new thing here is that it’s available for first class letters and you can use a ballpoint pen.
(22 years ago I had occasion to buy stamps in Spain. IIRC, the tobacconist printed them on demand on a roll of adhesive paper, so there were no pretty birds or flowers available).
As LH observes, the new thing here is that it’s available for first class letters and you can use a ballpoint pen.
I wish I could take credit for it, but that was Lars, not me.
I meant the observation that Scandinavia is a step ahead of the US, because I didn’t originally know enough about the US situation to observe anything. For all I know, the USPS might have a service where you send them a PDF and they print it and send it off to your email-refusing elder relatives. Or to the nephew who hasn’t picked up the phone or answered an SMS since 2015, though in that case it’s more likely that you can find his e-mail address than his postal address..
@J. W. Brewer: Born in 1948, I used to be bemused by punk rock. Then I reflected on what late-70s rock was really like (“Hot Blooded”!), and it all became clear.
languagehat: “Why would you not think it worth your while to include positus, which explains the -t- in post?”
Sounds like they got obsessed with the trees and forgot to include a map of the forest.
Isn’t the -tus ending of Latin participles supposed to be descended from a PIE suffix deriving action nouns from verbs? At least, Wiktionary says it is, and says the Germanic cognate appears (no longer productive) in growth, sight, weight. Is that well established? Anyone know more?
Giacomo Ponzetto:
Rotta è l’alta colonna e ’l verde lauro
…
Colonna of course alludes to the death of Giovanni Colonna in July 1348,
three months after the death of Laura. I couldn’t resist translating that sonnet immediately, but I resisted presenting my translation here till now. I use iambic pentameter in such work, and preserve the exact rhyme scheme (which inevitably forces some distortion in word order, etc.):
LH wrote: “But AHD does it right in a much smaller compass.”
True, but by omitting the second part (via Latin “sinere”), we miss out on its other PIE root, *-tkey — of which English “home” is a descendant, as are the learned Latin/French borrowings “site” and “situation.”
ktschwartz wrote: “Isn’t the -tus ending of Latin participles supposed to be descended from a PIE suffix deriving action nouns from verbs? At least, Wiktionary says it is, and says the Germanic cognate appears (no longer productive) in growth, sight, weight. Is that well established? Anyone know more?”
Actually, according to Wiktionary, the “t” in Latin “positus” (and ultimately English “post”) is from Latin “situs,” the past participle of “sinere,” from PIE “*-tkey.”
Wiktionary doesn’t include “positus” (nor “situs”) in its “Category:Latin_terms_suffixed_with_-tus_(action_noun)” list.
But the -t- of situs is the selfsame formant as in other Latin past participles: the n of the present stem comes from an old PIE present-stem-deriving infix (same as in “think”), and is absent in the perfect sivi. The formation of the past participle situs is entirely unproblematic.
So this has no bearing on ktschwartz’ question (which I think refers to the old PIE habit of deriving certain adjectives from verb-derived nouns by tone change, though there are Hatters who will Actually Know about all this.)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-tus#Etymology_1
As a participle/verbal adjective I would expect to see it in the “Category:Latin_terms_suffixed_with_-tus_(adjective)” list, but that does not contain the pptc. of all Latin verbs. Maybe only the noun-derived adjectives with more or less non-compositional semantics. (positus is regularly formed, as far as I can tell, it’s pōnō that’s elided a syllable).
Also I don’t see *-tkey mentioned in Wikt.en’s etymology of Latin -tus. At the time of writing, it says PIE *-tós.
TIL that Latin had a Lautgesetzliche alternation between -w- < (PI) *-gʷ- in present stems and -x/ct- in perfects and participles, which formed the basis for analogical vixi/victus for vīvō < *gʷīwō which had bothered me. (My grandfather was viktualiehandler, FWIW).
Also I don’t see *-tkey mentioned in Wikt.en’s etymology of Latin -tus
That’s (supposedly) the stem sī-.
Looks fishy* to me, but I am no kind of Indo-Europeanist.
* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%B0%CF%87%CE%B8%CF%8D%CF%82#Ancient_Greek
Bravo, Noetica.
======
meaning or etymology of “Tramontane,”
This led me to wonder now for the first time why the pro-papal or, more broadly, pro-centralization faction in the 19C Catholic Church was called ultramontane (a term I had known for decades), when surely that word should properly refer to the anti-centralization French faction ‘beyond the mountains’. The answer is that it is an anglicization of ultramontain, thus from the Gallican perspective an epithet for their adversaries ‘beyond the mountains’.
Vaguely analogously, I once saw a graph of the U.S. Southeastern states showing which set of inhabitants were contemnors of which. The maximum of the graph is Virginia, because Virginians look down on everybody, but there is no minimum, because Tennesseans and North Carolinians look down on each other. Gale confirmed at least one side of this graph loop, and she and I speculated that that is because the border is the Appalachians, and therefore the cultured folk of North Carolina and Tennessee think of their neighbors to the west and east respectively as hillbillies, or at most mountain williams (hillbillies with pretensions).
From the opening page of Lee Maynard’s Crum, set in a desperately poor and miserable town in West Virginia in the 1950s, a one-sentence paragraph: “Across the river was Kentucky, a mysterious land of pig fuckers.”
That’s (supposedly) the stem sī-.
Looks fishy* to me
/s/ seems to be a (the?) regular outcome of the PIE cluster /*tk/ in Latin; it also shows up in ursus from PIE *h2r.tko-.
@John C.: yes, it rather depends on which side of the relevant mountain(s) your frame of reference presupposes. Note how the same bit of “Ruthenia” has historically been known (modulo translations into other tongues) as “Ciscarpathian” and “Transcarpathian” depending on which side of the Carpathians the person or political regime doing the naming was treating as the baseline.
Transylvania is supposedly on the other side of some historically relevant forest from the Hungarian point of view. The “Transylvania Colony” (“short-lived” and “extra-legal” sez wiki) was beyond some historically relevant forest from the Virginian (and North Carolinian) point of view. Its hoped for territory made up much of what became Kentucky, and its legacy continues in the name of Transylvania University, Kentucky’s oldest educational institution.
John Cowan: Very likely.
Y: I’ve known people from Crum and visited friends in Crum. They don’t much like Lee Maynard, who was Not Quite One Of Us, being the son of the school principal (the short wiry fellow who attains heroic stature in the novel–he was later my principal in Kenova, at the opposite end of the county and in a different world, and in my childhood experience he deserved the accolade). But you could definitely see where Lee was coming from.
J. W. Brewer: Subcarpathian?
hypercarpathian!
Carpathian-fluid
Rodger, thanks! Did you read his postscript to the reprint, where he describes a latter-day visit to Crum, not knowing how he’s going to be received? The people who did want to talk to him did so, so the impression he gave was perhaps too sanguine.
I don’t suppose he was very wrong about how kids from WV viewed the KY kids from across the river, was he? It takes a lot less than a river and a state border to set up a rivalry in that age.
I enjoyed the book, but I can see how people would think that it, along with Li’l Abner and Hasil Adkins, may enforce unflattering stereotypes among outsiders.
BTW, I once gave a friend, a dyed-in-the-wool ex-WVian, the collected stories of Breece D’J Pancake. They found it too realistic and therefore depressing.
Speaking of the delivery of mail in the United States, the following is tangential to the discussion but consider it useful as a public-service message:
In the larger cities, the custom is growing of giving one set of numbers to the apartments in an apartment house and a different set to the mailboxes, so that whereas formerly if you knew that Mary Doe lived in, say, apartment 12, you would address your letter “Mary Doe / 90 Broadway (apt. 12) /…,” today you have to know her box number to properly address your letter, say, “Mary Doe / 90 Broadway (box no. 35) /….,” the goal being to make it impossible for persons having no legitimate business with the resident to go right to her door even if they know her mailbox number.
Metacarpathian.
Oh, I misparsed what John Kelly wrote.
I’m not an IEist either, but I’m not sure you can equate the root *tkey- with Latin sī-. Which stem is it even supposed to be? *tḱi-né-ti giving sinet, OK, but what sort of messy analogy and paradigmatic rearrangement is needed before some Italic dude decides to use situs for the participle? (Given that *-tós didn’t directly form participles in PIE, the Italic pptc must have been extended from a subset of the inherited verbs that did form a deverbal adjective that way. PIE didn’t even have a passive as such innit? *tḱi-n-m̥h₁nós for a middle participle, anyone?) And yes, the Greek one is fishy.
Y, thanks. You’re not the first person to mention that postscript to me, but my copy of Crum is the original edition. His picture of how WVans see KYans is accurate and is of course fully reciprocated (I taught in KY for 37 years). As for Breece Pancake, he had issues (obviously), compounded by being a hillbilly in Charlottesville.
What ktschwartz linked to is etymology 2 of -tus, an adverb-forming suffix I don’t think I even knew. Here’s the list of examples.
Wasn’t “ultramontane” used by the comparatively sane Italians to mock the particularly reactionary church in Bavaria?
That word is not a good example of anything. Discussion starting here, then jumping to here and continuing from here onwards.
In think it’s part of the root. The business with thought is that Pre-Germanic eventually stopped tolerating [ŋx] and created long nasal vowels instead – still nasal today in Älvdalen.
one set of numbers to the apartments in an apartment house and a different set to the mailboxes
And yet a third set for the button to push to ask for admission. In my building, all three are the same: if you push 2A, I’ll let you in and you go past the 2A mailbox and up one flight of stairs to Apartment 2A. Curiously, before my building was rehabilitated in 1996, A rather than 2 encoded the floor, so my apartment was 3A.
As for Breece Pancake, he had issues (obviously)
I’m not sure which issues you consider obvious. I’d think that his name was an obvious issue.
Wasn’t “ultramontane” used by the comparatively sane Italians to mock the particularly reactionary church in Bavaria?
That’s not how I read WP:
It sounds to me like the Bavarian Ultramontanes were still pro-papal, or at any rate pro-Catholic (the Gallicans were not of course anti-Catholic).
Breece Pancake was a fine writer, but he killed himself at a young age.
Mention of “contemnors” in the South reminded me that I have never quite been able to parse the Battle Hymn’s* fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
It’s seems like there is either a layer of effective misnegation there, or I am not understanding the theological context.
* Normally, I would put the (partial) song title in quotes, but that would make the possessive look barbarous.
@brett
Although it is tempting to ascribe a muscular Christian aspect to the application of God’s grace to sinners (God as Stalin, purging Party members of their sins), I believe the lyric is intended more like, “you deal with my contemnors, I give you a consideration” (God as jovial businessman or perhaps mafioso).
As for Breece Pancake, he had issues (obviously)
I’m not sure which issues you consider obvious. I’d think that his name was an obvious issue.
The name Pancake may have given him some hassle in Charlottesville, but in WV it’s a fairly common surname (< Pfannkuch). An excellent WV writer who should be better known is Ann Pancake. She's not closely related to Breece, a fact she's sometimes been at pains to explain to people.
The wiki bio of Breece* Pancake asserts that he “was a devout fan of the music of folk singer Phil Ochs,” but doesn’t note that Ochs himself famously (well, famously back then — I imagine Ochs has faded into complete obscurity among most members of younger generations) died of suicide and indeed whether coincidentally or not Pancake’s suicide was the day prior to the third anniversary of Ochs’. Possibly a complete coincidence of course, and the etiology of suicide is often complex and mysterious. The trick perhaps is to learn how to enjoy and appreciate** art made by artists who had dysfunctional and disorderly lives, as many do, without taking those artists as role models.
*At first glance this seems a spelling variant of the predominantly-French given name Brice (St. Brice being the French name for Sanctus Britius or Brictius), but there’s also an English surname Breese to which the internet attaches the etymology “nickname for an irritating person, from Middle English brese ‘gadfly’ (Old English brēosa).”
**I’m not much for Ochs myself, but within reason don’t begrudge others their enthusiasms.
@Brett etc. I would note that by the time Julia Ward Howe wrote the words to the Battle Hymn she was not herself really a Christian, and the theology of her adaptation of the Biblical narrative to topical concerns cannot be considered sound. Lincoln was by most accounts not a very orthodox fellow in his personal opinions, but the rather contrasting theology of the Second Inaugural is hard to find fault with.
Breece can also be a development of the Welsh “ap Rhys”, which more commonly became Price.
Yes, of course! They just… overdid it.
Plus catholique que le pape!
Although it is tempting to ascribe a muscular Christian aspect to the application of God’s grace to sinners
That may well be so. I actually first learned it as “so with you my wrath” (rather than grace) shall deal”. Twain’s anti-imperialist parody does say “wrath”.
I imagine Ochs has faded into complete obscurity among most members of younger generations
I first heard of him on the day of his death.
I imagine Ochs has faded into complete obscurity among most members of younger generations
I first heard of him on the day of his death.
Well, good grief then:
https://youtu.be/uRU_ruqnR6Q?si=nKKYjPpqgQITSjHa
I recall hearing, not exactly at the time but within a few years, about the legendary-in-some circles May ’76 Ochs memorial concert, which was sort of a symbolic last-hurrah gathering of the aging veterans of the early-Sixties Greenwich-Village Folkie-Industrial Complex, except for the conspicuously MIA Dylan. The Ramones’ first album had just come out, so it was sort of like a dinosaur social event when the meteor was already en route. But audiovisual evidence of it is Out There on the internet, so if Dave Van Ronk singing the maudlin song Roger McGuinn had written about the killing of JFK is your idea of a good time (or at least a rewarding aesthetic experience), it’s waiting for you. Some people claim that Tim Hardin (who had already managed to thoroughly destroy his own career via heroin) rose to the occasion and was in good form,* but they may be grading charitably.
*He did “Pleasures of the Harbor,” which is one of the less strident numbers from the Ochs songbook.
That was before I met Gale, after which I became reasonably familiar with his work.
I remember being made acquainted with his music by an oldie show on the Norddeutscher Rundfunk in the early 80s. “I’m not marching anymore” was one of the featured songs.
I imagine Ochs has faded into complete obscurity among most members of younger generations
over the last 20 years or so, i’ve seen several cohorts of younger radicals rediscover Love Me, I’m a Liberal – it’s aged much better than most other sarcastic satirical songs i know, which probably says more about liberalism (and ochs’ descriptive powers) than anything else.
i did recently get to hear a draft of a yiddish translation of Changes, but it was made by someone older than me. (and was quite a solid start, though ii doesn’t try to match the internal rhyming in ochs’ english)
I have linked to Ochs’ songs here several times. However, he certainly seems to be obscure; I never learned about his role in the American political folk tradition until my late twenties.