Search Results for: Egg corn

I first featured Justin B Rye at LH in 2005 (his Primer In SF Xenolinguistics); now, thanks to a comment by January First-of-May, I learn that he’s got a post called Fantastic Statistics in which he analyzes his extensive sf collection:

In the twenty‐first century I decided I didn’t want a paper collection anyway – what I want is a story collection. If I switched to ebooks then apart from a few sentimental‐value volumes of Teach Yourself Sumerian and the like the physical copies could go to the charity shop on the corner. This proved a fortunate idea given the number of times I’ve needed to move house recently, but electronic texts have other advantages too […]. For a start, I always convert my ebooks into a consistent HTML format so they’ll work in any browser (including my throwback of a mobile phone); but the part that got me writing this page is that once I’ve done that I can also carry out all sorts of basic text analysis from the command‐line. And thanks to all the old magazines that are out of copyright, it’s getting easier and easier to end up with a moderately comprehensive collection of the big‐name SF award‐winners of the twentieth century (and even quite a few of the ones I might actually want to re‐read). So here are some interesting facts, or at any rate facts, about my virtual bookshelf.

There are all sorts of tidbits, like Most‐Used Title (“the title that shows up most often is The End”), Famous Titles First Published Together (“the all‐time best value for money still has to be Dangerous Visions” — I still haven’t gotten over my copy, signed by many of the authors, getting lost in the mail years ago), Title Length (shortest is We, longest is the Connie Willis short story “‘The Soul Selects Her Own Society: Invasion and Repulsion: A Chronological Reinterpretation of Two of Emily Dickinson’s Poems: A Wellsian Perspective”), word frequencies, and the like. I will single out for special mention the section I was gladdest to see there, The Bechdel Test:
[Read more…]

Thatching Info.com is one of those delightful sites that assembles masses of detail about some subject unknown to most people today:

The information available here, is the result of over three decades of practical experience, plus more than a dozen years of research; into the history and various working methods, employed in the craft of thatching. The research included an eighteen thousand mile trip around most of Britain. Thus this site covers thatching throughout the Island of Britain and the islands around it, from Shetland to Sark, with a few excursions to other lands…

Of course what caught my attention was this, in the following paragraph: “there is a large glossary to help you.” And so there is, A Glossary of Thatching Names and Terms:

As well as a list of the technical terms and names, used throughout this site; I have also included other names, which are not mentioned in the text. Hopefully allowing this glossary to also act as a basic reference, to the myriad nomenclature found in the craft. Also included are terms from the dialects and languages, of the Channel Islands, Cornwall, Wales and Scotland…. […] Alternative names are in brackets. Other glossary entries are in italics. (I have not cross referenced all the various names, for a Thatching Spar, due to the many terms, used to describe this humble article….

The main list runs from A Frame (Principal Rafter) “The largest timbers, in a normal roof construction” to Yoke (Jack or Groom) “A forked stick, used to carry a Burden of Yealms on to a roof,” including such savory terms as Biddle (either “A wooden frame, with pair of spikes set in the top” or “Yet another name for a Legget or Bat”), Flaughter Spade (“A form of breast plough”), Tekk (“The name, used in Shetland, for Oat Straw”), and Witch’s seat (“a large flat stone set in a chimney”); then there follow lists of terms from the Channel Islands (“Gllic: Thatch”), Cornwall (“Teyz: Thatch also a Roof, suggesting they were one and the same for a long time”), Wales (“Gwrachod: A tied underlayer of thatch”), and Scotland (“Fraoch: Heather or Ling”).

Finally a couple of Gaelic proverbs…

Is tr’om sn’ithe air tigh gun tughadh… Rain drops come heavy, on a house unthatched.

Tigh a tughadh gun a sh’iomaineachadh… Thatching a house without roping it. (Is to surely labour in vain!)

And of course there are plenty of informative images.

Recently I’ve run across a couple of omissions from the OED that mildly surprised me; they’re not common usages, but they’re established enough you’d think the grand repository of the English wordhoard, which embraces even absurd hapaxes like pancakewards (1867 Cornhill Mag. Mar. 362 Her allowance would not admit of..a surreptitious egg, might her desire pancakewards be never so strong), would have entries for them:

1) Entry fine. I encountered this as the definition for a prerevolutionary French term, which I forgetlods et ventes [thanks, Xerîb!]; it means “a payment due when a new customary tenant entered land” and is frequently used in books dealing with relevant topics (“to all transfers of land was the imposition of the entry fine”; “Both of these variants confirm the principle that the entry fine was the responsibility of the incoming tenant”; “the 24,000 marks possibly paid as a relief or entry fine to Philip II of France for Richard’s French lands”; etc. etc.). The OED, s.v. entry, has “2. Law. The action or an act of taking up occupation of a piece of land, property, etc., as a legal assertion of ownership; the action or right of entering upon possession of land, property, etc.,” and the phrase writ of entry “a writ for the recovery of land or property from one claiming legal possession of it,” but not entry fine (and the word fine does not occur in the entry for entry).

2) Turquet/torquetum. This one has its own Wikipedia entry (with splendid illustrations):

The torquetum or turquet is a medieval astronomical instrument designed to take and convert measurements made in three sets of coordinates: Horizon, equatorial, and ecliptic. It is said to be a combination of Ptolemy’s astrolabon and the plane astrolabe.

There’s a detailed description in The History of the Telescope, by Henry C. King (p. 10):

Nasir ed-din el-Tusi is believed to have introduced the turquet or torquetum (Fig. 5), an instrument that became very popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was a kind of portable equatorial and altazimuth. To a base plate was hinged an inclinable plate which could be set in the plane of the celestial equator by adjusting the length of a graduated arm or stylus. At right angles to the inclinable plate was a polar axis carrying two circles. A movable alidade indicated declinations on the upper circle, while the equatorial circle, in the plane of the inclinable plate, indicated right ascensions. […] In any case, the torquetum appears to have been in regular use in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Torquetum occurs nowhere in the OED; turquet, amusingly, does… in two hapaxes with very different senses:

turquet, n.¹
Obsolete. rare^—1
A player dressed up to resemble a Turk.
1625 F. Bacon Ess. (new ed.) 225 Anti-masques..haue been commonly of Fooles, Satyres, Baboones, Wilde-Men, Antiques, Beasts, Sprites, Witches, Ethiopes, Pigmies, Turquets,..and the like.

turquet, n.²
Obsolete. rare^—1
? Spelt. […]
1725 R. Bradley Chomel’s Dictionaire Œconomique at Stone A Remedy for the Stone and Gravel is, to take the Herb Turquet or Storch-Corn [sic], dry it and reduce it to Powder.

I trust the good folks at Oxford will take note and do the right thing.

I was reading the section on Pasternak’s 1922 Detstvo Lyuvers [The Childhood of Luvers] in the magnificent Reference Guide to Russian Literature (Neil Cornwell, ed.) when I was brought up short by this passage:

While there is little plot, the prosaic details encountered on this everyday journey stimulate the girl’s imagination into an endless process of recreating reality. The only logical chain linking the digressions, omissis and unrelated switches from which the story is woven lies in Zhenia’s life experience.

Now, I’m a widely read fellow, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never encountered the word omissis before except in Latin (where it is the dative/ablative plural of omissus ‘neglected, omitted,’ a passive participle of omittō). Wiktionary tells me it is also an Italian word (masculine, invariable) meaning “omission (deliberate),” though it is not in any Italian dictionary I have access to, so I presume it is rare; Dizy gives the following sample sentences:

Nell’ordinanza di rinvio a giudizio, gli omissis erano così numerosi da renderne incomprensibili i motivi.
I partecipanti alla riunione hanno chiesto, per alcuni documenti, una versione in cui figurassero meno omissis.
Rileggendo gli atti, i suoi “omissis” ad alcune domande mi hanno molto contrariato.

What I can say with some confidence is that it is not an English word (and I say that as someone who is notoriously lax about welcoming marginal items into the word-hoard); it is not in the OED (except in a Latin title: A. Boate, Observationes medicæ, de affectibus omissis, 1649) or any other dictionary I have access to, and Google Books gives only Latin hits, apart from a passage in David Ward’s Contemporary Italian Narrative and 1970s Terrorism:

And in relating what he had occasion to read in the secret files, and in order to further cloud the air of mystery, Genna makes ample use of the term OMISSIS, always in upper case, to indicate when information has been deemed too sensitive for the general public’s eyes and ears and is excised from a document.

The section was written by Daša Šilhánková Di Simplicio, who has written books in Italian and thus is presumably more at home in it than in English (though her first two names are Czech and/or Slovak, Šilhánková being the feminine form of Šilhánek), so I assume she used “omissis” as a term familiar from that language, perhaps not being sure what the English equivalent was (though you’d think “omissions” would do well enough — I note that while the Italian word is both singular and plural, here it is clearly plural in context, which might lead the innocent reader to suspect a singular “omissi”). I don’t blame her for its appearance in the final text, I blame the editorial staff at Fitzroy Dearborn, who should be able to differentiate between obscure but defensible scholarly terms and straight-up foreign words that will simply bewilder the hapless reader. (Of course, it may be that I am wrong and it is in fact used by some English-speaking scholarly community, in which case I welcome correction, as always.)

Lynne Peskoe-Yang has an enjoyable piece for Popula on the problems with the term “vegetable”; she begins with the Supreme Court case (Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 [1893]) that determined that John Nix’s tomatoes were properly subject to vegetable tariffs even though they were technically “fruits” in botanical terms, because they were commonly understood to be vegetables:

In this way, Gray and his fellow jurists sealed the tomato’s identity crisis into law. The legal definition would be what common speech suggested, even if biology indicated the opposite. Nix’s tomatoes would be called “vegetables” because that’s what everyone called them. […]

Botanically speaking, it’s still clear: eggplants, tomatoes, bell peppers, and squash are all fruits. It’s equally clear that mushrooms and truffles are fungi, more closely related to humans than they are to plants. But these are all, also, in common usage, “vegetables.” Yet when an authority like the Oxford English Dictionary should provide clarity on what a vegetable actually is, it instead defines vegetables as a specific set of certain cultivated plant parts, “such as a cabbage, potato, turnip, or bean.” And since carrots and turnips are roots, potatoes are tubers, broccoli is a flower, cabbage is a leaf, and celery is a stem, we find that “vegetable” rarely applies to the entire plant (or to the same parts of the plant), while it also has a way of applying to things that aren’t actually vegetables. It is a category both broader and more specific that the thing it’s supposed to describe.

In a botanical sense, it’s easy: vegetables don’t exist as a discrete, coherent category. And the more you know about botany–the nuanced phylogeny that gardeners and farmers know and the centuries of research into plant evolution that botanists have learned–the more likely you’ll be a dissenter in the vegetable debate. “This is why people hate botanists,” as one disillusioned commenter wrote in a particularly heated r/Botany thread.

Unfortunately, there’s a silly excursus on how dictionaries “betray the [descriptivist] cause by appealing to the etymological past, breaking words down into their simplest and oldest-known usages” (!), but there’s plenty of good stuff about veggies and their history, e.g.:
[Read more…]

Mark Liberman at the Log investigates the phrase “up/out the wazoo” and its eggcorn up/out to wazoo; that’s an interesting phenomenon, but what I want to make sure gets the widest possible attention is the splendiferous 1919 tobacco ad he turned up (via OCR error) in his search. It begins “Say, you’ll have a streak of smokeluck that’ll put pep-in-your-smokemotor, all right, if you’ll ring-in with a jimmy pipe or cigarette papers and nail some Prince Albert for packing!” It goes on for three more equally peppy paragraphs; Upton Sinclair was so upset he quoted the whole thing and called it “poisonous filth” in his book The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism. Follow the link and admire this summit of advertising genius in its full glory, headed by a squinty, smirking, balding fellow smoking what I can only presume is a jimmy pipe.

Alf MacLochlainn’s “Father Dinneen and His Dictionary” is a wonderful account of the origin and nature of Foclóír Gaedhilge agus Béarla / an / Irish-English dictionary, being a thesaurus of the words, phrases and idioms / of the modern Irish language./ Compiled and edited /by / Rev. Patrick S. Dinneen, M.A.,/Hon. D.Litt. (Nat. Univ. of Ireland). There’s a nice comparison with the OED, which had a significant influence on the Irish dictionary:

The typical OED entry consists of a list of the variant forms in which the headword has appeared, explanation(s) of its meaning or meanings, separated and numbered if necessary and supported by dated occurrences, and a derivation. The explanations can be discursive. Thus, for example, the third meaning recorded under ‘kitchen’ reads as follows: ‘Food from the kitchen; hence any kind of food (as meat, fish, etc.) eaten with bread or the like, as a relish; by extension, anything eaten with bread, potatoes, porridge, or other staple fare to render it more palatable or more easily eaten. Thus butter or cheese is ‘kitchen’ to bare bread, milk is ‘kitchen’ to porridge. Chiefly Sc. or north Ir. (=Welsh enllyn)’

The entries in Dinneen’s Foclóir are broadly comparable and consist typically of an array of meanings of the headword (only very rarely separated by numbering), illustrative phrases, often including extracts from songs or poems and occasional references to cognates or early Irish forms. We note too a characteristic use of that little word ‘as,’ in OED’s ‘as meat,’ above. Dinneen resorted to it to extract himself from difficult corners in which he found himself as a result of his consistently giving verbs in the first person singular of the present indicative. So the unlikely ‘milsighim I dawn’ requires the qualification ‘(as the day).’ Similarly ‘gabhluighim, … I fork as a road,’ and, making distinctions which might appear unnecessary ‘clithim, I copulate, as swine’ but ‘doirim, I copulate, as cattle.’

Dinneen’s illustrative citations suffer in comparison with the dated quotations which distinguish the OED. In Irish there was no significant printed tradition and therefore few datable occurrences to cite. Dinneen’s quotations from poets are necessarily from editions of their works published long after their floruits and he frequently falls back on the vague ‘early’ or ‘recent’.

This paragraph is quite delightful:

If a special bag for hens to lay eggs in should strike us as a strange object, what are we to make of such surrealist concepts as a gaunt rabbit (‘spiodal’), goats’s honey (‘mil gabhair’) or dead man’s spittle (‘blinn’)? There is an anecdote which might explain some of these more bizarre entries. The distinguished Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was on the staff of University College, Dublin, while Dinneen was a student and was the victim of practical jokes. He was an informant for Joseph Wright, compiler of the standard English dialect dictionary and students allegedly presented him with fake locutions for communication to Wright, asserting that they had heard them in their native places throughout Ireland. If Dinneen was one of these jokers, he may in poetic justice have later been a victim, for, his biographers tell us, many fake lists were sent to him when he had turned lexicographer. Tantalisingly, they do not identify any such hoax items and they do not assure us that Dinneen identified them all.

And the following passage reminds me of Dahl’s great dictionary of Russian:

The exuberance of the information pouring out forces us to realise that inside Dinneen’s Foclóir there is another book hidden. The information, for example, that eating cabbage affects the way in which your pee works in tucking frieze is certainly above and beyond strict dictionary needs, a gratuitous addition to the simple explanation of what ‘maothachán’ is – ‘maothachán … an emollient liquid for steeping, esp. suds and urine stored for … washing new flannel, tucking frieze, etc. (the consumption of cabbage affected its emollient qualities).’ But this nugget of information would form an interesting part of an entry in some encyclopaedia describing traditional crafts, in this case weaving – and the book hidden inside Fr Dinneen’s great dictionary is just such an encyclopaedia. It is an encyclopaedia of the manners and customs, lore and skills, of the pre-industrial society which survived in Dinneen’s home place (4), Sliabh Luachra, on the bare Cork-Kerry border, and in the other parts of western Ireland where the Irish language was still the vernacular. By cool design or in response to some inner compulsion, Dinneen was loath to miss the opportunity to record the way of life of that Irish-speaking community.

That it was an encyclopaedia of rural life becomes obvious when we see, for example, under ‘seanfach’ not only the meaning of the word – ‘a heifer from three to four years (without calving)’ – but a full classification of cows from ‘laogh,’ a young calf, through ‘gamhain,’ ‘colan’ and so on, complete with distinctions by age and fecundity. Numerous references to potatoes include, under ‘scrios,’ a detailed description of a particular form of tillage: ‘ … prátaí do chur fás., to sow potatoes covering them in the beds with a light coating of soil (the first step in sowing potatoes the third consecutive year, the old furrow is made the middle of the new bed, and the surface of the middle part of the old bed constitutes the scrios for the new bed; this method of tillage is called ath-riastáil, while the tillage of the previous year is called ath-romhar …’

Dahl is likewise fascinated with traditional ways of life and will take the opportunity of a relevant word to list a whole catalogue of related items or events. MacLochlainn’s essay ends with “examples of entries in which the explanation goes far beyond what is needed to explain the headword”; I posted about a parody of a Dinneen entry here, and I am happy to see that the Twitter feed I posted about here is still active. Thanks, Trevor!

Back in 2006, we here at LH (always ahead of the curve) discussed the WWI-era Tommyfied French “san fairy Ann” (ça ne fait rien); now Mark Liberman has posted about it at the Log, spurred by David Shariatmadari’s “That eggcorn moment” (“If you’ve been signalled out by friends for saying ‘when all is set and done’, you’re not alone – linguists even have a word for it”). Both Liberman and Shariatmadari quote a wonderful paragraph by Jeanette Winterson about “damp squid”; Liberman goes on to cite this further passage:

My father was in Ipres, (pronounced Wipers), during the War, and like many of his generation, came back with bits of French.

Ce ne fait rien turned into San Fairy Ann, meaning Stuff You, and then a new character emerged in Lancashire-speak, known as Fairy Ann; a got-up creature, no better than she should be, who couldn’t give a damn. ‘San Fairy Ann to you’, morphed into, ‘Who does she think she is? Fairy Ann?’

And he quotes he OED on san fairy ann., n.:

Jocular form repr. French ça ne fait rien ‘it does not matter’, said to have originated in army use in the war of 1914–18.

An expression of indifference to, or resigned acceptance of, a state of affairs. Also ellipt. as Fairy Ann.

And yes, I’m quite sure “signalled out” in the subhead is a deliberate eggcorn. (Thanks for the link, Eric!)

Mark Liberman at the Log reports on an eggcorn that had involves a perfectly understandable reanalysis of the word intact. “Reader RP” noticed the expression “so long as Roma culture remains in some kind of tact” on the Guardian comment boards and did some research, coming up with examples like “all welds are in complete tact,” “The binding is in good tact,” “soundboard in perfect tact,” and “all pages are still in excellent tact.” Examples with negative adjectives seem to be mostly variants of “in poor/bad taste” (“What she did may have been in poor tact, but …”), but RP turned up this lovely example:

You see the Chanel woman said you can’t make a judgment on foundation and say ‘oh this foundation is rubbish it doesn’t do anything for my skin when your skin is in bad tact in the first place, you have to get your skin in good tact before you can make a judgment on a product’

I never cease to be impressed by the linguistic ingenuity of native speakers.

I’ve been reading A Sentimental Journey (see this post) with pleasure and profit; not only is Sterne’s style a constant joy, but I’m seeing where later authors got their material (Radishchev’s anecdote about giving his platok [kerchief] to the beggar who wouldn’t accept his banknote is clearly derived from Sterne’s tale of giving his snuffbox to the mendicant monk he’d refused alms to), and I’m learning some new words and phrases. He starts off the book by deciding to go to France after being challenged by an interlocutor (“They order, said I, this matter better in France. – You have been in France? said my gentleman, turning quick upon me, with the most civil triumph in the world”) and immediately makes reference to the droit d’aubaine, which turns out to be something for which prerevolutionary France was notorious: any foreigner who died within the country had his goods seized by the French crown, and his heirs got nothing.

After he goes to Calais and stiffs the monk, he goes out into the coach-yard of the inn where he’s staying and sees “an old désobligeant in the furthest corner of the court”; the OED soon informed me that this pleasing word refers to “A chaise so called in France from its holding but one person.” (The OED marks the stress on the second syllable, implying an anglicized pronunciation /dezˈɒblɪdʒənt/, but Sterne’s spelling, with italics and an accent aigu, implies at least an attempt at a French version; a pity we don’t have a recording by the author.) He later tells his landlord he wants to buy a coach to continue his journey, and “we walk’d together towards his Remise, to take a view of his magazine of chaises.” (Note the use of magazine in its original sense, ‘a place where goods are kept in store; a warehouse or depot’; it’s from Arabic maḵzan or maḵzin ‘storehouse,’ which is also the source of Spanish almacén.) A remise (also given with anglicized pronunciation, /rᵻˈmʌɪz/ ri-MIZE) turns out to be “A building providing shelter for a carriage; a coach house (Chiefly in French contexts),” and the specific sense is somehow from French remise ‘action of replacing, (in law) pardon, reduction of a penalty, adjournment, lessening of the severity of a disease or symptom, renunciation of a debt, action of restoring, re-establishing, action of handing over to someone.’

Not of linguistic relevance, but it strikes me forcibly that Sterne’s 1765 journey took place only two years after the end of the long and brutal Seven Years’ War, in which France and England were enemies, and yet so far there’s been only one passing mention of it; I don’t know whether Sterne is simply choosing not to write about it (don’t mention the war!) or whether it really wouldn’t have come up much, but it certainly doesn’t seem to have been comparable to visiting France in, say, 1947.