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XIX век has an occasional series of posts headed “Words new to me,” and I thought I’d borrow it because in my reading of Ford Madox Ford’s The Fifth Queen; And How She Came to Court (1906; the first of the Fifth Queen trilogy) I keep coming across such words. Here are the ones I’ve noted so far:

aumbry (OED s.v. ambry), “A repository or place for keeping things; a storehouse, a treasury; a cupboard (either in the recess of a wall or as a separate article of furniture); a safe; a locker, a press” (from Latin armārium)

balinger “A small and light sea-going vessel, apparently a kind of sloop, much used in the 15th and 16th centuries” (“Its nature was already forgotten in 1670, when Blount could only infer the meaning of the word from old statutes”; from Old French baleinier ‘whale-ship,’ from baleine ‘whale’; “afterwards employed generically”)

anan (pron. /əˈnæn/, with the stress on the second syllable), a variant of anon: “orig. in response to a call = ‘In one moment; presently; coming!’; hence a waiter’s response to express that he was paying attention, or awaiting commands; thence a general mode of expressing that the auditor was at the speaker’s service, or begged him to say on; and in later use, a mode of expressing that the auditor has failed to catch the speaker’s words or meaning, but is now alert and asks him to repeat; = I beg your pardon! What did you say? Sir? Eh?”

tulzie (OED s.v. tuilyie) “A quarrel, brawl, fight; a noisy contest, dispute” (from Old French tooil, touil, tueil, ‘contention,” and thus a doublet of toil)

An interesting phrase and institution: Augmentation Court, “a court established by 27 Hen. VIII, for determining suits and controversies in respect of monasteries and abbey-lands; so called because, by the suppression of monasteries, it largely augmented the revenues of the Crown.”

Addendum. Two more:

springald (OED s.v. springal(d, n.²) “A young man, a youth, a stripling”; “attrib. as adj. Youthful, adolescent.” “Of doubtful origin; perhaps a formation < spring v.¹ suggested by springal(d n.¹ In very common use from c1500 to 1650; in 19th cent. revived by Scott.”

craspisces This one is so obscure it’s not in the OED; I take this explanation from Annals and Magazine of Natural History (Taylor and Francis, Ltd., 1857):

“I met with,” says he, “an Inspeximus of a grant made by Henry the 3rd, wherein is granted to the Bishop of Exon and his successors for ever omnes decimas Craspesiorum within Cornwall and Devon, and is confirmed to them by Edward the 2nd. This without doubt was of value, otherwise the Bishopps would not have been solicitous to have had a confirmation of itt, But it is a question of what it is, the word not being to be found in any of the Glosaryes, And I have asked many persons whose business lyes among the old Records, who never remember that they mett with any such word, But I think that I have since mett with the meaning thereof in the Patent Rolls of R. 2, wherein are those words de piscibus regalibus vocatis whales sive Graspes, from which word I suppose like Lawyers they make Craspesiorum, But if it only extended to such great fishes, it will be of no great value. — The word Craspisces is used in Bracton, not only for Royall fishes, but for any big fish whatever, And I take the word in the Grant to be of the same signification. Oct. 10, 1700.”

Via Dave Wilton at Wordorigins comes Is the Print Dictionary Doomed?, the inaugural podcast in Slate’s new “The Afterword” series, in which June Thomas interviews Steve Kleinedler, executive editor of the American Heritage Dictionary, about the new fifth edition. It’s under twenty minutes long (18:43, to be exact) and has all sorts of interesting stuff: new inclusions like asshat, eggcorn, and presenteeism; entries omitted to make room for them, like cassette memory; a paean to etymology, with enticing remarks like “Some of the etymologies are truly expansive”; and the fact that there is a doctor on staff to make the call about which new words for medical procedures should go into the book.

In other dictionary words, I was pleased to learn that the OHD has added the entry bibimbap; not only is it a tasty dish, the word is a joy to utter.

Jan Freeman, who used to write an excellent Boston Globe column on language and now writes the equally excellent blog Throw Grammar from the Train, has a post making what should be an obvious point, but one that I have rarely seen put so explicitly:

At Grammarphobia, Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman wandered into the “confusion” quagmire and couldn’t get unstuck. A reader asked whether using its for it’s was a grammatical error or a spelling error; here’s their answer,* with my objections:

A: On a superficial level, this qualifies as both a punctuation error and a spelling error.

But on a deeper level, it’s a grammatical error, because it represents a failure to distinguish between (1) the possessive pronoun and (2) the contraction.

What “deeper level”? You’re saying the writer doesn’t know the difference between the actual words its and it’s? That he mistakenly writes “it’s tires are flat” because he thinks it’s OK to say “it is tires are flat”? Of course you don’t think that. Sometimes a mixup — reign in for rein in — could be either a simple spelling goof or a genuine confusion (resulting in an eggcornish reinterpretation of the metaphor). Not so with its and it’s. We could drop the apostrophe entirely and we’d still know which was which, because in fact we don’t confuse them grammatically.

And here’s the footnote attached to “answer*” above:

*I actually first wrote “here’s there answer,” though I caught it immediately. And no, I am not confused about the difference between their and there.

Brava! (Of course, the people who make such claims aren’t actually making intellectual points, they’re just slinging whatever mud comes to hand to express their revulsion—which reminds me of the nasty verbal tics in the later reviews of Pauline Kael, so memorably analyzed by the austerely eloquent Renata Adler in this classic 1980 takedown [archived], which everybody who cared about movies read and argued about back in that time when people actually cared about movies.)

Robert Lane Greene is an international correspondent for The Economist and one of the moving spirits behind their language blog, Johnson (where his latest post is called “Anti-Peeve Peeve Friday”); last year I praised his column on the best books about language, and now Sophie Roell has a good interview with him at The Browser in which he again discusses language books (like me, he’s a fan of Guy Deutscher and Arika Okrent, but he thinks more highly of Steven Pinker than I do). So I was expecting to enjoy the copy of his new book You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity that the good folks at Delacorte sent me—but I wasn’t expecting to enjoy it as thoroughly as I did. He covers pretty much all the ground I was vaguely thinking of covering in the language book I’ve been vaguely thinking of writing, and does it so well and so convincingly my impetus has been drastically diminished. This is the book I will be recommending to people who want to know how to think about language without getting themselves and others more agitated than is necessary—or, as he puts it in his charming preface, “Too many people are too angry about language too much of the time. That time that could be better spent listening, learning, and enjoying the vast variety of human language around them.”

He starts off discussing some general myths about language (giving Bill Bryson a well-deserved whack along the way), then moves on to “A Brief History of Sticklers,” starting off with the wretched Lynne Truss—”She doesn’t do subtlety”—and leaping back to Caxton’s late-fifteenth-century complaint about varying ways to say ‘eggs,’ moving forward again through Dryden, Swift, Lowth, and the usual twentieth-century suspects, two of whose names rhyme with “funk” and “blight” (“But on what basis could White condemn ‘hopefully’ while accepting the new extension of ‘to dress’? We never find out. Peeves are like that: my peeves are law, yours are unhealthy obsessions”). Then he delves into academic linguistics, where he is fortunate to have Mark Liberman (of the Log) as a guide; my complaint about the chapter, which is also my only complaint about the book, is that he jumps from Saussure straight to Chomsky, ignoring the entire storied history of American linguistics, that beautiful and varied garden that Chomsky stomped into submission and replaced with his identical rows of plastic flowers. In fact, he has a horribly misleading paragraph on page 73 that begins “Having killed behaviorism with this kind of dry wit, and having also published his revolutionary 1957 book Syntactic Structures, Chomsky launched linguists on the task of trying to construct ‘grammars’ of languages.” This is the exact reverse of the truth; it is the prior tradition of American linguists, led by the great Leonard Bloomfield, that worked on constructing scientific grammars of languages. Chomsky had no interest in grammars of anything but English, as illustrated by a remark of his Liberman passes on to Greene (on pages 64-65) to the effect that “it wouldn’t matter a whit to have descriptive grammars of all the world’s languages (and that one might as well survey the location of every blade of grass on MIT’s campus).” But that’s not Greene’s fault; he’s simply repeating what passes for the Story of Linguistics these days, from which the pre-Chomsky tradition is effaced much as the pre-Mao founders of the Chinese Communist Party like Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu were written out of its history once Mao became the Great Helmsman. Other than that, the chapter is well done, and ends with an excellent discussion of diglossia that includes this telling anecdote about Arabic:

In the first full-length Arabic conversation I ever had, with two young Egyptians I met in South Africa who didn’t speak English, I could speak only fusha (not yet having begun learning a modern colloquial Arabic dialect). They tried to respond in kind. But it was a clumsy exchange on both sides. They mixed in not only typically Egyptian pronunciations (such as gadiid for jadiid, “new”) but “wrong” ones in fusha that came from their dialect, such as munazama for munadhama (“organization”). Though I struggled to remember some vocabulary, in other ways my fusha was better than theirs. (On the other hand, a sociolinguist might say my overall performance was much worse; fusha is utterly inappropriate for late-night hotel-bar drinks. I must have sounded something like a professor lecturing to them.)

The fourth chapter, “More Equal than Others: How All Languages Can Express Almost Everything,” starts with a discussion of this hilarious YouTube clip, which was new to me: “I’ve probably watched the video fifty times, and it makes me laugh every time. I’ve quoted the video so often that a friend suggested I call this book Shit Flyin’ in My Mouth.” But he deplores the racist commentary on YouTube and the fact that the video is titled “Ghetto Reporter,” saying that the reporter’s sudden change from standard English to his native (Louisiana) dialect is exactly comparable to what happens to his Danish-born wife, who speaks “incredibly fluent English” but “as soon as she stubs her toe on our bed frame, she always says the same thing: For Satan!, cursing in Danish.” He goes on to discuss the Ebonics controversy, Whorfianism, and other touchy topics with admirable good sense.

The fifth chapter is about linguistic nationalism, and of course covers Hebrew, with this delightful bit:

Hebrew even has—and this should not surprise readers of this book so far—declinist sticklers. “Ben Yehuda would be dismayed by the demotic Hebrew spoken today,” said the Israeli author and journalist Hillel Halkin. Another Semiticist scholar, Ullendorff, scoffs:

Modern oddities like the grammatically impossible mekir instead of makkir and similar monstrosities had not arisen in Mandatary Hebrew, and I am glad that it is left to those who nowadays watch over the health of contemporary Hebrew either to come to terms with such horrors or to endeavour to discard them.

Just a hundred years old, and already being ruined by the kids! A normal language indeed.

He also discusses the former Yugoslavia, with some vivid quotes from linguist Robert Greenberg, who specializes in the region. When giving a speech in Zagreb, “Much to my embarrassment, my interlocutors chastised me for using the Serbian form jul ‘July’, rather than the Croatian form srpanj. To add insult to injury, one of the Institute’s staff then took me aside and made me repeat after her all the proper Croatian forms for all twelve months.” And:

Having landed at Sarajevo [Bosnia] Airport in June 1998, I struck up a conversation with one of the airport’s land crew. Her first comment was that she was impressed with my skills in the Bosnian language. Frankly, I had had no idea that I was even capable of speaking Bosnian…

The next morning I crossed the inter-entity boundary… in order to catch the bus to Belgrade. In Bosnian Serb territory, I spoke the same language I had used the day before, only now I was treated as a Serb. When the Yugoslav border guards singled me out for extra questioning upon my entry into Serbia, the bus driver told them to let me through, because he considered me to be one of theirs.

The sixth chapter is on “The Folly of Legislating Language Rules,” dealing with Turkish, French, and German before wading bravely into the touchy subject of Chinese and Japanese and their possible Romanization. Chapter Seven is about nationalist pressures in English and French (on the latter: “It is no longer seen as the done thing to attempt to destroy indigenous languages, and the attitude of the government in Paris has become what some call ‘hostile tolerance’ of the regional languages”), with good discussions of Breton (he visits Brest and tries to find someplace where Breton is in use) and the Midi, about which I learned something from this paragraph:

Finally, there are the Romance dialects: Picard, Gallo, Nissart, Occitan, Provençal, and the like. These are all closely related to French, and their speakers often themselves regard them as little more than substandard “patois.” They are different enough from French to be reasonably classified as separate languages, however, and they do have their ardent backers. But they are either small—as with the northern varieties—or divided, as in the south. “Provençal” and “Occitan” are dialects of each other, or Provençal is a dialect of Occitan, or they are the same thing, depending on whom you ask. But the supporters of “Provençal,” in the southeast and near the Alps, are associated with the political right, and the fans of “Occitan,” in the central south and southwest, are tied to the left. They don’t get along and so have been unable to form a strong united front for the single strongest and uniquely French Romance tongue after French itself.

The final chapter is on “Better Ways of Thinking About Language,” and it is so wise and eloquent that it should be required reading in schools (and definitely for politicians). A couple of passages I particularly like:

In thinking about languages themselves, most people succumb to a simple vision that might be called languages-as-boxes. Just as boxes have a rigid geometrical shape, people want a language to have one rigid, supposedly perfectly “logical” variety: the correct one handed down in prescriptive dictionaries and grammars. Moreover, people also want or expect those boxes to correspond exactly with national boundaries. Only one variety of one language called German should be the language of exactly one country called Germany, which should include all and only German-speakers; and so on for Italians, French, and so forth. One crucial step to realizing the boxes metaphor in the real world is to create “nation-states,” largely achieved in Europe but elusive in most of the rest of the world. The other step is to standardize the language so that everyone within their borders speaks the same dialect; variation is to be scorned, as against unity and patriotism, against the nation itself. This metaphor is taught, overtly or tacitly, to children in schools when they are told to stop speaking their Alsatian/Cajun/ Scots/Ebonics and start speaking the “real” language, the only one worthy of the name and the one that defines the society the children live in.
* * *
Language is not law; it is in fact a lot like music. Speech is jazz—first you learn the basic rules, and then you become good enough to improvise all the time. Writing is somewhat more like classical composition, where established forms and traditions will hold greater sway. But nobody sought to punish Franz Liszt for using Hungarian folk songs in his compositions, nor to put Jimi Hendrix in jail for playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on his guitar (though Jimi did spark indignation). We need to put away the idea that someone speaking a way we don’t like is some kind of offense against the public order.

If you think any of the statements I’ve quoted are too simple, rest assured that he’s probably gone on to qualify them. He has the journalist’s knack for the pithy and memorable line, combined with an admirable respect for the messy and endlessly disputed nature of the human world. I hope the book sells like hotcakes and stays in print forever, so I can go on recommending it to anyone who wants to know how to think about language.

James Davidson, a classicist of wide-ranging interests, frequently writes for the LRB, and last October he had a long review of a book that would normally get covered in a brisk paragraph or two in the TLS (“…worthy continuation of a valuable series… a few minor lapses should be noted…”), A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, Vol. V.A Coastal Asia Minor: Pontos to Ionia, edited by T. Corsten (Oxford, 496 pp, £125.00). Mind you, he doesn’t actually get around to Greek names until the halfway point, and doesn’t get to the book being reviewed until perhaps the three-quarter mark, but a detailed review of Coastal Asia Minor: Pontos to Ionia is not really the LRB’s remit. The whole thing is a mine of informative and delightful tidbits; I’ll quote a few to whet your appetite:

It is even possible to trace the rise of particular combinations of sounds. The popularity of J-names for boys in English-speaking countries is very ancient. A more recent trend is for names that end in -an or -en. This may be enough to account for the meteoric rise on both sides of the Atlantic of Jayden, coming soon to a playground near you, a lovely sounding name, without history or significance, which first entered the US top 1000 only in 1994. Or perhaps the -en sound has become a masculinising suffix, so that Jayden is a male form of Jade. An ‘ee’ sound has also become dominant in the top ten of girls’ names, assisting the revival of Ruby, Lily, Chloe and Sophie/Sophia – which currently enjoys remarkable popularity all over the world, from Russia to Argentina and from Germany to New Zealand. …

This fluidity is enabled by a traditional freedom in naming. The Rev. Easther noted – merely as a curiosity – that already in early 19th-century Yorkshire, children were being baptised with diminutives: Fred, Ben, Willie, Joe, Tom. Everywhere, some names could be given to both girls and boys – Hilary, Evelyn, Lesley, Happy, Providence – and the practice of using surnames as forenames was well established. Particular groups have periodically used this customary licence to bestow unusual names. Thus the sloganeering names of Nonconformists: Freewill Shepherd, Praisegod Silkes, Feargod Hodge, River Jordan and, reputedly, Unless-Jesus-Christ-Had-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barbon, whose father, Praise-God Barebone, lent his surname to the Barebones Parliament of the mid-17th century. An American dialectologist noted that in the southern Appalachians in the early 20th century,

One girl was named Vest for no other reason than that her father wrapped her in his vest when she was only a week old and carried her proudly across the hollow to display his first-born before admiring neighbours … Three brothers in the little settlement of Shawnee bear the names Meek, Bent and Wild. Lem and Lum are the names of twins. One young man carried the substantial name of Anvil, and another that of Whetstone. A small mountain boy has Speed as his Christian name.

Until very recently, most European countries fiercely resisted such typically English laissez-faire. You could not use surnames as forenames; you could not register diminutives; names must be taken from the calendar of saints or the otherwise illustrious of the nation’s past; names must be either masculine or feminine, but not both; names had to be given in the correct form of an official language. So, while Friday has occasionally been used as a forename in England and America for several centuries, when, in 2006, an Italian couple wanted to name their child Venerdì, a judge refused and took it on himself to rename the boy Gregorio; the name Friday carried negative, potentially damaging, connotations, he argued, citing Robinson Crusoe, Friday the 13th and the Crucifixion. Some countries, notably Germany, Sweden and Denmark, maintain approved lists, cared for in the last case by academic specialists at the University of Copenhagen, and parents must go through a special and sometimes expensive appeals procedure if they wish to name their child something off-piste.

However, licence is spreading rapidly. The number of appeals against the name-lists has increased rapidly in recent years and threatens to overwhelm the system, causing even Hans, Jens and Jørgen to wonder if this might not be a waste of government time and taxpayers’ money. Recently, the Danes have allowed Christopher and Swedish courts have allowed Google, Metallica and Q, though not Albin spelled Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssql-bb11116 in a vain attempt to test the law; even the laid-back English registrars insist a name must be readable and contain no numbers; it should also contain no titles, which leads one to wonder how Princess Tiaamii passed.

Now, here I (tentatively and deferentially) take issue with him:

An interesting case is the name Alexander. It looks very much as if it is a typically Greek dithematic compound of alex (‘defend’) and andr (‘man’). In the Iliad it is an alternative name for Paris, prince of Troy. There was therefore some excitement in the 1920s when a long Hittite document was found to be a treaty between a Hittite king and one Alaksandu lord of Wilusa – now almost universally accepted as the Hittite name for Ilion/Troy. Alexander could therefore be an example of a foreign Anatolian name being Hellenised into Greek-sounding syllables or, just as intriguingly and rather more probably, a 13th-century BC Greek (or Greek-named) ‘Alexander’, Hitticised as Alaksandu, a name that would be the 17th most popular in the far distant British Isles in 2010, approximately 3300 years later.

How can he say “rather more probably” about names from over three thousand years ago, given in circumstances totally unknown to us? The reverse has always seemed probable to me, that an Anatolian name Alaksandu got Hellenized and eggcornized to Alexandros. But we’ll never know. Anyway, here’s a bit on the actual book being reviewed:

In this region, somewhat unusually, the most popular name, by far, was Apollonius, pushing Dionysius into second place; Demetrius is in third place and Artemidorus fourth. Alexander is in fifth place, with two examples from little Ilium, seat of prehistoric Alaksandu. The region seems even more fond of god-names than elsewhere, and some of them throw interesting light on local cults. The popularity of Apollonius and Artemidorus shows the importance of Apollo to the Ionians and of the great shrine of Artemis in Ephesus. The importance of Cybele, the local Mountain Mother, and the Phrygian moon-god Mēn is reflected in the frequency of the names Metrodorus (sixth most popular) and Menodorus. Greeks generally avoided names associated with underworld divinities such as Hades and Persephone, so the popularity of Hecate-names, including ‘Gift of Hecate’ Hecatodorus, confirms other evidence that the goddess of witchcraft had a more benign aspect in this part of the Greek world.

Even the most popular name, Apollonius, was shared by barely 2.5 per cent of the population, while the top ten male names accounted for about 15 per cent, the top ten female names for about 12 per cent; most of the top ten female names are Lallnamen (‘baby-babble’): Ammia, Tatia, Apphia. But there are also virtue-names such as Virtue (Arete), Justice and Peace (Irene). Well over half the names are attested only once in the region. These include a Sappho, an Ophelia, a Stephane, a Priam (from Pergamum), a Boar, a Quail, a Sparrow, a Foam, a Pebble (or Vote) and an Amazon, an Encolpius (whose father may or may not have read Petronius’ Satyricon), a Wonderful (or Miraculous: Thaumasios) and a Shitty (Copreus) of Teos, an Old Woman (Graus), who is male, and a man named Named (Onomastos) from Smyrna, a Ioseph, a Samouel, a Nigella, an Aemilia, a Martin, a Loukipher and a Christopher.

The online version has appended a very interesting letter from Stephen Oren of Chicago about a possible a connection “between James Davidson’s observation, in his review of the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, that the name Jesus/Joshua is missing among Greek personal names ‘in all regions’ and David Nirenberg’s statement in the same issue that Moshe/Moses was an unusual name for Maimonides.” And the twins Lem and Lum reminded me of the brilliant poem at the end of this post by The Growling Wolf:

On a Frostly Snowly Dawn
by Elmer Snowedin, The Daily Growler Poet Laureate

Snooding, grumpy, porcupinish Lum limping sledlike
to plough towards his fainting light, that held high by his
crying wife on a porch that is swaying as the snow dumps
itself blindingly between the man who’d gone a’fore and now
is coming back the vision of a holy ghost
on a snowy white apparitional steed unleashed from
God’s open refrigerator door…yes, there is a light in Heaven.

I’ve been muttering “Snooding, grumpy, porcupinish Lum” to myself ever since I read it.

Addendum. I forgot to mention the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names website, which is well worth checking out.

The other night, in our Long March through Proust (begun last November), my wife and I finally finished Cities of the Plain (Sodome et Gomorrhe)—it certainly ends with a bang!—and I now have a question and a complaint. The complaint is an artistic one, and I have not seen it mentioned anywhere: it seems utterly implausible that the narrator is welcomed into the circle of every single person he meets. The problem is not that he’s a self-absorbed cad, since so is pretty much everyone else in those circles, it’s that he’s a nobody from nowhere. His father is a Permanent Secretary in some Ministry or other, which is respectable but not so imposing as to open all doors; the family is well off but not so rich as to open all doors; he himself is an adolescent with lots of fantasies and a deep knowledge of the repertoire of the Paris ballet companies but no ability to do anything significant for anyone. As far as I can make out, a plausible response on the part of an aristocrat being introduced to him would be a vague smile, a limp handshake, and a quick retreat. Instead, every single person, even the goddam Prince de Guermantes, insists that he come to tea/dinner and meet the very best people in France—their normal companions won’t do for this young man, no, it’s got to be the cream of the cream. I’d call it a Mary Sue except that the hero is so repellent. (“Say, honey, could you come help me scout out a restaurant where I can seduce the woman I’ll be taking out to dinner instead of you?”) But you can’t help me with that; I’m just griping to get it out of my system.

The question is this: what the devil are all those etymologies doing in the latter part of Cities of the Plain? On p. 917 of my edition there occurs the following paragraph:

“I shall be all the more delighted to meet her,” I answered him, “because she has promised me a book by the former curé of Combray about the place-names of this region, and I shall be able to remind her of her promise. I’m interested in that priest, and also in etymologies.”

That is followed by four pages of detailed etymological discussion, beginning:

“Don’t put any faith in the ones he gives,” replied Brichot, “there is a copy of the book at la Raspelière, which I have glanced through, but without finding anything of any value; it is a mass of error. Let me give you an example. The word bricq is found in a number of place-names in this neighbourhood. The worthy cleric had the distinctly odd idea that it comes from briga, a height, a fortified place. He finds it already in the Celtic tribes, Latobriges, Nemetobriges, and so forth, and traces it down to such names as Briand, Brion, and so forth. To confine ourselves to the region in which we have the pleasure of your company at this moment, Bricquebose means the wood on the height, Bricqueville the habitation on the height, Bricquebec, where we shall be stopping presently before coming to Maineville, the height by the stream. Now there is not a word of truth in all this, for the simple reason that bricq is the old Norse word which means simply a bridge. Just as fleur, which Mme de Cambremer’s protégé takes infinite pains to connect, in one place with the Scandinavian words floi, flo, in another with the Irish word ae or aer, is, beyond any doubt, the fjord of the Danes, and means harbour. So too, the excellent priest thinks that the station of Saint-Mars-le-Vetu, which adjoins la Raspelière, means Saint-Martin-le-Vieux (vetus). It is unquestionable that the word vieux has played a great part in the toponymy of this region. Vieux comes as a rule from vadum, and means a passage, as at the place called les Vieux. It is what the English call ford (Oxford, Hereford). But, in this particular instance, Vêtu is derived not from vetus, but from vastatus, a place that is devastated and bare…

(The French is below the cut.) Now, I love etymologies as much as anyone and more than most, but I tend to like my etymologies in reference works, where I can be reasonably sure they’re plausible. The musings of a fictional character about fictional place names are of much less interest. I grasp that there are artistic points being made about the preservation of history in names, about the importance of perspective (X says this, but Y says that; I used to believe this, but now I believe that, and it changes the way I think about things), all well and good, but four pages? My wife, who loves Proust and has sat without complaint through hundred-page descriptions of trivial chitchat at posh dinner parties, begged me to skip over the next such section (for the etymologies do not end there, oh no, every time Brichot turns up he feels the need to bring a little more lexical enlightenment)—I had to point out to her that the etymologies helped her get to sleep quickly and probably produced a good sound sleep. But seriously, what’s the point of these passages? After the bricq and the fleur, the fjord and the vetus, what possible gain is there in going on about vasta and holm and carque and dozens of other odd bits of nomenclature? Inquiring minds want to know.

[Read more…]

Two fine new additions to the internet:
1) The Snowclones Database. Erin O’Connor, a grad student in computational linguistics, has set up a site “inspired primarily by Mark Liberman et al’s Language Log and Chris Weigl’s Eggcorn Database.” As she says:

A snowclone is a particular kind of cliche, popularly originated by Geoff Pullum. The name comes from Dr. Pullum’s much-maligned “If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z”. An easier example might be “X is the new Y.” The short definition of this neologism might be n. fill-in-the-blank headline.

There are only a few up now, but “at least 30 more… queued up to be posted”; comments are open, and she’s taking suggestions.

2) Glottopedia “is a freely editable encyclopedia for linguists by linguists that is currently being built up. It will contain dictionary articles on all technical terms of linguistics and is multilingual. In addition, there are survey articles, biographical articles und language articles, potentially on all linguists and all languages.” The editors-in-chief are Martin Haspelmath and Sven Naumann, and they want your contribution (you must sign in with “your real name, or an abbreviation of it, not a pseudonym”). A great idea, and I wish it every success. (Via Anggarrgoon.)

I’ve finished Durrell but am still fascinated with Alexandria, so I’m reading Out of Egypt: A Memoir by Andre Aciman, a saga of his family’s life in the city covering most of the twentieth century. It’s apparently somewhat fictionalized, but that neither surprises nor distresses me—all memoirs are to some extent, and he writes so well I don’t really give a damn, not to mention that nobody disputes the accuracy of his portrait of the city. Anyway, I wanted to quote here an interesting discussion (from Chapter 2) of the languages of Jewish Alexandria:

To the three who had discovered one another, Ladino spoke of their homesickness for Constantinople. To them, it was a language of loosened neckties, unbuttoned shirts, and overused slippers, a language as intimate, as natural, and as necessary as the odor of one’s sheets, of one’s closets, of one’s cooking. They returned to it after speaking French, with the gratified relief of left-handed people who, once in private, are no longer forced to do things with their right.

All had studied and knew French exceedingly well, the way Lysias knew Greek—that is, better than the Athenians—gliding through the imperfect subjunctive with the unruffled ease of those who never err when it comes to grammar because, despite all of their efforts, they will never be native speakers. But French was a foreign, stuffy idiom and, as the Princess [his paternal grandmother] herself would tell me many years later, after speaking French for more than two hours, she would begin to salivate. “Spanish, on the other hand, réveille l’âme, lifts up the soul.” And she would always slip in a proverb to prove her point…

The Saint’s husband [these are the maternal grandparents], a Jew born in Aleppo who spoke no Ladino, would often return from work and peek through the wrought-iron fence into the arbor. … “Spanish, Spanish,” the Aleppid would mutter as he and his wife crossed Rue Memphis on their way home, “always your damned Spanish,” while she apologized for not being home yet, trying to explain to a man whose native tongue was Arabic why she had tarried past her usual hour…

Monsieur Jacques… despised Ladino because everything about it conspired to exclude him from a world whose culture was foreign to him, as much by its customs and sounds as by its insidious niceties and clannish etiquette. The more his wife delighted in speaking it, the more repulsive it became, and the more it pleased her to remind him—as her father had reminded her to remind him—that Arabic may have been Arabic, but Spanish was always going to remain Spanish!

For more on the languages of Sephardic Jewry, see here.

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I’ve developed a pretty high threshold of interest for the eggcorns they investigate so assidously over at the Log: once you realize how common it is for people to get phrases wrong (free reign for free rein being a classic example in writing, for all intensive purposes instead of for all intents and purposes in speech), you get jaded. But Jeanette Winterson has renewed my enthusiasm, in a wonderful essay for The Times, by taking note of the stories people invent to account for what they take to be the idiom. She starts off with a beautiful example:

The other day my elderly country neighbour asked for a bit of help to get his new washing machine into the kitchen. That generation never use “it”, always, “he” or “she”, so I wasn’t surprised to hear the washing machine called “he”, but I was surprised by what followed: “My old washing machine, he’s given up the goat,” he said, in a broad Gloucestershire accent.
“The goat?” I replied. “Are you sure?” “Oh, yes,” said my neighbour, “ain’t you never heard that expression before, given up the goat?” “Well, not exactly . . . where does it come from?” “Ah well,” said my neighbour, “in the old days, when folks didn’t have much, and mainly worked the land, a man would set store by his animals, especially his goat, and when he come to die, he would bequeath that goat to his heirs, and that is why we say, ‘he’s given up the goat’.”

People are lousy at accurate reproduction, but they’re great at storytelling, and I could happily read an entire book of anecdotes like that. (Winterton herself “laboured long into adult life really believing that there was such a thing as a ‘damp squid’, which of course there is, and when things go wrong they do feel very like a damp squid to me, sort of squidgy and suckery and slippery and misshapen. Is a faulty firework really a better description of disappointment?”)

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I’m reading a (surprisingly good) book by Lucy Herndon Crockett called Popcorn on the Ginza (William Sloane Associates, 1949), about the first few years of the Occupation of Japan (she was there with the Red Cross from 1945 to 1947 and has left no biographical trace online that I can find, apart from a stint as a Bread Loaf fellow in 1949); on p. 144 I ran across a word that has stumped me: “The only death to date of an Occupationer at the hands of our former bitter enemy is that of an Air Force lieutenant who, about to return to his fiancée in the States, was poisoned in a geisha house by his corbito, who then took her own life.” (Italics in original.) “Corbito” gets a few hundred Google hits, but they’re all family names as far as I can tell, and the word is not in any of my dictionaries. It occurred to me that it might be an odd anglicization of some Japanese word based on hito ‘person’ (which can become –bito in compounds), but I haven’t found such a word in my Japanese dictionaries. Any ideas?

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