Today’s NY Times has a story about the tailors of Savile Row; my wife was reading it when she called me over and showed me this bit:
Both the tuxedo and the bowler hat were invented here, and when the suit emerged as the uniform of capitalism, the street set the gold standard for craft and durability. Its history and reputation are stellar enough that the name has found its way into at least one language. The Japanese word for “business suit” is sebiro. (Say it out loud.)
I raised my eyebrows and headed for the internet, where I found the Wiktionary entry for 背広 [sèbíró] ‘business suit’; the etymology says “Unknown, but thought to be related to English civil clothes, Savile Row, or Cheviot.” Sigh. I’ve long since stopped expecting, or even hoping, that newspapers will learn to double-check these enticing origin stories, but I still call them out when I get the chance.
Unrelated: I just learned that diathesis, which I knew only as an imposing word for grammatical voice (from Greek διάθεσις ‘disposition, arrangement’), is also a medical term meaning “a hereditary or constitutional predisposition to a group of diseases, an allergy, or other disorder.” I’m sure a great many Hatters knew that already; is it in common use?
Addendum. I just ran across a bizarre usage in the latest New Yorker; Evan Osnos is writing about the change brought by the telegraph: “By the end of the century, readers were wading through a flood of cheap errata from afar—mostly of war, crime, fires, and floods.” As far as I know, errata can mean only ‘errors in writing or printing’; can anyone think how it might have come to be used for (presumably) ‘newspaper stories’? (Insert boilerplate rant on decline of copyediting standards at major publications.)
Further Addendum. Another from the latest New Yorker: in Merve Emre’s “Tricked Out” (retitled online as Our Love-Hate Relationship with Gimmicks), she says “The word ‘gimmick’ is believed to come from ‘gimac,’ an anagram of ‘magic.’” No it fucking isn’t; OED, AHD, and M-W all concur in the judgment “Origin unknown.” The OED has a 1936 citation from Words (Nov. 12/2):
The word gimac means ‘a gadget’. It is an anagram of the word magic, and is used by magicians the same way as others use the word ‘thing-a-ma-bob’.
That’s certainly suggestive, but it’s not an etymology. Stop it with the cute word-origin stories, people! They’re all lies, lies!
…And then Emre says this:
In Vladimir Nabokov’s novel “Invitation to a Beheading,” from 1935, a mother distracts her imprisoned son from counting the hours to his execution by describing the “marvelous gimmicks” of her childhood.
Argh, what a mess! Invitation to a Beheading (the New Yorker quirkily insists on putting the titles of novels in quotes) is a 1959 translation of Приглашение на казнь, which was published in the Paris journal Sovremennye zapiski in 1935-36 and as a book in 1938; “marvelous gimmicks” is, of course, quoted from the translation, and the original has “удивительные уловки” [astonishing/wonderful tricks]. Emre goes on to chew on these “gimmicks” at length:
The most shocking, she explains, was a trick mirror. When “shapeless, mottled, pockmarked, knobby things” were placed in front of the mirror, it would reflect perfectly sensible forms: flowers, fields, ships, people. When confronted with a human face or hand, the mirror would reflect a jumble of broken images. As the son listens to his mother describe her gimmick, he sees her eyes spark with terror and pity, “as if something real, unquestionable (in this world, where everything was subject to question), had passed through, as if a corner of this horrible life had curled up, and there was a glimpse of the lining.” Behind the mirror lurks something monstrous—an idea of art as device, an object whose representational powers can distort and devalue just as easily as they can estrange and enchant.
Trick mirrors are gimmicks, but they are also metaphors for how gimmicks work, eliciting both charm and suspicion.
But all of this is bullshit, because it’s based on a translation; the original passage is in Russian and has nothing to do with the word “gimmick”! That’s not some esoteric quibble, and it’s perfectly evident if you give it a moment’s thought. But of course you’d have to know that Invitation to a Beheading is a translation, and I guess we can’t assume that knowledge on the part of the magazine’s authors or editors. We live in a fallen world.
…But wait, there’s more! She goes on to say:
Yet its single-use success—no other writer could get away with repeating her trick—reminds us that the literary marketplace, as Theodor Adorno once observed of the art world, favors “work with a ‘personal touch,’ or more bluntly, a gimmick.”
Adorno observed no such thing! She’s quoting from Aesthetic Theory, a 1995 English translation by Robert Hullot-Kentor of Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie. I don’t have an easy way of finding out what Adorno actually wrote, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t “a gimmick.” So again, Adorno is irrelevant if you want to talk about gimmicks. And surely Emre is aware Adorno didn’t write in English.
Diathesis is a standard Russian term for food allergies causing rashes. Since most of the Russian Hatters experienced it in their childhood, most of them know it from well before they learned other Greek words.
Interesting!
I think New Yorker should issue errata.
Just to finish the trifecta of respected NYC publications, the New York Review of Books published this, in Mark Mazower’s 2019 review of two books on Talaat Pasha: “… a paramilitary force of irregular killers under the control of a Talaat confidante, Behaeddin Şhakir.” In the online version they’ve corrected it to Şakir, which is encouraging, but still: where were the copyeditors?
It sounds like Osnos thinks errata means “small printed items, such as might appear offset in a box.”
Ah, good guess. We all have such misinformation in odd corners of our brain, but it’s the job of the editorial staff to save us from displaying it to the public.
I wonder is Osnos intended ephemera, and simply miswrote? Or perhaps he mistyped the word, and was sandbagged by the spool chucker.
I still remember, long ago, I think in one of Douglas Hoftstader’s works on self-reference, an errata entry for the errata page itself that read something like: “For errata, read erratum“. (And, obviously, nothing else.)
Plausible headings for a column of such short notices include “In brief” and “Around the world”. The only name I can think of for an individual notice is “bus plunge”, but even as a metonym it’s not quite broad enough. Is there an actual name in use that might be confused with “errata”?
@Owlmirror: Once or twice a year, MIT’s student newspaper, The Tech, would put out a parody issue, parodying one of the publications of campus. (The quality of the humor was highly variable.) For one such issue, my sole contribution was writing errata boxes. The first one was supposedly a correction of something (that had not actually appeared) on the front page, followed by further boxes successively correcting previous corrections, with variable levels of apology.
i also thought of ephemera. or memoranda? effluvia? trivia?
The “diathesis-stress” model for psychological disorders is taught in undergrad psych classes. “Diathesis” is the underlying predisposition towards the disorder, which is triggered by the “stress”.
Thanks!
Whatever the word “errata” there was supposed to be, it should be a word that makes sense when modified by “cheap”. That puzzles me more than “errata”. I can’t imagine any association of “cheap” with “war, crime, fires, and floods”. Even reports on such things are not “cheap”. Nor is “wading through” them.
I withhold benefit of the doubt and declare that sentence to be dead in the water. Blame is not always fairly assignable to copyeditors. Let’s call a spud a spud.
Speaking of being confused about words that begin with the same letter or letters, “diathesis” reminded me of a word for a different medical condition, meaning “A gap or space between two adjacent teeth, especially the upper front incisors (in humans).”. But I couldn’t recall it exactly at first, and had to resort to a Wiktionary browse (“dia-something? diaresis? no… diastasis?” no…).
(diastema)
But “cheap” is exactly what I would associate with “ephemera”.
Maybe “excreta” was intended.
“Cheap”, as in “a cheap way to increase sales”. See: Yellow journalism.
[Vicious fight breaks out in usually staid language blog! Cutting words flung! Sarcasm deployed! Exclamation marks horribly overused! Disgusting smears slung about! Read all about it!]
If ephemera are by nature cheap, then “cheap ephemera” doesn’t make much sense. If they are not, then there should be such a thing as pricey ephemera – but I can’t think of any.
Anyway, wars etc are hardly ephemera.
No, wars are not ephemeral. But journalism about wars is ephemeral. News articles on the current violence being committed. Maybe he should have written “battles” or “attacks on a certain front/location in wars”, but he was being brief.
pricey ephemera
A night on the town …
I read cheap as ‘filling columns cheaply’ – I mean, presumably you do pay for what I believe are called wire stories, but no one from your office has to be paid to spend time investigating them.
Maybe ephemera – if you still mainly report local news, only the most sensational snippets of world news are likely to find space, and no one story is likely to stick around for long.
I read it as “stuff that erred in/over here”, erratic stuff.
You missed such a chance to write preëminent here.
Never heard of it, but medical terminology in common use can be amazingly different in different countries. For example, Angina in German is not an angina pectoris unless that second word is mentioned, but a strep throat.
Diathesis is indeed a known word (in the given sense) for UK medics, though I find it doesn’t come up much in my own line of work. “Bleeding diathesis” is probably the commonest use in Real (medical) Life.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_diathesis
Angina in German is not an angina pectoris unless that second word is mentioned, but a strep throat.
A similar sense persists in UK medicalese in “Ludwig’s Angina”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig%27s_angina
(It’s very nasty.)
By repeatedly trying to misspell that addendum text, my phone’s autocorrect says that undoubtedly Osnos meant “[b]y the end of the century, readers were wading through a flood of cheap erotica from afar—mostly of war, crime, fires, and floods.” Considering that SMUT is the same length as STOP, this seems most likely to me, too.
I like it!
cheap erotica from afar
Funny. But the word that’d occurred to me fits the context better: “exotica from afar…”
Hmm. Could be!
Are not the best erotica also exotica?
OK. Maybe it’s just me, then.
As a Classical linguist I am of course well-acquainted with the grammatical sense of diathesis (especially since Italian diatesi is the usual term for ‘grammatical voice’, not confined to technical discourse), but I learned of the medical sense only last year.
Indeed, erotic dancers are often called exotic dancers in the U.S., apparently once to dodge the authorities, and now by mere tradition. The U.S. is also the home of that wonderful word for ‘stripper’, ecdysiast, coined by H. L. Mencken at the behest of stripper Georgia Sothern, another Baltimorean artist (and not Gypsy Rose Lee, as often claimed).
ephemera are by nature cheap
Single-page broadsides (aka leaflets or flyers) printed before 1550 command hefty prices today, precisely because they were intended as ephemera and most of the copies were used to wrap fish or kindle fires or were otherwise destroyed.
All pricey things are ephemeral (it’s just a question of degree.)
Maybe he was trying for a coinage: “cheap erratica” — random (and perhaps error-filled) violence-porn from all over the place.
All pricey things are ephemeral (it’s just a question of degree.)
In the sense that they will not survive the Sun’s expansion, yes. Elemental rhenium is rare (the Earth’s supply of it is mostly in the iron core) and expensive (US$1300/kg), but hardly ephemeral.
I thought I would just ask him. This is what he replied, via Twitter DM:
My “errata” was, alas, an erratum. I was really thinking of something like “squib” (in the North American usage, newspaper filler).
Thanks for that!
“Squib” is of unknown etymology (possibly onomatopoeic) but lacks the apparently-desired majesty of a Latinate word. Google translate suggests “libellus” as the closest Latin equivalent of the relevant sense of squib, so maybe a jocular coinage from that? Libellotica? Maybe the lawyers in charge of defending newspapers and magazines from libel accusations wouldn’t like it, of course.
Unknown, but thought to be related to English civil clothes, Savile Row, or Cheviot.”
This is a very strange statement indeed. “Savile Row” to “sebiro” is plausible, as is “civil clothes” to “sebiro”, but I can’t think of any remotely believable reason why a men’s business suit should be known as a “Cheviot”. Cheviot is a range of hills on the Scottish borders, and a breed of sheep from the hills. Yes, men’s business suits are made from wool, but (unlike merino or cashmere or mohair) Cheviot wool isn’t sufficiently good quality or distinctive to be used as a name for the fabric.
“Civil clothes” is odd too – no one uses that phrase in BrE. You’d say “plain clothes” or “civilian clothes”, or (obs.) “mufti”. Though I googled it and found several uses, meaning “plain clothes”, in the English-language Indian press, so perhaps it’s survived there while dying out in Britain?
And it’s simply wrong to say that Savile Row was the birthplace of the bowler hat. James Lock & Co’s chief designer, William Bowler, produced the first bowler hats, and Lock’s shop is, as it has been for two hundred years, in St James Street, not Savile Row.
Maybe just as a running “miscellaneous stuff about genome-sequencing and prehistory) thread is needed, a running “stupid stuff about language published in the New Yorker” thread is needed?
I guess this is it!
Speaking of planetary cores and solar system evolution, I touched a bit of Mars (1e7 $/kg) the other night, courtesy of a Mr. Bizzarro. It turns out there are undifferentiated bits of original material in its mantle, because no plate tectonics. Look for a rousing yarn of 50 micron zircons getting lost under microscopes, coming to a major publication “soon”.
Yay, zircons. They tend to have trace amounts of very interesting stuff inside…
From personal experience, reducing a rock which barely fits in your hand to a half a pea’s worth of barely discernable shiny zircons is very satisfying.
Martin Bizzarro did look like a man who is happy with his job. Apatite inclusions, in this case.
@ajay: “Cheviot wool isn’t sufficiently good quality or distinctive to be used as a name for the fabric.”
But it is so used: Google “Cheviot cloth.” It even has its own Britannica entry. Since шевиотовый was a relatively common adjective in 20th-century Russian (usually applied to a jacket or a coat), it’s not at all unlikely that the word made it into Japanese as well.
Interesting! I had not come across that at all – in that case, I agree with you that it does sound plausible.
Ah, I hadn’t read Ästhetische Theorie since I was writing my undergrad dissertation, but I’m always up for a spot of Adorno scholarship! The relevant passage reads:
I’ll leave the unpicking of the semantics of Masche to those better versed.
Thanks! GT does pretty well with that up until the crucial endpoint, where it collapses in confusion: “In many cases there is direct socio-economic intervention in artistic production; at present, for example, through long-term contracts between painters and art dealers, which favor what is called a neat handicraft with its own mark.” (I gather “trick” would be a more appropriate rendering of Masche in this context.)
My German is so rusty it crumbles on touch, but I have the feeling ‘shtick’ may be the best approximation — it captures both the distinctiveness and the artifice.
That’s closer. Not having Masche in this sense in my active vocabulary myself, I’d explain it as “somewhat eccentric personal hallmark/distinctive way of doing things”.
(I have the more literal meanings of Masche in my active vocabulary: “the figure you tie your shoelaces in”, also any ornamental bow especially in the dialectal diminutive.)
“German” is misleading there; Stück is “piece”, but here you have to start from Theaterstück and send it through Yiddish.
Re: Further Addendum: “Gimmick” — it seemed probable to me that the word derived from an older sense of “gimcrack”, but I guess the OED needs more than a few letters of similarity and a similar older meaning.
OED:
Searching Google Books can be a huge pain, because it includes as a date the date of first publication. So I’m looking at the offered text, and seeing that there’s something suspiciously modern-looking about it . . . and, duh, it’s got 1962 printed right there! Feh.
Nevertheless, I found two antedates to the OED’s 1926 citations. The first is a bit surprising, because it’s hardly a minor publication:
Smith, Edward H. Invention and the “Grifter”. Scientific American, August 1923.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/24994724
The other is a little more obscure, but is interesting precisely because it does not have anything to do with carnival games or magicians’ devices.
Domestic Engineering and the Journal of Mechanical Contracting. Attributed to Strickland W. Gilliland in L.H. Drury’s “Hits”. January 8, 1910
Google Books link. Freely downloadable.
Two more hits for “gimmick” that antedate 1926:
Picking Winners with Major Miles. Copyright 1922.
==================================================================
The Flutist, June 1923. Credited to Nat Rapport.
This one is interesting because it is accompanied by a humourous illustration showing a flute with added odds and ends, labelled with letters. Once again, “gimmick” refers to a generic mechanical add-on or contrivance, without the specificity of carnie scams or magicians’ props.
One more:
Long Lines, December 1922. “Under the Bounding Main”, by R. P. Glover.
(Subtitle: When Number Two Key West-Havana Cable Fails, Telephone Men Board Ship and Yank Up Deep Line to Repair Troubles.)
I am tempted to derive gimmick from informal English “gimme” with “-ic/ick” suffix attached.
Original meaning then – “that small piece of machinery which I keep asking for”
The Billboard, April 14, 1917
Here, “gimmick” is clearly being used more abstractly.
Telephone Review. The date that Google Books presents is 1922, but I’ve learned to distrust that. Still, it reminds me of the citation from “Long Lines”, definitely dated to 1922.
SFReader, are your real initials MBW?
Telephone Review was published by the New York Telephone Company and I learned that abbreviation M.B.W. in that company stood for Manhattan-Bronx-Westchester Area of New York City.
I suppose the word “gimmig” was supplied by employees of the New York Telephone Company working in that area.
Abbreviation “L.I.” above stands for Long Island, obviously.
Owlmirror: Those are great antedates, you should send them to the good folks at OED.
I should have realized that the initials in parentheses were not individuals, because the next entries in that list of local jargon terms are:
Goose Egg: Strand connectors for splicing messenger. (Albany)
Gun: Blow torch for waxing cables. (Newark)
In my defense: Tiny blurry print.
Lexico “powered by Oxford” has sv ‘gimmick’
I suspect many hack journalists of automatically removing any hedges and qualifiers when using (credited or otherwise) a scholarly or scientific source. I wouldn’t expect it of a New Yorker Writer, though.
These don’t both antedate the OED, but I thought I’d post them, because they were from the New Yorker itself, and because the uses of “gimmick” seems unusual to me – a vicious and brutal trick, or a base fraud :
New Yorker, July 28, 1928. “A Reporter at Large” (I didn’t see a byline) This was about the New York State Boxing Commission:
==========================================================
New Yorker, December 25, 1926. “Talk of the Town” (no byline?)
Since the paragraphs are about words, I’ll post all of them for the general interest:
NB: Per the OED “scofflaw”:
I am tempted to read “Gonfaroo” as “Goinfre-roux” – glutton-sauce. Anyone have a better take?
I thought that contest sounded familiar; turns out John Cowan mentioned it back in 2010.
During the Prohibition, contraband alcohol in New York came from Quebec, so the source could have been French Canadian slang.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang is my first place to go. It has examples of grifter from 1911, 1914, and 1915, and of gimmick from as early as 1911. I like the 1921 example: “Being a Possible Questionnaire for Submission to Applicants for the Position of Assistant Stage Doorman […] What is the starflop? A startrap? A vampire trap? A gimmick?”
Gonfaroo immediately suggested granfalloon (because Bokononism explains everything)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granfalloon
Sadly, it seems unlikely (for technical reasons that I will not enter into here, as the margin is too narrow) that the bootlegger term is derived from Cat’s Cradle.
An idea, here. OED has gammock, n.2, < game n. + -ock suffix, “A piece of fun; a game, a jest; a frolic. Frequently in plural: antics, ‘tricks’.” Going back to 1819. Spelled variously gammyk, gamock, gommack, gamack, gamak, gamalk, gammick, gammik, gammock, gammuck, gammux, in various parts of England, from Cheshire to East Anglia to Surrey to Devon.
it seems unlikely that the bootlegger term is derived from Cat’s Cradle.
Reportedly, real live mafiosos started using “Godfather” as a term of respect for their bosses, under the influence of Mario Puzo’s book. When he was growing up, he said, it was just an affectionate term for older people, not necessarily relatives, like English “uncle”.
@Y: The FBI, who were listening in on so many mafia conversations in the 1970s, noted that the speech of the gangsters really started imitating The Godfather after the movie was so influential. The film was, after all, immensely popular with organized crime leaders, soldiers, and associates, since it portrayed many of the characters (especially Brando’s Vito Corleone, who, for example, wanted nothing to do with narcotics) as adhering to a sort of ethical code, which they took deadly seriously. As I remember one obituary for Puzo said, “he sometimes allowed the Corleones to be judge on their own terms.”
I wonder if some of that was trying to connect with some mythical old Sicilianhood in the face of assimilation (which is alluded to in the book, in the person of Michael.)
@Y: Assimilation of the mafia was definitely a cultural issue at the time, but it turns out to be very complicated matter, which I doubt anybody has every fully understood—inside or outside of the mafia. By the time The Godfather film came out, only the Bonanno crime family was still importing a substantial number of mafiosi from Sicily. The American La Cosa Nostra was inducting new made men who were of Italian, but not Sicilian, descent. The “Italian” mob had largely become a second- and third-generation Italian-American group, alongside an increasingly diverse crew of (non-member) associates.
In general, assimilation of the mafia into American culture seems to have been (perhaps paradoxically, given how much more violent the “men of honor” could get away with being in the old country) associated with increasing levels of violence. Salvatore Marzano (coincidentally or not, the founder of the Bonanno family*) was the last of the old-fashioned “Mustache Petes” to be a preeminent figure in the American mafia. While he had himself come to power by killing off the even more old fashioned and hidebound Giuseppe Masseria, Marzano’s rule only lasted half of 1931, before he was himself offed on the order of Lucky Luciano (who had previously assisted in killing his own boss, Masseria), who was relatively open to both the drug trade and more violent new forms of extortion. Luciano, although born in Sicily, was much more Americanized culturally, having immigrated when he was only eight. Moreover, unlike the Mustache Petes, Luciano was willing to go outside La Cosa Nostra to arrange the hit, which was carried out by (probably) three Jewish gangsters, one of whom was Bugsy Siegel.
* Until the 1960s, mafia families tended to change their names upon taking a new leader. However, once the FBI started to crack down on them, the bosses quickly realized that it was not in their best interest to have their own names used to refer to their criminal organizations. So the names became fixed—Gambino, Genovese, Columbo, etc.—and even the position of “boss” more and more frequently became an obfuscation,** where the official boss would merely be a lieutenant, with the real boss acting from well behind the scenes and insulating himself from prosecution by giving as few direct orders as possible.
** Having a fake “front boss” was not a new idea in the 1970s, although more families started using front bosses at that time. Paul Ricca*** may have been the real boss of the Chicago Outfit from as early as 1931, when Frank Nitti took over from “Scarface” Al Capone as the official leader. Ricca certainly remained the real power after his own stint as the official boss, although Ricca gradually passed more and more control to another one of his former front bosses, Anthony “Big Tuna” Accardo, after Accardo’s own “retirement.” Ricca and Accardo continued to use front bosses for decades, and they were fairly successful in distracting attention away from themselves. Outfit front boss Sam Giancana is (and was) far better known than the shadowy Ricca and Accardo, who were still pulling the threads**** from behind the scenes.
*** Paul “the Waiter” was a man of many names. Born Felice De Lucia, his legal name through most of his criminal career in America was Paul De Lucia. He was also, rather notably for somebody who was a leading mafia figure by the early 1930s, not from Sicily but Naples. As a youth in the old country, he had been an associate of the Camorra, rather than La Cosa Nostra.
**** I did not mean this as joke, but I realized that it might come across as one, since Giancana infamously ran his operations as a capo and later front boss out of a tailor’s shop.
Fascinating! As an aficionado of the Godfather films, I have an interest in that sort of thing.
>there should be such a thing as pricey ephemera – but I can’t think of any.
Rudy Giuliani’s reputation as an attorney?
I can only raise a hackle or two at a newspaper that attributes the etymology of sebiro to one of three words that is mentioned in a more formal etymology, and is the only one of those three that seems likely to have given that result.
there should be such a thing as pricey ephemera – but I can’t think of any
Basically anything that was not intended to be saved long-term and is now collectible.
The first example that comes to my mind is admission tickets to old exhibitions, some of which can cost hundreds of dollars; I’m sure there’s an even better example that I just couldn’t think of offhand.
Baseball cards.
I was just discussing this with my daughter. The classic examples are (at least in America) were baseball cards and comic books. They were popular but ephemeral, thrown out by mid-century moms in enormous numbers. Looking at the values of items of different ages, one can actually see how the price structure changes, once they become known as popular collectables so that people start hoarding them.
There is a separate phenomenon of collectables that people expect to become valuable (like Beanie Babies). The purveyors might try to create manufactured scarcity, but even if there is a rapid run-up in prices, it typically collapses, because the real scarcity is not there, and interest in the product was often just a fad to begin.
Incidentally, “Gimmig” appears to be a real name. A lot (most? nearly all?) of the hits in Google books are names, not things. GB also has the Close Rolls of Henry III, with a Thomas de Gimmig’ (Gymeges, Gymeg’) (see also Gamag’, Gamages, Gamasch’, Gammach’) (anyone know what those trailing apostrophes represent? Just the clipped “-es”?)
An eventual spelling variant could well have been “Gimmick”, which does show up as a name in some searches. For example, there was a Gimmick Furniture Manufacturing Company; a Philip Gimmick (from Russia?) lived in London and received a Certificate of Naturalization from the Home Office; a Samuel E Gimmick served as Attorney General for Pennsylvania; probably others . . .
[ One “Gimmick” was an OCR error (for “Chinniah”) in a partly viewable book, but also available fully available in a different edition: A Progressive Grammar of the Telugu Language with Copious Examples and Exercises; hey, free language book.]
Probably most of these names are related to
Recorded as Gamage, Gammidge, Cammidge, Cammiage, and the variant dialectals Gammey and Gammie, this famous name is English, but of Norman-French origins. It is locational and derives from the villages of Gamaches found in the Department of Eure, Normandy. It has been claimed that the earliest name holders were followers of the Conqueror in 1066 and this is probable, although the earliest recording is somewhat late. The name is recorded heraldically in France, both in Picardy and Berry, the main original coat of arms having the blazon of two golden lions passant on a black field, whilst the English coat of arms granted to Payne de Gammage in about the year 1450 has a silver field charged with five red lozenges in diagonal. The name oddly, is believed to be from the ancient Gaelic words “Cam-apia” meaning winding river”. The name development includes Alicia Gamage of Oxford in the Hundred Rolls of 1279, and William Gamage of Yorkshire in 1583. Somewhat later in Victorian times we have the recordings of Martha Cammiage at the church of All Souls, Marylebone, and James Alexander Gammie at Sty John the Baptist, Notting Hill Gate, both city of London, on October 22nd 1871. The first recorded spelling of the family name is shown to be that of Godfrey de Gamages. This was dated 1158, in the Pipe Rolls of the county of Hereford during the reign of King Henry 11nd of England, 1216 – 1272. Throughout the centuries, surnames in every country have continued to “develop” often leading to astonishing variants of the original spelling.
When found as a surname among scarecrows, golems, etc., the name is most commonly spelled Gummidge.
s/Gaelic/p-Gaulish
See also: Gars am Kamp.
Is there really a Gaulish *apia “river”? All the Insular Celtic “river” words I know are from *ab-, not *aq-.
Presumably *-abia would give French –age (as with rage.) I’m not sure that *-apia would (sachant.)
German wiki derives Kamp from Celtic kamb- crooked.
Does the nearby placename Kamegg contradict that?
Well known to British people of a certain age: Worzel Gummidge.
No searches for “gonfaroo” have found any other hits besides that one New Yorker article (well, there’s a French commune called “Gonfaron” which shows up as “Gonfaroo” as an OCR error). Looking for bootlegging slang doesn’t show any similar words that might have been spelled differently. Toxic liquor is “rotgut”, already well known.
Continuing my speculation, I note that goinfreux = gluttonous = glouton = Gulo gulo = wolverine = “this drink will tear your guts out”.
Alas for this notion, French Wikipedia gives no suggestion that goinfre/goinfreux has ever been used to refer to the animal, only glouton, for the European subspecies. The Québécois for the North American subspecies is carcajou, derived from Algonquin Kwi’kwa’ju.
But *abonā is from *h₂ap-h₃on-ah₂ “the one having water”, with the actually PIE “water” root rather than the one that’s limited to Germanic, Italic and maybe Celtic.
Yeah, that’s the standard explanation, and seems rather more likely. By the way, that would be one of about two words where *mb became mp in the High German consonant shift as one would expect; the other is Wampe “fat belly”, the cognate of womb.
It’s also not clear to me why *k would become g in French word-initially.
No idea.
Keep in mind those don’t occur south of Scandinavia (and are limited to the mountains even there). The whole “glutton” complex looks like a translation of the German term, Vielfraß, basically “eat-a-lot”, which is usually interpreted as a 15th-century folk etymology of the “Old Norwegian” fjeldfross “rock/mountain tomcat”.
(I don’t know how much it eats. But it don’t care. It eats what it wants.)
Speaking of folk etymology, I just found the English name quickhatch on Wikipedia, from East Cree kwîhkwahâcêw.
@DM:
Thanks. From PG’s discussions:
they include several European river-names ending in -apa (which might or might not be a Gaulish cognate of aqua, not confirmed by any Gaulish text)
Looks like this *apia “river” is indeed a figment (as indeed is *abia.) But then one would expect no less from someone who thinks the Gauls spoke “ancient Gaelic.”
1. The element “am Kamp” could mean “at the river bend” the adjective cam is crooked but in placenames there is a specific form camas for riverbend.
2. These names in lower Austria need to be traced to their earliest attestation, because the settlement pattern (Celtic replaced by Slavic and Germanic) was a long and dynamic process.
For example Gars am Kamp: the consensus seems to be that the Kamp is Celtic. But is Gars from Slavic “gor” or Germanic “gerade” (giving a placename “straight by the crooked” but OK) or something else? My guess is that this name (compare Gars am Inn, which has an early attestation) is ultimately from PG *gardaz, but this was borrowed very early in to Celtic, and Gars may continue the Celtic word.
Maybe “Gaelic” was somebody’s “correction” of “Gallic.”
I suspect you’re right. I was thinking it might be something like an autocorrection of “Gaulish”, but “Gallic” is much more plausible as a starting point. Still wrong, but much less silly.
French Wikipedia says “le gaulois (autrefois appelé gallique)”, though I don’t recall seeing the language called “Gallic” in English. I expect someone did, though …
Kid—back in my day, we made autocorrect errors by hand!
@David Marjanović: Wampa.
Re the Gaelic/Gallic ambiguity, I thought I had probably previously quoted at this site the relevant excerpt from the liner notes to Steeleye Span’s _Below the Salt_ LP, viz. “So there we was sitting in this dressing room when in comes this guy with glasses and he says, ‘Oim afraid youse got de wrong toitles for de toons,’ and then he goes and rattles off a whole load of Garlic what we couldn’t make out, so we gets the roadies to see him off. Handy things roadies.”
But some googling suggests that my previous quotation was over at Language Log (in 2013), where I further explained: The track this text relates to is a set of jigs said to have been composed by “Trad.” and rightly or wrongly titled “The Bride’s Favourite / Tansey’s Fancy.”
Gaelic and Gallic are in fact exact homophones in my idiolect, and (I think) for Scots in general.
La Cosa Nostra
La Mamma Mia
Here’s an interesting turn-up, directly contra the claim that “gimmick” had its origin in “gimac”; magicians’ devices (I mean, given all the antedating appearances, that seems highly probable, but it’s nice to see additional confirmation from specific examples of negative evidence in usage by magicians themselves).
Fleischman, A. S. Words in Modern Magic. American Speech, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Feb., 1949), pp. 38-42
https://www.jstor.org/stable/486512
And footnote 12 reads:
Speaking of magic catalogues, Google Books turned up a magic book that it claims is from 1927 which has the word “gimmick” all over the place: Magic · Volume 3, by Harlan Tarbell. I wonder now if that might be the first place it occurred, to then spread to the rest of the magic-practicing world?
Someone compiled and uploaded Tarbell’s works to the Internet Archive. There’s no trustworthy copyright, but there is a paragraph in the introductory material that contains:
In the text of the book, “Gimmick” specifically refers to a connector used for rope tricks.
The whole river is called Kamp; it is indeed crooked all over, though that’s not terribly distinctive in that region.
Neither can explain the -s as far as I can see.
Could just be cognate.
+I·D·II·II·II·VVAMBA·℞
Wampe “fat belly”, the cognate of womb
<* LED moment *>
Vielfraß
ahma
Finnish
Etymology
Originally meaning “glutton (one who eats a lot)”, from Proto-Finnic *ahma. Related to dialectal Estonian ahm, Ingrian ahmo, Karelian ahmo, ahmoi, Ludian ahmo, Votic ahmia (~ ahmia) and more distantly to Northern Sami vuosmmis (from Proto-Samic *vuosvēs).
The meaning “wolverine” is possibly a calque from other European languages such as German Vielfraß and Latin gulo.
Pronunciation
IPA(key): /ˈɑhmɑ/, [ˈɑxmɑ]
Rhymes: -ɑhmɑ
Syllabification: ah‧ma
Noun
ahma
wolverine, glutton (Gulo gulo)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ahma
järv
Swedish
Etymology
From Old Swedish iærver, from Old Norse jarfr, from Proto-Norse ᛖᚱᚨᚠᚨᛉ (erafaz), of debated origin. Cognate with Faroese jarvur, Norwegian Nynorsk jerv & Norwegian Bokmål jerv, and possibly related to Old Norse jarpr (“brown”), Old English eorp (“brown; dark, dusky”), from Proto-Germanic *erpaz (“light brown”).
Pronunciation
IPA(key): /jærv/
Homophone: djärv
Noun
järv c
wolverine (Gulo gulo)
järv
屈狸
kuzuri
Japanese
Etymology
From Nivkh кʼузр̌ (kʼuzř).
The kanji spelling is an example of ateji (当て字), used both for the sound values, and for the meanings:
屈 (kuzu, “stooped, bent over”, irregular on’yomi)
狸 (ri, “raccoon dog”, on’yomi)
Pronunciation
(Irregular reading)
(Tokyo) くずり [kùzúrí] (Heiban – [0])[3]
IPA(key): [kɯ̟ᵝzɨᵝɾʲi]
Alternative forms
貂熊 (rare)
Noun
屈狸くずり • (kuzuri)
a wolverine
Usage notes
As with many terms that name organisms, this term is often spelled in katakana, especially in biological contexts, as クズリ.
When spelled in kanji, the 屈狸 spelling appears to be more common.
So that’s what it was
http://languagehat.com/glokaya-kuzdra/
And is the bokr—a wild guess—северный олень (the reindeer)?
juha: ahma
Finnish
Etymology
Originally meaning “glutton (one who eats a lot)”, from Proto-Finnic *ahma. Related to dialectal Estonian ahm, Ingrian ahmo, Karelian ahmo, ahmoi, Ludian ahmo, Votic ahmia (~ ahmia) and more distantly to Northern Sami vuosmmis (from Proto-Samic *vuosvēs).
The meaning “wolverine” is possibly a calque from other European languages such as German Vielfraß and Latin gulo.
If, as suggested, Vielfrass is a late medieval folk-etymological borrowing from Norwegian dial. fjellfross “mountain bear/tomcat”, there’s not much time to establish a calque on the Finnish side. And why would Finnish calque the name of this animal, of all things, from German or Latin? Finnish ought to have perfectly good words for it. Also, how old is the Latin name? If it’s Linnaean, the calque could well be the other way around.
The Latin name is Linnaean, and de:WP says it’s after “the voracious Norse legendary character Gulon”, who is a red link and doesn’t look terribly Norse to me.
That name doesn’t look Norse at all, and it’s not in my Old Norse dictionary, which is otherwise extensive on names of both real and legendary characters. I think you can safely delete that from the article.
Me: And why would Finnish calque the name of this animal, of all things, from German or Latin? Finnish ought to have perfectly good words for it.
Finnish WP:
Of these, ahma, osma and osmo look like different dialectal relexes of the same Uralic word, kätkä is a borrowing from North Sami geatki, and kamppi looks like it could be a borrowing from Early North Germanic “fighter”.
i think the early-20s citations (telephone techs, flautists, etc) and the fleischman & tarbell professional magician evidence make a nice pair. together, they make it look to me like the magicians were looking for a term for strictly mechanical aids to a trick to distinguish them from overtly deceptive rigging. if they hadn’t wanted to make a distinction between more and less ‘honest’ aids, they’d’ve just used “gaff” for both (that being the carnival/variety performance term for the tools used to fake a ‘natural’ wonder). so they pulled in “gimmick”, as a word already current in other contexts. i’d hazard a guess that the boxers and bootleggers did the same thing, but with more of a sense of active trickery, since they didn’t have the near-doublet “gaff” as ready to hand to distinguish it from…
Another meaning of gimmick, in the first few decades of the 20th century, seems to have been something like “guy”, “fellow”, “person”.
===================================================================
Memoirs of France and the Eighty-Eighth Division, 1920, pg 158
[A poem, titled “Le Printemps Est Ici”, attributed to the Lorraine Sentinel (Students, University of Nancy)]
===================================================================
Dramatic Mirror and Theatre World, February 26, 1921, pg 361 (“Broadway Buzz”)
[I wondered if this was the first example of the spelling-pronunciation of “certainly”, but it is not.]
===================================================================
Time Magazine, January 19, 1925
[The overly-specific description here (something like “conformist” or “materialistic”, maybe “square”, to use the slang of a few decades later?) does not seem to quite match up with other usages.]
===================================================================
Miss Letitia’s Profession, by Lupton A. Wilkinson
The North American Review, Vol. 238, No. 1 (Jul., 1934), pp. 61-65
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25114476
[Context for the above: A short story. Miss Letitia is thin and frail, losing weight to some medical condition. She lives a genteel life in a pleasant house on Long Island, and while she has an inheritance, she has also spent her time making something of a career as a “true-life” confessional crime writer, researching the sundry argots of criminals. One day, she finds a burglar stealing the family silver. She snaps out the line cited, which so flummoxes the burglar that he obeys and drops his gun — and as she continues slanging at the burglar, his nerve breaks and he flees.]
My newspaper archive search has found the full list of questions, by the way:
With a Bow to Mr. Edison
New York Times, May 15, 1921
I didn’t find an answer key in that paper, but in The Congressional Digest for November 1928, there is a Glossary of Motion-Picture Terms which says:
I see that the slang dictionary did not have the same answer as the Glossary as to tormentor, which is:
Yow!
Shillaber, now known by the abbreviated form shill, is an utter mystery. There’s even no certainty about where the stress is.
Searching through some old newspaper archives (very arduous, ProQuest has worse OCR than Google, so there are multiple hits on “Chronicle”, for some dumb reason. Also on names like “Dimmick” and “Kimmick”, which at least makes some sense):
=======================================================
One more for “gimmick” as thing:
Boston Daily Globe, May 20, 1917
Lingo of Our Navy Men
=======================================================
One more for “gimmick” as “fellow”; “guy”:
The Pittsburgh Press, May 3, 1921
[Flivver! Now there’s a bit of old slang. But the OED has a cite from 1910.]
Hm. Here’s “gimmick” as a thing in theater, but as nothing to do with lighting.
[Quoting the whole thing because it’s not that long, and amusing]
The Conning Tower
F P A
New – York Tribune , Aug 4, 1921
I see that urbandictionary is ahead of me in citing the sense used in “G-berg and Georgie let their gimmicks go rotten / So they died of hepatitis in upper Manhattan.” Attn dialectologists: that’s slant rhyme. “Rotten” and “Manhattan” don’t really rhyme in the idiolect of the author or AFAIK anyone else’s idiolect.
Again, “gimmick” as a thing, part of a mechanical device.
Burlington Daily Free Press, 09 Feb 1922:
Also: Detroit Free Press, 09 Feb 1922 (accompanied by an illustration of a young child writing in said notebook)(also, slightly different text from above appearance):
Also: Toronto Daily Star, 09 Feb 1922 (no illustration)
Little Benny’s Notebook, by Lee Pape
[ Context: A new clock has been purchased that chimes every 15 minutes. This seems to be some sort of syndicated humorous column, I guess. All spelling and punctuation below is as it appears. ]
Antedating my antedate, I see that the radiator gimmick anecdote posted above appeared earlier in:
Boston Daily Globe, 01 Mar 1908 (which also has an attribution of “Chicago News”)
@DM: “German” is misleading there
Erm, I meant my German isn’t good enough to judge whether ‘Masche’ would be best translated as ‘shtick’.
East Cree kwîhkwahâcêw ‘wolverine’ looks like it must have a transparent etymology. This has cognates all over Cree/Ojibwe, and I looked at some dictionaries of such online, but couldn’t find an etymology anywhere, and the library is closed.
Micmac word for ‘wolverine’ (and also mythical demon which looks like wolverine) is “gigwadju”. In “Indian Place Names of New England”, it is said that “gigwadju” literally means “beast of the mountain”.
Re Adorno and gimmick:
“Das engagierte Kunstwerk entzaubert jenes, das nichts will denn da sein, als Fetisch, als müßige Spielerei solcher, welche die drohende Sintflut gern verschliefen; gar als höchst politisches Apolitisches. Es lenke ab vom Kampf der realen Interessen.”
Theodor W. Adorno: “Engagement”, in: Noten zur Literatur, hrsg. von Rolf Tiedemannn. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1981. (= Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft. 355.), S. 409-430
This is kind of dense; basically it says that a politically engaged work unmasks [entzaubert] one “that has no objective other than to exist” as a fetish, as a time-wasting [müßig] gimmick [Spielerei] of those who want to sleep through the coming Apocalypse [drohender Sintflut], as a highly political non-political work, which distracts viewers from the struggle.
I think Stu is better with texts like this, so my translation may be incorrect. It is possible that Adorno said something similar in A.T or that the author of the New Yorker was thinking of this essay.
Thanks for finding and explicating that!
Speaking of translated gimmicks,
“Über die mechanischen Grundlagen der Thermodynamik,” Ann. d. Phys. 33 (1910), 225-274
On the mechanical foundations of thermodynamics
By Paul Hertz
Translated by D. H. Delphenich
Original German:
(The claim is footnoted as being said by H. A. Lorentz)
What’s the function of the special type (bold/spaced) for Gibbs?
That’s a now rather old-fashioned way of distinguishing proper nouns in German.
Huh. Seems kind of silly to carry it over into English, where there is no such tradition.
@hat
Addison&Steele (or their printer) seem to have capitalised proper names and italicised them, to distinguish them from an ordinary capitalised noun e.g Farmer (which could also be a surname). You can see this in Wikipedia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spectator_(1711)
OK, but that was three hundred years ago. If D. H. Delphenich chose to imitate Addison and Steele in all aspects of his writing, that would be one thing, but to me this just seems pointless. We know Gibbs is a proper name.
What’s the function of the special type (bold/spaced) for Gibbs?
There’s no italic version of Black Letter/ Fraktur. Extra spacing was the best they could do.
Sure, I understand about the German; what is bizarre to me is the felt need to reproduce it in English. I don’t see the point.
I mean, as far as I understand it, the entire function in German is to indicate that it’s a proper name. We don’t need that in English, since we don’t capitalize other nouns.
It used to be (and maybe still is) that the Daily Torygraph would print all proper names in bold in its editorials. To give the paper a respectable 19th-century look, I suppose.
I have two comments. First, I was curious how proper adjectives would have been handled. (For example, the ensemble of many parallel systems introduced and described by Gibbs is known as the “Gibbsian ensemble.”) So I looked at another pseudo-randomly selected paper [M. v. Smoluchowski, “Zur kinetischen Theorie der Transpiration und Diffusion verdünnter Gase”—another article about statistical thermodynamics] that appeared in Annalen der Physik in 1910. On the first page, I found the answer, in the form of the adjective “M a x w e l l sche.”* So only the proper name was kerned out, with the adjectival suffix spaced normally.
Second, I think it is interesting to see the Gibbsian ensemble called an “analytischen Kunstgriff” or “analytical gimmick” (although “analytical trick”) might be a better English rendering. I am not sure how critical Paul Hertz intended this to sound in 1910—quite early in his career, before his work, as part of the Vienna Circle, on the foundations of statistical mechanics. Fleeing the Nazis in 1938, Hertz came to Yale to be part of a 1939 centennial commemoration of Gibbs’s work, but he became and ill and died without actually participating in a significant way.
However, it is certainly not wrong to call the Gibbsian ensemble an “analytical gimmick.” The idea is that, to determine the average behavior of a macroscopic system, about which only a small number macroscopic measurements can be made (mass, volume, temperature, pressure, etc.), it is suitable to average over the behavior of all possible systems whose states are consistent with the small number of known facts about the system. Of course, this is not the kind of average behavior that anyone is actually interested in, in actual practice. What Gibbs claimed was that the real object of interest—the time averaged behavior of a single system—could be replaced by an ensemble average over all possible consistent systems. This is clearly a gimmick, of a sort. Moreover, while the replacement of a time average with an ensemble average can be reasonably well justified if the time average is taken over very long times (long enough for a given system to explore nearly all possible allowed states—which is actually absurdly long, nepers of nepers longer than the lifetime of the universe), the remarkable thing is that the time average agrees with the ensemble average even when the times involved are quite short. A handful of collision times is typically enough, so any time average over longer than 10 ns for a typical gas sample can be accurately replaced with an ensemble average.
The resolution of the problem came from the original observation by Ludwig Boltzmann, later augmented by Gibbs and then Edwin Jaynes, that nearly all states of a system with a macroscopic number of degrees of freedom (i.e., thermodynamically large) are very close to the state of a system with a canonical** distribution. Therefore, wherever a system starts out, it takes only a short time evolution to bring it into an essentially canonical distribution state, because those states so utterly outnumber the noncanonical distribution states. Unfortunately however, it is very hard to make this rigorous for anything beyond artificially simple systems.
* The noun phrase, in full, was “M a x w e l l sche Geschwindigkeitsverteilungsgesetz,” which is transparent enough that Google Translate has no trouble interpreting it correctly as “Maxwell’s speed distribution law.”
** A canonical distribution (of which the M a x w e l l sche Geschwindigkeitsverteilungsgesetz was the first one discovered) is one in which the probability of being in a state with energy E is proportional to exp(–E/kT), an exponential factor which is known as the “Boltzmann factor.”
Annalen der Physik was not printed using Fraktur. Not the 1910 paper I looked at; not the 1799 first volume. I doubt that it ever was.
For context, the original page, and the translation.
I must complain about how the footnote numbering resets after each page rather than continuing from (1) onward for the entire paper.
Spacing rather than italics seems to be pretty common in German academic works at least of a certain genre and vintage. Pulling the first few German works off my shelves at random, I see that Kleinschmidt’s Greenlandic grammar does it for e m p h a s i s in the German text, while citing actual Greenlandic forms in italics. My somewhat ancient copy of von Soden’s Akkadian grammar does the same: spacing for emphasis, italics for Akkadian. Klingenhaben’s Fulfulde grammar is similar. (None of these is in Fraktur; the sole work I possess in Fraktur is a copy of Faust* that belonged to my grandfather; he did have an appropriately-Fraktur Also Sprach Zarathustra, but I don’t know what’s become of it.)
Mind you, none of these does anything peculiar with authors’ names.
*EDIT: Oops, no: it’s not in Fraktur at all. Quite right too: Goethe transcends such parochialism. The Nietzsche, though, was. But also my grandfather’s copy of the German translation of Pickwick Papers, about which there are family legends …
But as I noted, he was quoting — or rather, translating/paraphrasing Lorentz:
“H. A. Lorentz, Ges. Abh., pp. 286 and 287, Atti del 4. Congr. dei Mat. Roma 1 (1908), pp. 152. ”
Per Lorentz’s full bibliography, that latter work is:
1909h – “Le partage de l’énergie entre la matière pondérable et l’éther.” In Atti del IV Congresso Internazionale dei Matematici (Roma, 6–11 Aprile 1908). Vol. 1, pp. 145–165. G. Castelnuovo, ed. Roma: R. Accademia dei Lincei, 1909. Repr. of 1908b with add. note. – repr.: 1934b.15 (C.P. 7, pp. 317–343).
The Atti del 4. Congr. dei Mat. Roma can also be found in the Internet Archive.
If I am parsing it correctly, what Lorentz wrote was “artifice mathématique”. Does that translate exactly to “analytischen Kunstgriff”, or is there some nuance being added or lost?
I note that the style for Atti (Italian scholarly works of that period in general?) is to render names in small caps rather than spaced text. Although it isn’t consistent, or at least, I can’t figure out the exact rule. For example, on page 48 of the text, the name “Marcolongo” is given without small caps, then immediately after is:
“Marcolongo” is small caps, but “Lagrange” is not.
But on the same page:
“Loria” and “(Moritz) Cantor” are in small caps.
Who can say?
Y: East Cree kwîhkwahâcêw ‘wolverine’ looks like it must have a transparent etymology.
Yes, it has…
SFR: Micmac word for ‘wolverine’ (and also mythical demon which looks like wolverine) is “gigwadju”. In “Indian Place Names of New England”, it is said that “gigwadju” literally means “beast of the mountain”.
The word clearly is cognate with Norw. fjellfrass “tomcat/bear of the mountain”, with the correspondence Gmc. f- ~ Alg. K-. I’ve not been able to identify the Oti-Volta reflex.
the Oti-Volta reflex
It’s clearly compounded from the elements seen in Kusaal gik “dumb” and wabʋg “elephant” (with Scandi-Congo *dj -> b, as regularly in Oti-Volta.) The semantic shift from “big dumb object” to “mounainous beast/beast of a mountain” to “mountain beast/beast of the mountain” is straightforward.
The Ginormous Wolverphant is related to the Heffalumph and the Colossal Boojum (not to be confused with the Spectacular Boomjar or the Spectacled Bamjab), and is much sought after by Bakers, Bellmen, Batmen, Batsmen, and Ontologists. It can occasionally be spotted near or in Trondheim, Tanzania, Tibet, Tacoma, and Cleveland.
Do not taunt the Ginormous Wolverphant.
Marcolongo, Di un trattato di Meccanica inedito anteriore alla Mécanique analytique di Lagrange.
“Marcolongo” is small caps, but “Lagrange” is not.
Maybe the reason is that “Lagrange” is part of the quoted title of the article.
On Kunstgriff: for me, it doesn’t have the slightly disapproving overtones of “gimmick”, but that’s perhaps because for me it’s a literary word that’s not part of my active lexicon.
I’ve always interpreted Kunstgriff more as “artful trick” connotation-wise (Kunst: “art”), but it’s nowhere near my active vocabulary either.
Emphasis used to express conventionalized respect for a u t h o r i t a h .
Even today there are journals that render all last names in large & small capitals.
Yes, into the mid-late 20th century that was the default for emphasis – and the bar for what warrants emphasis in the first place was a lot lower than it has been in English in centuries.
@David Marjanović: Rendering names in small caps is, if not particularly common in English, at least familiar. It’s only the spacing out of the letters for emphasis that looks weird to those used to English conventions.
An antedate of “gimmick” from Electrical Review, March 11, 1893:
While I am 99.99999% sure that this was not meant to be a serious report, it nevertheless seems clear to me that in context, “gimmick” is used to mean “mechanism or (sub)component of a mechanism”.
Great find! Here’s the actual clip:
@Owlmirror: There’s a long list of terms for structural, mechanical, or electromechanical parts used humorously there. The only one I was completely unfamiliar with was whippletree, so I looked it up and found that it was an obsolete synonym of singletree—which looked more familiar, but I didn’t know the meaning of either. It is apparently an American variant of the more natural looking swingletree, “a wooden or metal bar used to balance the pull of a draught horse or other draught animal when pulling a vehicle.”
I also looked looked up dewflicker, which I was familiar with, but was curious to know more about. The word is similar in origin and meaning to to doohickey or doojigger—which, in retrospect, seems like it ought to be obvious. However, Green’s Dictionary of Slang lists a secondary meaning of “the foreskin,” which I assume to be of eggcorn-ish origin. However, for the only attestation given (published in 1953, but from a folklore and song collection—so undoubtedly actually older) the meaning could equally well be the entire “penis.”
Owlmirror, this is great. How come it didn’t come up in previous searches? What search gimm… trick did you use?
Wow! Thanks for the find.
Couldn’t stop reading Electrical Review of 1893, everything in it is so fascinating.
Even boring corporate article on new president of Western Union is written in amazing style.
Gen.T.T. Eckert who was elected president of the Western Union Telegraph Company on March 8… is a genial, self-reliant, approachable disciplinarian of magnificent physique and splendid executive ability.
Why people don’t write press releases like that anymore?
Reminds me of David Eddyshaw’s Auden quote in the other thread:
Yes, but it used to be much more common in German.
My math schoolbooks rendered all names in plain all-caps, including ARCHIMEDES for example.
Because, in 20th-century culture, a man saying another man has a “magnificent physique” thereby outs himself as gay.
That would still let men write like that about women, but it soon became painfully obvious how one-sided the result was, and so it was abandoned as sexist (after a few decades).
And now in the after times, praising a woman’s physique is demeaning so we shouldn’t very well praise the men either innit? I’ve often been assumed gay for other reasons, like not chasing girls hard enough, so that’s not what’s stopping me.
Australian rules football does seem to select for some impressive (male) physiques in very minimal shorts, I’ve recommended the watching of it to my old Mum. I don’t know if they have women’s sides, they don’t get air time on Eurosport if so.
What bugs me personally about it is that beauty really does lie in the eye of the beholder. Any such praise of anyone’s physique only tells us details about the speaker’s personal taste that nobody cares about.
Wikipedia knows.
There are commercial interests caring enough about those details to try to tell us what they should be.
I like the 1915 photograph on that page, for the fact that the ball is not in it but clearly up in the air somewhere to the left. (Though I actually wanted to see what shape it was). Being a sports photographer in the age of long-travel triggers was clearly a challenge.
I would suppose that Evan Osnos’ use of “errata” in that way springs from the usual reporting of errors in a text book/journal article as a series of notes in an appendix/section (similar to the usage as foot’notes’ and such) – and so “errata” gets conflated with “notes from all over” as a reference to a collation of odd, maybe topical, extracts/excerpts from foreign media ‘wired’ in for further consideration perhaps as story suggestions to follow up (a foreign reporters jetsam/flotsam).
See D-AW’s comment above, with Osnos’s answer.
First, I was curious how proper adjectives would have been handled. (For example, the ensemble of many parallel systems introduced and described by Gibbs is known as the “Gibbsian ensemble.”) So I looked at another pseudo-randomly selected paper
I just took a look at Owlmirror’s “original page” and noticed that a few lines above “G i b b s” is “P e a n osche Kurve” (repeated in footnote 1).
Pfft, I got blocked from further editing of the previous because I played around too much with Unicode line breaks. You will have to infer line endings in that stanza, it’s not hard.
But to the crux: All proper surnames in running text are spatiated, but not first names. Also I found one instance (Part 6, The First Love, a comedy by Scribe translated by I. L. Heiberg) where the names (including initials) are in heavier weight on the title page but not in the volume’s table of contents.
This was “the previous” but that instance got spam-filtered, knowing that may improve understanding…
There’s no italic version of Black Letter/ Fraktur — so they used antiqua for French words. (Or English, I suppose, if ever they should demean themselves so).
Checking my 1843 edition of Either-Or, I find the first section (Δ Ι Α Ψ Α Λ Μ Α Τ Α) with the dedication ad se ipsum and a French verse on the reverse of that page both in antiqua. Also Roman numbers.
(What I have is actually a 1937 photographic reprint, but with the added front matter in Fraktur as well, even the “Printed in Denmark” line that was usual then. It was given to me by my grandmother who took up bookbinding at the municipal activity center in the 80s, and she was able to gold-stamp the spine in Fraktur as well so they must have had a case for that).
I wondered if perhaps an alternate spelling of “gimmick” might have existed, and found an unusual one-off in Google Books, on a page treating with the country of Morocco, and specifically a section on that country’s languages. As it happened, the Internet Archive has the same book with a more legible scan. I attempt to transcribe the words as they appear, with late 18th-c spelling, abbreviations, italics, punctuation, and use of the long “s”.
https://archive.org/details/b30454967_0002/page/901/mode/2up
A Universal Geographical Dictionary; or Grand Gazetteer; of General, Special, Antient and Modern Geography [… the title wanders along …], by Andrew Brice of Exeter. In Two Volumes. Vol. 2. (1759)
Pg 901:
I’m actually not sure I understand it. Is “Moorish” what we would now call “Berber”? Is “Arabesk” (Arabesque?) something distinct from Arabic (OED says that “Arabesque” once meant “vernacular Arabic”)? What else beside Spanish is mixed to make “Gimmik”? The OED and WikiP suggests that “Tamacette” means Tamashek or Tamasheq.
(Going by WikiP on the topic — I know nothing myself)
I wish I knew what Brice’s sources of information were. I cannot find anything that “Gimmik” might correspond to, and I’m wondering if this instance of “Gimmik” might be something like the Scythian/Sethian confusion I found elsewhere.
Geography anatomiz’d, 1737: “The trading People, especially in their Dealing with Strangers, do use a certain Jargon, compounded chiefly of Spanish and Portugueze, not unlike the Lingua Franca among the Turks.”
I’m wondering if someone discussing the trade language was German, and the actual word used was a variant of Gemisch, which was misapprehended.
Say, I wonder if “Gemisch” is also the source of the “Gimmick” drunk in December 1926 (New Yorker piece cited above at November 20, 2020 at 1:46 pm)?
That does mean “mixture”, though, outside of Yiddish.
Owlmirror: Your quote about Morocco is fascinating. My interpretation: “Moorish” = Berber, “Arabesk” =Arabic (both the written and the vernacular form), “Gimmik”, A.k.a. “Lingua franca”, is indeed lingua franca (which was more Italian-influenced in the Eastern Mediterranean and more Spanish-influence in the Western Mediterranean, so referring to it, as is the case here, as Spanish-influenced in Morocco makes sense).
The mystery to me is this “Tamacette” language (“jargon”): the geographical location (North of Mount Atlas) makes it unlikely this has anything to do with Tamashek/Tamasheq.
If I had to guess, I would guess (since its speakers boast of descending from Christians) that it is a very distinctive, heavily mixed language variety transplanted from the Iberian peninsula and which to Moroccan Arabic and Berber speakers seemed to be a wholly separate language (A Romance variety heavily influenced by Arabic and/or Berber? A Berber variety heavily influenced by Arabic and/or Romance? An Arabic variety heavily influenced by Romance and/or Berber?). The juxtaposition of “Tamacette” and “lingua franca” as jargons makes me suspect that the former was either a Romance variety or Romance-influenced.
(A more exciting but much less likely possibility, considering how late this source is, is that this Tamacette language is the last known echo of North African Romance).
“Tamacett” is more likely Tamazight.
@David Marjanović:
That . . . was kinda exactly the point? Moroccan trade language “Gimmik”: a language mixture. New Yorker “Gimmick”: an alcohol mixture. Or so I’m guessing, in both cases, I mean.
Checking my dictionary (Harkavy), I don’t see anything that suggests a wildly different meaning in Yiddish. Besides “mixture”, it also has “mash”.
What do you think gemisch means in Yiddish?
Actually, I should clarify, because Harkavy has an interesting redirect to the next entry: “געמיש=געמישעכץ” ; “gemisch=gemischechts”.
“Gemischechts”?
@Y/Etienne: Your ideas about Tamacette are obviously more learned than my hasty and ignorant guesses.
I note that “Geography anatomiz’d,” also has “Arabesque, or corrupt Arabick”. There’s a lot of pejoration about language in these old books. Hm.
I had a vague recollection that it had a more metaphorical meaning… if not, great 🙂
I can’t make sense of that.
As will immediately be apparent to LH readers, the trade language Gimmik is obviously a debased form of Cymric, i.e. Welsh.
But seriously, I wonder if this apperently Moroccan name Gimmik for a mercantile jargon comes a local form of Arabic جمرك “customs, customs house” (Turkish gümrük).
Sort of a note for further research:
It occurred to me that “gimmick”, as a mechanism/part of a mechanism, might derive from Yiddish/Dutch/other Germanic: gemacht/gemaakt (artificial – artifice?). There might be early spelling variants like “gemmock”; “gimmuck”; “gimmock”.
The “gemisch”/”mixture” suggested meaning could have spelling variants like “gemisk”; “gimmisk”; “gimmix”.
@David Marjanović:
Darn. I was half-hoping that you would post “Oh, yes, that’s an obvious example of the German variant of [someplace].”
Gemischechz is mentioned on p. 283 of Historische jiddische Semantik (Timm and Beckmann, 2012), defined as “Gemisch, Durcheinander”, for what that’s worth.
Huh. If we assume the -ik is a Romance gentilic suffix, maybe Gimmik could be `Ajam-ik “non-Arab-ic”?
“Gimmick” — it seemed probable to me that the word derived from an older sense of “gimcrack”, but I” guess the OED needs more than a few letters of similarity and a similar older meaning.”
—-
So far as I can tell, the first phoneme of gimmick is universally /g/ and that of gimcrack universally /dʒ/. That would be a major obstacle to deriving either of the words from the other.
Re wolverine names:
Also borrowed into English. TLFI, OED (revised 2019), AHD, and Random House all say the source language was Montagnais (OED is perhaps over-specific: “Western Montagnais (Pointe Bleue) kwa:hkwa:če:w”). In case it wasn’t already obvious, that’s cognate with the Cree source of “quickhatch” mentioned above. I’m guessing the etymologists pin it down to (Western) Montagnais/Innu because in that language there’s an a in the first syllable, where all the others have i or e.
The online Innu Dictionary corroborates this word:
A long name like that does seem like it must have some compositional meaning, but unfortunately, this source:
… is dismissed by Ives Goddard as amateur guesswork.
Micmac gigwadju is also attested as referring to the badger, and so is “carcajou” in English, which is a natural sort of shift. On the other hand, I think transferring “kinkajou” (also cognate) to a Central American fruit-eating, tree-living mammal was ridiculous, but it’s too late, the deed is done.
At least the mammal is reasonably closely related – it’s basically a raccoon.
“the geographical location (North of Mount Atlas) makes it unlikely this has anything to do with Tamashek/Tamasheq.”
I don’t know where is Mount Atlas:( But possibly it is “the Riffians, known still in history as Riff pirates, inhabit the northern portions of Mount Atlas.” The word is /θmazixt/ in modern Riffian.
Yes, Y and drasvi are both obviously correct – the word is simply T(a)mazight, whether the specific reference is to the Rif or to somewhere more central.
-t > -ette is cute.
Are there more in-depth accounts (maybe local ones?) of the linguistic landscape of 18th century Morocco?
Searching for spelling variants found some interesting hits.
https://books.google.com/books?id=8bdZAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA275
Atlas Geographus: Or, A Compleat System of Geography, Ancient and Modern (etc.): For Africa ; Containing What is of most Use in Bleau, Varenius, Cellarius, Cluverius, Baudrand, Brietius, Sanson, &c. ; With The Discoveries and Improvements of the best Modern Authors to this Time
by John Nutt, 1714
Thank you, Mr. Nutt, for putting in a source. Although I don’t know if Dapper would actually have more information.
And it’s still unclear if “Gemick” derives from “`Ajam-ik” or “gemisch”. Oh, well.
(WikiP says: “Taroudant is a city in the Sous Valley in south eastern Morocco.”)
ſopke > ſpoke
Sigh. Yes, yes. English as she is not sopke. Hat, if you could fix the metathesis?
Done, and I thank you both for the chkucle!
Another spelling variant I searched on was “gimmix”, which had a hit from 1917:
The Green Book Magazine, Volume 18, iss. 2, pg 359
Story-Press association, 1917
The Come-Back of Kayo Bill, by Chesley Clyde Caldwell
Google Books only had a snippet view, but the Internet Archive has the whole thing:
https://archive.org/details/sim_green-book-magazine_1917-08_18_2/page/358/mode/2up
Green’s Dictionary of Slang says that “gimmick” meant foolish person, specifically. Well, maybe. I wonder if maybe rather than “foolish”, the original sense was “mixed up, confused”, and derived from “gemisch”?
Eh, more speculation.
Fascinating to see the trope of Berber being an unwritten and unwritable language already around so early – the more so given that there were plenty of Tashelhiyt Berber manuscripts circulating in the early 1700s in the Sous Valley.
“so early”
The source, I think.
Awesome!
What means “jatan ſe”, which the margin note corrects to “si uantan”?
It’s a form of jactarse ‘to boast, brag.’
the hand of Google Books
(previously I only knew fingertips…)
Unfortunately, I don’t know much German (I can guess at a few things, especially obvious cognates and Latin terms).
This paragraph seems to be discussing the suffix, but with many scholarly abbreviations that trip up Google Translate & DeepL. Also, I probably made typos which worsened confusion.
Original, retyped by me, probably with mistakes:
Googletrans:
DeepL:
[‘colective’ is in the DeepL output. Don’t look at me about that one]
Anyone who actually knows German is welcome to provide a better translation, preferably from the original page.
Is the original page online somewhere?
Odd how DeepL just drops the participial construction in the first sentence. Here’s my attempt without looking at the Google or DeepL outputs:
“Here, -ėch is identical with the Upper German collective suffix -ach < OHG -ahi, which is still represented in dialects; -ėcht is an extension, attested in German as well, that has made it all the way into the German common language in isolated cases like Kehricht (Henzen 1965: § 88.3); yet, gemischecht is not to be found in the Lexer, the Findebuch or the Deutsches Wörterbuch [I think that’s Grimm’s dictionary]. Finally, to explain the extension to -echz in Yiddish, it will not likely be necessary to employ cross-breeding with the Central German -z(e) (on which see Henzen op. cit. § 88.2). Rather, as is well known, the inflectional ending -s of the substantivized neuters (see above in Part A, § 25) has in Yiddish an inclination to add itself without justification to neuters in -t: Standard Yiddish [I guess] dos gezolt / gezolts ‘salary’ [apparently cognate with Zoll “toll”, zollen “pay metaphorical things like attention”], dos gericht / gerichts ‘course of a meal’ [Gericht: “a dish”], thus also to -echt.”
The dialectological ė represents /e/, the default umlaut product of *a, as opposed to /ɛ/, the inherited *e; the reason OHG -ahi occurs with and without umlaut is that the h, i.e. /x/ inherited from Proto-Germanic (probably [χ] at the time), blocked umlaut to /e/ in Upper German (…though the outcome then should still have been MHG /æ/, and I have no idea what would happen to that later in any dialect in such an unstressed position). I think z is consistently used for monomorphemic /ts/ even in the transcriptions of Yiddish. Kehricht “filth with a large trash component” is “common” only in the sense of being literary; I don’t think I’ve ever heard it said out loud. “As is well known” is my translation of ja; “after all” would fit less well this time.
That’s an intriguing representation of the erroneous single L in the input.
it will not likely be necessary to employ cross-breeding with the Central German -z(e)
Isn’t that more commonly called contamination?
Yes. I was tired and got too literal.
@David Marjanović:
Keith Ivey linked to it above (August 31, 2022 at 4:30 pm).
Does this work for you?
https://books.google.com/books?id=Ji9XFg5IFoEC&pg=PA283
It actually doesn’t work consistently for me (I get “You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.” for page 282), but there are sneaky tricks using the browser Developer Tools that I can use to access the page image when I get that message.
Or are sneaky tricks even necessary? I just clicked on the “magnify” icon, and it showed the page. Does that work on your browser?
The publisher page has an English overview of the book:
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110945034/html#overview
I note that cheyder derives from Hebrew. The German overview of the book transliterates it as Chejder.
Hm. Looking closely, the German overview seems to be longer than the English one (has slightly more information).
the German overview seems to be longer than the English one (has slightly more information).
German overviews (such as WiPe articles) often have more information on topics not bound to the German or English languages. For example Greek and Latin authors, and European history. The bonds of culture set you free.
Too Much Information is not a biggy here. The bane of all nations is usually that information needed is not provided. Too Little Relevant Information is what you get from news sources and politicians.
“Geography anatomiz’d, 1737: “The trading People, especially in their Dealing with Strangers, do use a certain Jargon, compounded chiefly of Spanish and Portugueze, not unlike the Lingua Franca among the Turks.”
“But seriously, I wonder if this apperently Moroccan name Gimmik for a mercantile jargon comes a local form of Arabic جمرك “customs, customs house” (Turkish gümrük).”
“Huh. If we assume the -ik is a Romance gentilic suffix, maybe Gimmik could be `Ajam-ik “non-Arab-ic”?”
Can lingua franca itself be a borrowing? “Franks” was the usual way to refer to Europeans in the Middle East.
@David Marjanović:
Well, dang. I just realized that was my fault. The term “Kollektivsuffix” was correctly spelled with 2 “L”s on the page, but was hyphenated between the two “L”s, and I just kept missing it while checking my typing, or typoing.
I note, as a separate data point, that Google Trans offers “gemish” as a Yiddish translation for “mixture”, and “gemisht” as a translation for “mixed”, which makes me think that the modern vernacular does not use “gemischechtz”. I suspect it was included in Harkavy because the term was in the Yiddish biblical translations.
And another separate data point, it’s interesting that Google actually translated “gemischecht” in the source as “mixed”. It seems to default to autocorrecting (perceived) mistakes.
The earliest gemique I was able to find is Jean Mocquet (French WP).
And also Quneitra:
Aljamía comes to mind, though probably irrelevantly.
@LH, yes, Lameen suggesed the same above.
It makes sense, but do/did Berber and Arabic speakers actually refer so to European languages?
(European langauges were not the only “weird” langauges…)
So he did! But that was over a week ago, and the buffer memory has been wiped.
Yes, thanks! It turns out ė is most likely a matter of transliteration, the Hebrew letters (and probably niqqudim) being rendered in an extremely diacritic-rich way that allows full reconstruction of the multifarious original spellings – though it’s explained on p. 693, which I can’t see this week.
Why the /-ik/ of Gémique? Given that Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian were the common trade languages and the sources of Lingua Franca, why not /-iko~a/? Was Catalan significant? Or is the form a gallicized version of an earlier /d͡ʒemiko/?
Timm’s book is on L****n. The transcription has a distinct symbol where the Yiddish letter is distinct, or where it represents a reflex of a distinct MHG sound or Hebrew/Aramaic source, with some 60 symbols and digraphs altogether. ė is י (yod) when it represents “mhd. e in freier Stellung und mhd. ē, auch für entrundetes mhd. œ; Indifferenzvokal”
Y, I think because Jean Mocquet wrote in French. Dapper directly references Mocquet…
Ah, so ė can mean basically anything in linguistic terms. Thanks.
Why the /-ik/ of Gémique?
See Henry de Castries (1909) Les Sources inédites de l’histoire du Maroc, series 1, volume 2, p. 393, footnote 3 here.
Aha, the smoking gun!
Doesn’t it mean the reduced /e/? Another “Indifferenzvokal” is transcribed as e̍, when it is not marked with a Yiddish letter. E.g. unse̍rė is /unzǝrǝ/, spelled אונזרי in the particular source quoted.
As far as I now understand, it means any /e/, /ɛ/ or /ǝ/ that is spelled with a yod in the particular source quoted.
(I wonder if e̍, which is by definition reconstructed, may mean zero as well. Syncopated unsre has been pretty common in German, though it vanished from the standard in the 20th century.)
A google snippet:
Abraham I. LAREDO, Les taqanot des Juifs expulsés de Castille au Maroc.
Régime matrimonial et successoral, trad. de l’espagnol par Elie Malka et
David AMSELEM, Casablanca, 1953. (Extrait de la « Revue Marocaine de
Droit », février 1953).
Il faut remercier MM. Malka et Amselem d’avoir faii connaître aux
lecteurs français cet article d’un Tangérois érudit, paru en 1948 dans la
revue espagnole Safarad.
1 On sait que les communautés juives du Maroc, qui avaient été ruinées par
les persécutions des Almohades, reçurent un afflux de sang neuf avec l’émigration
de leurs coreligionnaires d’Espagne, expulsés en 1492.
Ces Israélites espagnols devaient constituer désormais l’élite du judaïsme
marocain. Mais la fusion des deux éléments ne se fit pas sans heurts :
l’autochtone appelait l’Espagnol « romi » ou « ajami », celui-ci appelait le
Marocain « forastero ». Les nouveaux venus gardèrent longtemps l’usage
de leur langue maternelle. Dans les villes du nord, où ils furent en majorité,
ils l’ont même conservé jusqu’à nos jours.
C’est sur le plan juridique que le conflit fut le plus vif. Les Espagnols
avaient leurs institutions et leurs coutumes propres et
And one more, this time complete.
Elajimi en pays conquis
En cette nouvelle année, intéressons-nous aux « étrangers ». C’est-à-dire aux Azimi, Elajimi, Alazimi et autres Lajimi. Dont le patronyme est un dérivé du diminutif arabe « al ajami », appellation que les musulmans donnaient aux pays conquis de langue étrangère, cela par opposition à ceux qu’ils nommaient « Al Arab » (les Arabes). Au Maroc (dont viennent généralement tous les Elajimi et dérivés), ce sont les Juifs de langue arabe qui ont nommé ainsi leurs coreligionnaires venus d’Espagne. Au Maroc aussi , où grâce à une prononciation qui est propre aux Juifs locaux le « j » s’est transformé en « z » ; d’où les Lazimi et les Alazimi du départ. Plusieurs rabbins ont porté ce nom : Avraham Alajimi à Méknès au XVIIIe siècle ; Eliahou Elajimi, kabbaliste, né en 1871, et qui fut l’un des dirigeants de la communauté marocaine de Jérusalem jusqu’à sa mort en 1921 ; ou bien encore Mimon Alajimi, cabaliste de Meknès au XIXe siècle.
Pour continuer dans les étrangers, citons les Ruimi, Arruimi ou Errouimy dont le nom est dérivé du mot « aromi », le romain en arabe. Là encore, ce sont les Juifs arabophones du Maroc qui ont désigné par cette appellation ceux qui parlaient espagnol (ou toute autre langue européenne). Pour la petite histoire, les premiers « Romi » dont l’histoire a retenu l’existence se nommaient Salomon et sa femme Régina. Ceux – ci quittèrent Barcelone en 1492, dans une galère, lors de l’expulsion des Juifs d’Espagne. Ils furent presque aussitôt capturés par un pirate venu de Nice, avant d’être rachetés et délivrés à Marseille au mois d’août de la même année. ⚫ CATHERINE GARSON.
Là il fiſt venir un Iuif pour ſeruir de truchemẽt en langue Gemique (qui eſt Eſpagnol ou Portugais corrompu) que ie ſçauois….
Le Chelubin qui eſt à dire le Seineur de là qui ſçauoit vn peu de la langue Gemique (qui eſt vn Italien corrompu) parla pour moy…
(Là il fit venir un juif pour servir de Truchement en langue Gemique ( qui est Espagnol ou Portugais corrompu ) que je sçavais….
Le Chelubin[30] qui est à dire le Seigneur de là qui sçavait un peu de la langue Gémique (qui est un Italien corrompu) parla pour moi…
…[30]. Transcription de “Celebi”. (From Jocelyne Dakhlia · 2008 · Lingua franca :Hidtoire d’une langue métisse en Méditerranée))
links:
French 1645 with clickable index
English 1696 1696
French 1617 with horrible book vandalism (and mysterious Signs on a club in the vandalised picture).
I’ve been wondering if there’s a connection between the Spanish+Portuguese mix of Gemique/Gemick/Gimick/Azimi/Elajimi/Alazimi/Lajimi/&c and the Spanish(+Portuguese+others) mix of Ladino/Judesmo/Judaeo-Espanyol. It seems plausible that there would be.
The WikiP article on Judaeo-Spanish links to a page on a distinct Western dialect of the language spoken in North Africa called Haketia.
The Hebrew WP page on Haketia contains most of the same information as the English one. It notes that Haketia shares the hypocoristic -ito with Iberian Spanish, in contrast with -iko of the more conservative Ladino of the eastern Mediterranean.
a connection between the Spanish+Portuguese mix of Gemique/Gemick/Gimick/Azimi/Elajimi/Alazimi/Lajimi/&c and the Spanish(+Portuguese+others) mix of Ladino/Judesmo/Judaeo-Espanyol
gemique seems like a maghrebi descendent/offshoot of djudezmo (just picking my favorite spelling variations here, not making an argument), so it’d make sense to me to think of it as a more-mixed sibling to (k)haketia.
a not-exactly-parallel could be papiamento, which if i’m remembering right is a judezmo-lexified creole that emerged around the same time.
Pierre Davity (French WP),
https://books.google.com/books?id=ytEo0Z_-D9AC&q=gemique
https://books.google.com/books?id=RS0Y8vMS0AwC&q=gemique
A gold vein of guys who are not in the English Wikipedia…
This is great:
So we learn from this meager sample that Gémique is kinda Italian.
Mišmiš is Arabic for apricot, so what the difference is between the michemis and the abricot? And what is the Apricot Of Doom?
Today, there are abricots.
Boukrah, fil michemis.
I have no answer to the question, but seeing it made me wonder if the famous Arabic phrase might have been influenced by Judaeo-Islamic eschatology.
Bukrah fil Masīḥ?
Apricots, as members of the Prunus genus, have amygdalin in their kernels, which becomes cyanide when ingested. Maybe Europeans were eating the kernels as well as the fruit, and sometimes overdosing themselves?
The WikiP page notes that there are multiple subspecies/cultivars of the fruit, so perhaps michemis and abricot were attempts to refer to distinct cultivars.
WikiP has a separate page for apricot kernels:
Etymology of apricot, per WikiP:Apricot:
Apricots are precocious?
Random apricot fact:
From one of the sources:
Apricots are post hoc ergo propter hoc?
That is truly remarkable.
On the first point, why would someone want to eat apricot kernels in the first place?
Most people would avoid something known to be poisonous. Some, more willing to tempt fate, might try it anyway. Others still might might be unaware of the toxicity. Especially in the 16th-17th centuries.
I’m much more surprised that in the late 20th century someone thought it would be a good idea to package these toxic kernels up and sell them. Were apricot kernels eaten domestically in Pakistan (and are they eaten there even now?), or were they trading on ignorance? Or were they trading on the gullibility of laetrile fans? (it cures/prevents cancer! It can’t be bad to eat.)
WikiP:Amygdalin has:
(bolding mine)
Holy freaking grift.
Hat: why would someone want to eat apricot kernels in the first place?
Why not? We do eat almonds.
Bitter almonds are toxic. Sweet almonds are safe to eat. The same goes for bitter and sweet apricot kernels, respectively, though from what I can gather, sweet apricot kernels are not safe in the same quanta as sweet almonds.
I eventually became vaguely aware that apricot kernels are mildly toxic, but I’d eaten them since childhood; cracking them open myself after eating the apricot was fun (from our own apricot trees in the garden). I’ve been avoiding doing that too often since then.
EDIT: Trond Engen now I remembered was bugging me: yeah, everyone used to eat apricot kernels around me, so assumed it’s safe. Sweet apricots. The analogy with almonds brought this back; I just didn’t know there are bitter apricots like there are bitter almonds before, and I eventually researched it after I heard about “the danger of apricot kernels”.
Perhaps more to the point, we eat horseradish, and other sharp/bitter tasting things. Apricot kernels are bitter, but are they so bitter that they would be immediately rejected on the taste alone? Maybe I’ll have to try one (and spit it out!), just to comment on the taste.
They might have even been eating the kernel with the fruit, to balance out the sweetness thereof.
Edit: I see that V has eaten apricot kernels; presumably they didn’t taste obviously bad.
Edit: WikiP:Apricot has, under Phytochemicals:
Less toxic, but not nontoxic.
@LH, for the same reason why I eat walnuts and hazelnuts… I ate them often as a child (that is, I usually ate them). And my aunt makes абрикосовое варенье with both fruit and kernels.
That makes sense. I just never heard of anyone eating them, so it seemed odd to me.
I still wonder how many peasant guinea-pigs were sacrificed by the first chief who established that you can so eat cassava if you prepare it right. For Science!
I have bought and eaten apricot kernels on different occasions. The first time I had them they were sweet and wonderful. Another time they were pretty much inedible because they smelled so strongly of cyanide (both times they were sold at an Israeli market, with big red warnings.) Those might be for flavoring. The difference might come from the variety of apricot used; they have a wide range of amygdalin content. Perhaps also the amygdalin can be removed by steaming or some such. I have recently seen packaged apricot kernels in the US, safe but also relatively bland.
Islay (Prunus ilicifolia) kernels were a staple food of Native Central and Southern California. They are also rich in amygdalin, which is removed through grinding and leaching. Although they were used in large quantities as food, I also read someplace of people eating too much of them and getting lightheaded.
The symptoms of Am[m]azza Franchi poisonings are described as “flux de sang” — flushing? — and “fievre pestilentielle”. Acute cyanide poisoning does cause deep flushing, but not fever, I think. Could it have been something as prosaic as a bout of food poisoning?
Searching for Am(m)azza Franchi shows the story being retold, in English and German as well, until the early 1800s. It’s a good story.
Y, is this “wide range” a common knowlege among people in Israel?
“might be for flavouring” – and do you mean that people do use them for falvouring?
Owlmirror: Indeed, the mildly bitter taste of the kernel did balance the overwhelming sweetness of the fruit. But I would also store them to eat them later by themselves also, and barely noticed the bitterness — actually they were less bitter than almonds. I guess it was the sort of apricots my grandparents were growing — I’ve tried eating the kernels of store-bought ones and it’s noticeably bitter.
we eat horseradish, and other sharp/bitter tasting things
What’s this “we” jazz?
drasvi: I don’t know. Apricot kernels are not common there either. I assume there’s some particular community that uses it in their cuisine.
People use bitter almonds for flavoring, so I assume they use the apricot kernels likewise. Or maybe they are cooked in such a way that removes the cyanide? I don’t know.
The main motivation for eating them for me was/is just that it’s a fun fact about apricots. You don’t have to throw them away, you can collect them, and when you’re in the mood, take a hammer and extract kernels and eat them too.
I rarely see them sold (usually in markets) and I am surprised each time. First it removes the fun. Second see Y above. It would have made much more sense if they were selling a particular variety, and not just “any” apricot kernels.
For me it’s like with drasvi — it’s just fun to smash them open and eat them raw. It’s a nice snack, too.
What they do sell and buy here (and also in the south Mediterranean) is кедровые орехи. That is, pine seeds. As I understand (based on WP) they are generally edible, just too small. Certain pine variety that grows in Siberia and, presumably, another Mediterranean variety have larger seeds.
Кедрови ядки? Yeah, here in southwest Bulgaria we use them for tea, after drying them — the whole pinecone. The imported larger ones from Italy that are used in cooking are about 50 euro a kilo. There’s just not a demand for it.
“the whole pinecone” – wow I didn’t know this!
We do… or rather did (before the fall of USSR) use them – I mean, pinecones as such – for teamaking, but in a different way:) Namely we feed the fire in the samovar with them….
De gustibus.
Agriculture is said to have developed in the Fertile Crescent when people ran out of acorns to grind and became desperate enough to grind grass seeds. Acorns pose the same problem as cassava: cyanide that you need to wash out of the flour.
David Marjanović : I’m considering moving to Linz by the end of the year; are there any specific local things I should be worried about?
from Arabic الْبَرْقُوق (al-barqūq, “the plums”), from Byzantine Greek βερικοκκίᾱ (berikokkíā, “apricot tree”), derived from late Greek πραικόκιον (praikókion, “apricot”) from Latin [persica (“peach”)] praecocia (praecoquus, “early ripening”).
What a mess. I don’t for a moment believe that berikokkíā derives Greek-internally from praikókion; if I had to guess, I suspect it’s a borrowing from the Arabic word into Greek.
Great quotes on Gemick, btw.
кедровые орехи. That is, pine seeds
Actually, we call them pine nuts. They’re very tasty.
Acorns have tannins, not cyanide.
Pine nuts became popular in the West in the ’80s, through Italian food of colors other than red (mainly pesto). Relatively cheap pine nuts these days come from China, which obtains them from independent harvesters in Siberia stripping bare miles of pine forests.
Why worried? 🙂 Oh yeah: at any mention of Linz, the Viennese say “in Linz beginnt’s”. That immediately got on my nerves.
Bummer.
Amazza Galli (Ch’est bon les amandes).
I was in Linz in June (before meeting David in Vienna). I’ll classify it as mostly harmless. Large enough to have all the shops, small enough that all the interesting stuff is in a quarter square mile or so. Except for the nice little mountain of course (but there’s a bus to the top, or at least to the cafe with a view, from the city centre). However I have no idea how welcoming the people are to foreigners living there, I was only there for one night playing tourist
If you are sensitive to punny spellings you will have a hard time with all the official slogans where {o} or {ö} get replaced with {oö} (for Oberösterreich). That’s the only vaguely language-related thing I remember, apart from the eye dialect used in advertising.
(There was one outbreak of spoken Austrian where my Vienna-raised host got asked if he had a cigarette to spare. That exchange left me in the dust, as in, unable to identify a single word. His boyfriend from Styria [but living with his parents in the US for decades and having to learn Standard German now] seemed to follow it all right, so I assume it was Standard Austrian and not local dialect).
The mountain with the castle on top? There’s a pretty big museum in there (Schlossmuseum) that I recommend. It’s got everything.
Almost all Bavarian-Austrian dialects are mutually intelligible with barely a hiccup, though. You need to get high up in the Tyrolean Alps, or in the other direction somewhere north of Regensburg, to find a whole new demonstrative pronoun or the occasional completely unexpected vowel.
David Marianovic: worried because I’ll have to meet my partner’s parents and my German is not up to it. She implied her parents are quite conservative. I don’t know if I will use the proper terms of adress, even if she assured me she would teach me.
There must be a Cyrano-Turing app you can download, to use with an earplug and a microphone for feedback to the app.
Otherwise, this sounds more like a dramatic opportunity than a linguistic challenge. A lot of self-deprecation goes a long way. Play to your weaknesses !
Almost all Bavarian-Austrian dialects — but the Viennese one is dead, I thought you said (in other threads)? So two months after moving to Linz, my host could be excused for not having acquired it.
The mountain with the castle on top? — Pöstlingberg, yes, and not a bus, a tramway. But looking up Schlossmuseum, it’s downtown west of Hauptplatz. (And it wouldn’t fit on top of the mountain. Though it looks like there’s a tiny one in the Schlössl on Pöstlingberg as well). Anyway, the sun was shining so I didn’t look for museums.
Well, that’s my partner thinks, basically? That the Linz dialect is basically Bavarian and Viennese is its own thing and the surrounding dialects are their own thing.
I don’t want to misquote her but that is as accurate as I can recall her opinion.
FWIW, I only have German as my third language, and probably a god-awful mixture of Danish phonetics and an attempt at hitting some sort of West Germany standard. (If there was a difference in standards between East and West when I went to school in the 70s, there may not have been). And I got along just fine in Linz, within the limits of my vocabulary and probably 40% wrong guesses at noun genders.
(Last time in Berlin, in an excellent little Japanese restaurant [Tabibito, Karl-Marx-Straße 56], I twice ordered grüner Tee and the waiter repeated grün Tee back to me. He looked like he’d been installed in the restaurant when it opened in 1990. I think we talked about “foreigners’ German” some weeks back).
I looked at the map, and it seems that Roman Lentia is still there in the city plan. The Alter Dom is presumably on the site of the old forum, just off the crossing of the main axes.
Stu: “There must be a Cyrano-Turing app you can download, to use with an earplug and a microphone for feedback to the app.”
Love the joke but I’m dealing with possibly hostile parents here not… you know what, it’s quite apropos.
Edit: I just love “Cyrano-Turing app”.
I just love “Cyrano-Turing app”.
Me too!
@V:
You’ll not be expected to understand the dialect at first encounter. But my very limited experience with German dialect speakers is that having no education in German might actually be helpful. I must compensate by listening to what people say, or listening for meaning instead of what I expect them to say.
As for polite register, parents are rarely as conservative as their children believe (or claim) them to be. Also, being foreign helps you a long way. I think I would have let my inner descriptive linguist come out to make differences in expression of politeness part of the conversation. Whenever you’re in doubt, you can ask — and compare how it’s done in your other languages.
That’s right, divert the conversation to linguistic matters. Everybody can make a contribution then.
Oh! In that case I can’t actually help you.
You’re definitely not expected to understand any dialect, though. If they can’t speak English, they’ll use Standard German.
Moribund; basically everyone above my age remains a native speaker. But now that I reread your original comment, maybe you were just stumped by the slang word for cigarette, let’s spell it Tschick? That’s widespread, I learned it in Linz before my family moved to Vienna when I had just turned 11.
Oh, that one! That’s another one, on the other side of the Danube, but also recommended if you don’t mind hordes of tourists. 🙂 Yes, it’s great for hiking, too.
I suppose he expected you to order an accusative, grünen Tee. In something like the northern half of Germany that comes out as grün’n, which can become completely indistinguishable from grün – I’ve even seen misspellings.
Or perhaps he was using the compound Grüntee (first-syllable stress). But that’s rare.
The main motivation for eating them for me was/is just that it’s a fun fact about apricots. You don’t have to throw [the pits] away, you can collect them, and when you’re in the mood, take a hammer and extract kernels and eat them too.
That’s basically how I learned it too – as a fun fact about apricots. I think sometimes we extracted several kernels in a row and saved them up, because eating just one kernel wasn’t much of a snack.
I don’t recall them being bitter; AFAICT they tasted very much like sweet almonds. It probably depends on the specific kind of apricot.
I’ve been told that you’re not supposed to eat peach (or nectarine) kernels, because they’re poisonous (and that it’s better to use moderation for the apricot variety as well). I don’t think I’ve heard of “bitter apricots” before this thread. If I’ve ever seen packed-up apricot kernels for sale, I didn’t notice or took them for almonds.
Namely we feed the fire in the samovar with them….
The pinecones in (European) Russian forests are Pinus sylvestris and look like this – the seeds are tiny (3-5 mm, says Wikipedia), with huge wings, and prone to falling off the cone. It’s probably theoretically possible to eat the nuts but good luck assembling enough of them for a taste.
OTOH they do in fact burn very well (though with lots of sparks…), and are plentiful on the ground in places where pines grow, so they’re commonly used for firewood.
I do like cedar (= Siberian pine) nuts; in Israel I’ve once had the local ones (apparently from stone pines) that were about twice the size.
WikiP Amygdalin:
The high numbers for apricot vs peach may be the bitter apricot variety that I guess no-one here has actually eaten?
I remember seeing a video that discussed apple seeds, which said that the seeds of one apple, especially if they were not chewed or otherwise broken up so that the amygdalin would be released, were not unsafe to swallow.
That having been said, I remember reading a long time ago about a prisoner who saved many apple seeds, crushed them, and swallowed them all simultaneously to commit suicide. I remembered that, and was always careful to discard the seeds (I also dislike the hard part (endocarp?) that is around the seed).
Edit: Huh. That story of apple seed suicide may be apocryphal:
WikiP Apple:
J1M: The pinecones in (European) Russian forests are Pinus sylvestris and look like this – the seeds are tiny (3-5 mm, says Wikipedia), with huge wings, and prone to falling off the cone. It’s probably theoretically possible to eat the nuts but good luck assembling enough of them for a taste.
I’ve thought about cracking a pinecone open and eat the seeds, but I’ve never actually done it. I suppose one must take them just when they’re ripe and the scales are coming apart. Or maybe it’s the growth of the seeds that makes the scales come apart. But I’m pretty sure that if they were edible, our ancestors would have done so.
What we do use, and have used for thousands of years, is juniper berries (which start out as cones too, but by magic turn into berries after a year or two), especially with game or game-like meat*. It’s an excellent spice, but undervalued, probably because it was so easily accessible back when spices was a luxury.
* I made a finnbiff caserole yesterday. Reindeer shavings, a couple of newly fallen apples from the garden**, cream, roughly crushed juniper berries***, a lump of leftover brown goatmilk cheese, and some assorted green spices. (If my wife ate onions, I might have added shallots. And fresh mushrooms if we’d been out picking some.) Served with small new potatoes, lightly steamed broccoli, and lingonberry jam.
** Extreme amounts of fruit this year. Also blackberries, which we had for desserts.
*** We do have a large juniper in the garden, but it doesn’t yield crop.
That sounds delicious.
It felt like time for the Annual Language Hat Food Festival.
We’re having Marcella Hazan’s meatballs tonight, a perennial favorite. And it just occurred to me to wonder where her surname was from; Professor Google tells me “Hazan is a Turkish and Romaniote Jewish surname, and is a variant of the Hebrew ‘Hazzan’ and means cantor. This variant is carried by the Romaniote Jews between Greece and Turkey.”
Oh, then that’s probably also the origin of Gennady Khazanov’s last name.
“Reindeer shavings” mean meat, right? Right?
Right! Reinsdyrskav. Small chips or pieces of reindeer meat. I liked “shavings” for the cognacy and lack of a better word. “Reindeer scrapings” sounds like something the reindeer dug up from under the snow. “Reindeer chips” sounds like they’re roasted and crispy. Perhaps “reindeer jerky”, except it’s not dried.
Or just “Rudolph”.
I was purposefully thick and imagining a reindeer’s facial whiskers.
That’s appreciated. I was purposefully thick and took it literally, just for the chance to explain the alternatives.
Update: meeting the parents in a month and a half.
In Denmark, marcipan is a conventional name and has to be made from at least 60% almonds and sugar (saccharose) q.s. to be called “pure raw marzipan” — but discount “marzipan” so called can be adulterated with apricot kernels and glycose syrup without attracting censure from the food standards people. (Not so in Germany, though “Konsummarzipan” can be as low as 1 part almonds to 2 parts sugar).
Also konfektmasse or bagemarcipan = ‘confectioner’s mass’ or ‘baking marcipan’ will contain apricot kernels which supposedly behave better when baking. It’s not noticeably more bitter, but too sugary for my taste.
(FWIW, I’ve been told that bitter almonds can occur randomly on “plain” almond trees and that up to 1 percent of the ones you buy can be bitter — I think it’s happened to me once only that I snacked on a very bitter one. I suppose there are cultivars bearing only bitter fruit, because you can actually buy them in very small packages for those recipes that need them).
She’s already met _my_ parents — did not go well. They’re assholes, at least my father as much as her mother is from what I hear from her. Seriously, people in need of therapy. I got my father the best therapist I could find and he just rejected it. The whole concept of therapy.
Been in Linz for a week now, pretty great so far. Nice cozy city. We just had the first winter snow.
I got my father the best therapist I could find and he just rejected it. The whole concept of therapy.
I totally understand where he’s coming from. For me (perhaps my generation), the idea of going to “therapy” to solve your problems is quite alien.
First snow in Berlin and Kyiv, too – unusually early.
Record snowstorm buries parts of upstate New York under 6 feet of snow. That’s almost two meters, for you non-imperial types. (We recently got a light dusting that melted away when the morning sun hit, and there’s a chance we’ll get a little today, but the snow season hasn’t started here in western Mass. It’s below freezing much of the time, though.)
Lars Mathiesen: “If you are sensitive to punny spellings you will have a hard time with all the official slogans where {o} or {ö} get replaced with {oö} (for Oberösterreich). That’s the only vaguely language-related thing I remember, apart from the eye dialect used in advertising”
I already fucking hate it {oö}
There’s been a few tiny snowflakes in the air a couple of mornings this week, but not enough to settle on the ground. Looking out the window now, I see fine lines of snow crisscrossing the street, so that’s the first this year. I’m supposed to be travelling tomorrow. We’ll see how it turns out.
Sonw, since the beginning of this week
Мороз и солнце; день чудесный!
I got my father the best therapist I could find …
A therapist you judge ‘best’ is not necessarily going to be judged best by somebody else — especially if your opinion of the somebody is ‘needs therapy’.
If somebody’s reached the age of being your father, they’re too set in their ways for therapy to have much effect.
Let’s turn to why you still want ‘approval’ for a companion/partner from someone you don’t respect. I suggest you spend the therapy fees on yourself – especially if you’ve gone to the bother of finding the ‘best’.
AntC: it seems to me that he’s just a malignant narcissist. I talked to his brother today. He’s always been like that, according him.
According to my grandmother, he changed when he was a teenager.
@V: I’m sorry to hear that; there are no circumstances or explanations that would make a parent behaving like an asshole less painful.
I don’t think there’s an age cap on going to therapy, pace AntC; my own grandmother found it quite useful, and she started when she was past 75.
But often the people who would benefit the most on working on their issues are some of the most reluctant, and I’ve never seen any attempts to persuade them out of this position go well.
(Of course, coming to grips with this often takes a fair bit of work in itself. But at least as an adult you can take the initiative on this now, unlike any assholery you were subjected to as a kid.)
often the people who would benefit the most on working on their issues are some of the most reluctant
According to what I see on Youtube — and I mean licensed psych therapists, not new-age psychobabble [**] — a) narcissists love therapy because it gives them a pretext to talk about themselves; equally b) it’s pretty much impossible to change their personality, precisely because they’re talking not listening.
Does Counseling Make Narcissism Worse?
[**] Beware ‘narcissism’ is narrowly defined by licensed therapists vs the informal sense/as stretched by psychobabblers to include nearly everyone you’ve chosen not to like. It’s at least possible that an amateur deciding to label somebody ‘narcissist’ is a symptom that the labeller is a narcissist (meaning: the somebody who won’t bend to the labeller’s outlook), and tells nothing of the labellee.
@AntC: “people who would benefit the most on working on their issues” may include but is certainly not limited to narcissistic types. I’m not qualified to make clinical judgements about anyone, let alone V’s father whom I’ve never met, so I stuck to the kind of conclusion I could draw from personal experience.
Should we look at the clinical literature, though, we would find that “the grandiosity and defensiveness that characterize narcissistic personality disorder militate against acknowledging problems and vulnerabilities and make engagement in any form of psychotherapy difficult” and that for people presenting with other issues “co-occurring narcissistic personality disorder is known to increase the likelihood of treatment dropout” (Caligor, E., Levy, K. N., & Yeomans, F. E. (2015). Narcissistic personality disorder: diagnostic and clinical challenges. American Journal of Psychiatry, 172(5), 415-422). I’ll take that over a YouTube therapist.
Alon Lyschinsky: thank you for the reference; I downloaded the article. That describes my father’s personality quite succinctly.