I was astonished to read this quote from Robin Williams, talking about Jack Nicholson:
“He once was with me at a benefit and leaned over and said, ‘Even oysters have enemies’. In a very intense voice, I responded with, ‘Increase your dosage’. More fascinated than scared. He says things that even Buddha goes, ‘What did you mean?’”
To an English-speaker, “Even oysters have enemies” sounds like weirdness from the outer limits, but any reader of Russian literature would immediately recognize it as a version of “И устрица имеет врагов!” [Even an oyster has enemies!], No. 86 in Плоды раздумья [Fruits of meditation] by the great (and fictional) Kozma Prutkov. I have no idea how it wound up in the brain of Jack Nicholson, but it gave me a frisson of delight.
(Incidentally, устрица ‘oyster’ is borrowed from Dutch oester, which is from Latin ostrea; our oyster comes from the same Latin word, but via French. And враг ‘enemy’ is borrowed from Old Church Slavonic; the inherited doublet is во́рог, which is archaic or folk-poetic.)
The appropriate response to a seemingly random statement about the enemies of oysters is probably: “The Walrus and the Carpenter” (or a line or two from the poem).
Could Tolstoy have influenced Dodgson? one wonders doubtfully.
On one of the exhibit cases at the Field Museum of Natural History with a fossil walrus skeleton inside, there is a sign headed, “The time has come to talk about walrus tusks.” Presumably, the individual responsible is Ken Angielczyk, a curator there who does research on tusk evolution.
Tusk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Or_All_the_Seas_with_Oysters
cf also Thomas Pynchon no doubt…
“if oysters have a million enemies, then i am one of them.
if oysters have one enemy, then i am that enemy.
if oysters have no enemies, then i am dead.”
– sherlock holmes, apparently
Why wouldn’t oysters have enemies? Although I believe oystercatchers are not actually among them!
Count me among them.
Horrid slimy things, oysters. Got no reason to live.
устрица ‘oyster’ is borrowed from Dutch oester, which is from Latin ostrea; our oyster comes from the same Latin word, but via French
There’s a fishmonger 40 meters down the road from the trattoria I frequent with Sparky. The Sicilian cook is somewhat bored by the pizza and pasta dishes he usually has to make, as I am to eat them. So I recently bought some gamberoni for him to make spaghetti with.
Another time I got the idea of having him make something with Austern. He didn’t know the word, so I tried “oysters” and huitres – another blank. Google provided me with a picture, and he said ostriche!
He insisted they must be eaten raw, so I ate ostriches on the half-shell with lemon juice and sand. I had been thinking along the lines of having them breaded and baked, like clams. This idea is perhaps foreign to the Sicilian mind on the street.
Oysters keep oysting.
Extrapolating from these two data points, I postulate that the natural enemies of the oyster (or lack thereof) may have been a floating idea – a recurring subject – a meme – in mid-to-late 19th century semi-learned discussion. Charles Darwin didn’t formulate his theory of natural selection in a vacuum. The balance of factors promoting and limiting the success of a species were much discussed in both scientific and lay circles.
I’m surrounded (if you will grant me permission to exaggerate by a few miles…) by oyster farms.
The critters seem to like the cold, clean waters of the Damariscotta River. There is a new restaurant in one of the Twin Villages that serves little else.
Ostras. I am happy to count myself among their devoted devourers, whether or not that’s a word. I had no idea they were so involved in literature.
Eta- in coloquial Spanish, ostra is the mollusk, and also an introvert or misanthrope.
The Mystery deepens
I guess it’s pretty dull sitting on a nest. Need some sort of mental stimulation.
> spotted and cryptic.
Spotted and not easily spotted
The more cryptic, the less spotted.
Paradox !
And враг ‘enemy’ is borrowed from Old Church Slavonic; the inherited doublet is во́рог, which is archaic or folk-poetic.
Wargs? It’d be like Tolkien to have known this. (Yes, I know there’s vargr. But what are the interrelations?)
I’ve only eaten oysters once, and I don’t see the point – it was a bit like eating salty snot. But I’m not their enemy, they’re very welcome to keep on living as long as I don’t have to eat them.
i do love eating oysters (and i’m with the sicilian: raw, perhaps with a little squeeze or drizzle of something; if there’s significant amounts of sand, have a word with the shucker!) – and appreciate how they taste so distinctly of the different places they’re from (their merroir?). and i look forward to the triumph of the ongoing restoration of new york’s historic oyster abundance!
In the U.S. at least, cheaper oysters are often served breaded and fried. The texture is chewy, the taste is of the ocean, and they are fatty and filling.
I wonder if there’s a deliberate or accidental conflation with ostracism?
I note that the Kozma Prutkov WP page actually has a link to Nicholson pronouncing the line “at the 2010 AFI Life Achievement Award ceremony for Mike Nichols”:
https://youtu.be/T4HDA-Xecuk
One wonders if Williams heard it from Nicholson before or after that 2010 event. Hm. I see that Williams was in fact present at the event — did he misremember the circumstances?
https://www.showbiz411.com/2010/06/13/jack-nicholson-a-list-stars-at-mike-nichols-afi-tribute
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mike-nichols-tributes_n_6191704
Edit: I see that Williams recounted that about Nicholson in 2013
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2013/09/robin-williams-jack-nicholson
So definitely three years after, and maybe he was misremembering after all
Surely Čapek read Sherlock Holmes; and yet he resisted writing War with the Oysters.
Akismet hates me.
I think I can reconstruct what I wrote, but I’ll wait a bit to see if the original bobs up from the abyss.
in coloquial Spanish, ostra is the mollusk, and also an introvert or misanthrope.
I wonder if there’s a deliberate or accidental conflation with ostracism?
ostracism (n.)
1580s, the name of a legal political method among the ancient Athenians by which men deemed dangerous to the liberties of the people or embarrassing to the state were banished for 10 years by public vote, from French ostracisme (16c.), Modern Latin ostracismus, or directly from Greek ostrakismos, from ostrakizein “to ostracize,” from ostrakon “tile, potsherd,” from PIE *ost-r-, from root *ost- “bone,” which also is the source of Greek osteon “bone,” ostreion “oyster,” and German Estrich “pavement” (which is from Medieval Latin astracus “pavement,” ultimately from Greek ostrakon). source: etymonline.com
Given the common ancestry, perhaps ostracism and ostra might be considered a bivalve.
Could Tolstoy have influenced Dodgson? one wonders doubtfully.
Well, there’s also that mention in Alice in Wonderland chapter III: “You’re enough to try the patience of an oyster!”
(“Oyster” is also the accepted-though-unofficial answer to the White Queen’s riddle in chapter X of Through the Looking-Glass, though I don’t think any enemies are specifically involved.)
James Joyce:
I also wondered, could the phrase recorded in Russian have had an actual Spanish origin? “Even a recluse (oyster) has enemies”, but “ostra” was deliberately or accidentally mistranslated?
it was a bit like eating salty snot.
Grandpa Friedman used to say eating raw oysters was too much like having a cold. I agree, but I like them stewed or sauteed.
And of course
I like my oysters fried.
That way I know they’ve died.
Credited to Roy Blount, Jr.
Why wouldn’t oysters have enemies? Although I believe oystercatchers are not actually among them!
Indeed, Eurasian Oystercatchers aren’t. The ones that live on the coasts eat mostly cockles and mussels (not just near Dublin), according to the RSPB. However, “American Oystercatchers dine almost solely on saltwater bivalve mollusks, including many species of clams and several oysters and mussels, and to a lesser degree limpets, jellyfish, starfish, sea urchins, marine worms, and crustaceans such as lady crabs and speckled crabs. Oystercatchers walk slowly through oyster reefs until they see one that is slightly open; they quickly jab the bill inside the shell to snip the strong adductor muscle that closes the two halves of the shell.” That’s from All About Birds, which provides further interesting information. So that’s “catch with its shell open” like “catch with its pants down”.
According to the OED, the name was coined as Oyster Catcher by the English naturalist Mark Catesby in 1733 in his Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands. “The earlier English names for the bird were sea-pie and olive.” The name was used for the Old World birds by Pennant (OED) in 1773 and Yarrell in 1843 (Wikipedia). It was just so that a British species got an English name that was first used for and applied more accurately to its American cousin. Are there any other macroscopic species of Britain for which that’s the case?
Olive is an interesting word. OED (2004):
OED by Jerry F.: “The earlier English names for the bird were sea-pie and olive.”
Maybe, but there’s no way that was the original name, and hardly the name used at the time in dialects bordering the natural biotopes of tidal plains and coastal wetlands.Shetlan shalder, Orkney chalder are descendants of O.N. tjaldr, a homonym of tjaldr “tent”. So are Norwegian tjeld, Swed. dial. tjäll, and Faroese and Icelandic tjaldur. The name is too local to be attributed to common Germanic, but I can’t find any better candidates. Wikipedia tells me that North Frisian has liiw, which looks like a different ancient word, but perhaps originally denoting the lapwing. Danish strandskade, Swedish strandskata, Dutch scholekster, and other formations from local words for “(mag)pie” must be recent coinages. German Austernfischer is an obvious calque from English.
Edit: But see the comment in-between.
Me: formations from local words for “(mag)pie” must be recent coinages
Or we could argue that “beach/sea-pie” is an ancient folk-taxonomic term, an underlying idea whose surface form has been renewed when the word for magpie and the natural environment of Germanic speakers have changed.
the natural environment of Germanic speakers
Which one is that ? Above a certain age they appear to thrive in any environment, much like Hungarians.
Me: a homonym of tjaldr “tent”
Oops. A near-homonym of tjald n. “tent”, of course.
@Stu: Germanic speakers have adapted successfully to very different environments, resulting in considerable variation in the biotopes of their local oystercatchers.
EDD has olive from Essex, also olaf, “Supposed to be named after Olave (ON. Ōlāfr), the sainted Danish King”; this after Newton and Gadow’s Dictionary of Birds, here. They, in turn, quote Christy’s Birds of Essex (here), which also comments, “It is not improbable that the Pye Sand, off Harwich, and the Pye-fleet Channel, between Mersea Island and the mainland, take their names from this bird, which is often known as the ‘Sea Pie.’” N&G support their etymology by referring to knot (Calidris canutus, a kind of sandpiper), supposedly named for king Canute; but they themselves reject that etymology in the corresponding entry.
Back to the EDD, it says there is an “obsolete French word olive for some kind of bird.” But according to FEW, that 16th century word means ‘owl’, cf. modern Catalan òliba, from OHG ūwila.
BTW, I am very fond of oystercatchers.
Charles Swainson’s 1885 Provincial names and folk lore of British birds (here; a great resource) lists oyster plover, pienet, sea pie/piet/pilot, olive, and from Scotland tirma and trillichan, plus other less specific ones, viz. dickie bird and chaldrick/sheldrake vel sim., plus Orkneys scolder, I suppose a folk etymology of the above.
Or we could argue that “beach/sea-pie” is an ancient folk-taxonomic term, an underlying idea whose surface form has been renewed when the word for magpie and the natural environment of Germanic speakers have changed.
But this “pie” (nicknamed “Mag”) is from Latin pica via French pie. The OED dates it to 1225, where it appears with the first instance of a rare English word for the bird.
a1225 (?OE)
Pica, pyge the is on englisc Aguster.
Latin-Old English Gloss. (Vitellius MS. C.ix) (transcript of lost MS) in N. R. Ker, Catalogue MSS containing Anglo-Saxon (1957) 471
“Aguster” survived in dialects as “haggister”.
Bosworth-Toller says there was an Old English “agu” meaning a magpie and “higera” meaning a magpie or woodpecker.
I’m not sure what you’re suggesting—that there might have been an Old English word for the oystercatcher that combined one of those words (or another word for a magpie, if there was one) with a word for “sea”?
Y: BTW, I am very fond of oystercatchers.
Me too. For two connected reasons. It reminds me of childhood summers walking the tidal plain near the Arctic Circle, and family lore tells that I had so red feet that my father suggested to name me Kjell.
from Scotland tirma and trillichan.
Those are interesting
Never mind. I think you’re just saying that since ancient times, people might have thought of oystercatchers as related to or like magpies, so when they got newer words for magpies, they would have applied them to oystercatchers. But I’m not going to delete my post, since it has etymological stuff in it.
Speaking of which, the OED says that “haggister” probably goes back to “Old English agu, Old High German aga magpie, perhaps (with reference to its erect tail) ultimately < the same Indo-European base as edge n."
Jerry F.: I’m not sure what you’re suggesting—that there might have been an Old English word for the oystercatcher that combined one of those words (or another word for a magpie, if there was one) with a word for “sea”?
I mean that there are many names that combine a first element denoting something maritime with a second element meaning “pie (bird)”, e.g. Sw. strandskata “beach pie”. One might imagine that both elements have been changed time and again in different Germanic dialects but that the underlying idea has been preserved.
Edit: Yes, that’s probably a simpler way to put it.
Y: EDD has olive from Essex, also olaf, “Supposed to be named after Olave (ON. Ōlāfr), the sainted Danish King”; this after Newton and Gadow’s Dictionary of Birds
Olaf from olive does look like a folk etymology, but was the saint well-known enough to have that effect? If so, could it also explain the initial o-? Or should we perhaps think of olive as a contaminated form, a merger of unrelated live and olaf?
(I suppose the finer distinctions between Scandinavian kingdoms were unimportant in an ornithological context.)
One of the medieval churches in the City of London is dedicated to St. Olave, which is the, or at least a, long-ago English spelling of Olaf (mediated through Norman French? I dunno). Apparently guided by non-ornithologists, King Haakon regularly went to services there during WW2 while in exile from wherever it was he would have gone in Oslo.
Yes, there are about a dozen (or two) parishes with (mostly) medieval churches dedicated to St. Olaf/Olave in the UK, but there must be lots of obscure saints with similar scores. What’s more, the churches aren’t randomly scattered, but concentrated in regions of Norse settlement and in cities with once busy ports*. I don’t think that’s enough to make it available as a folk-etymology.
* St. Olaf’s Churches in harbor towns seem to have been established by Scandinavian expatriate communities of traders and also served as contact points for visiting sailors.
Thanks, Hat, for fishing my comment ( #comment-4615675 ; October 5, 2024 at 10:36 pm) back from the briny deep.
FWIW: The original words by Robin Williams quoted in the OP were a slight paraphrase from a Reddit AMA. For the record, here is the subthread where they appeared, starting with the prompting question:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1n41x1/comment/ccf6gie/
JWB: Apparently guided by non-ornithologists, King Haakon regularly went to services there during WW2 while in exile from wherever it was he would have gone in Oslo.
I’ve never thought about this. The king’s and the royal family’s attendance (or not) of mass is not much of an issue. I do know that they attend Christmas mass at the “sports chapel” at Holmenkollen – the skiing arena in the hills above Oslo. There’s also a chapel at the (ceremonial) castle of Akershus, which is used for some family occasions.
But it wouldn’t be odd if the king became a much more regular churchgoer in exile. That would be a way to represent the country in public and show business as usual week after week after week.
(Of course he, and other public figures in the exile community, frequently attended service and other gatherings at the church of the Norwegian Seamen’s Mission, the center of the contemporary expatriate community. This church is also called St. Olav…)
I looked in Lockwood’s article, quoted in the OED and referenced above by Hat. He compares North Frisian liiw etc. to Faroese klipp, which W-ary says is ‘the animal sound of the oystercatcher’ and the name of the bird in children’s language, and therefore olive would ultimately be of onomatopoeic origin.
Lockwood’s 1984 book, The Oxford Book of British Bird Names, explains tirma as onomatopoeic tir- plus maw ‘seagull, seabird’, cf. fulmar.
Gaelic trìlleachan is more generally a name for any noisy sea-bird, diminutive of trill (also attested, for ‘plover’). I suppose trill is an onomatopoeia, though with bird name etymologies that argument can be the fast escalator to perdition.
Horrid slimy things, oysters. Got no reason to live.
I believe what you mean to say is that they’ve got no reason to be killed and eaten by humans, or at least by you.
Oysters are a hugely important part of the marine ecosystem, a keystone organism. Without them the water gets real filthy, real fast. If you like to swim, or drink water, or eat any of the organisms that live in reefs – thank an oyster!
So oysters hoover up all the nasty stuff contaminating the water, and then you eat them. Yum.
If you like to swim, or drink water, or eat any of the organisms that live in reefs
Abominable practices, all three.
(And I once saw a man in a coma from drinking water. Truly.)
As German folk wisdom has it, water is for washing (and some other uses besides), but you drink beer.
I once saw a man in a coma from drinking water
Overhydration ? Say from drinking too much water too fast in a condition of dehydration ?
“Water, woman? I said thirsty, not dirty.”
In the Western US, they say whiskey is for drinking and water, for fighting
The relationship between tjeld “oystercatcher” and tjald “tent” (-> “pole”?) could be parallel to that between spett “woodpecker” and spitt “(roasting) spit, but the etymologies of the two latter are messy and probably contaminated with unrelated stuff.
The semantic link between “bird” and “pole” would be that the beak of the oystercatcher is used as a crowbar or digging rod to open shells.
Lockwood has a discussion of Faroese tjaldur on pages 27ff. in ‘Faroese Bird-Name Origins (V)’, Fróðskaparrit 23 (1975), available here. Compare the entry for Icelandic tjaldur in Ásgeir Blöndal Magnússon Íslensk orðsifjabók here.
I wonder if there is a good source out there documenting the history of Danish slang tjald ‘weed’.
Also Norw. tjall, probably < Danish, following the supply chain.
I’ve been thinking that the origin may be in tjald “tent”, something like tjalde “set up camp” -> “hang out in the park” -> “smoke weed”. But that’s my just-so-story, and I’m not convinced that the first Danish potheads had the necessary familiarity with pre-modern camping terminology.
Overhydration ? Say from drinking too much water too fast in a condition of dehydration ?
Compulsive water drinking (as a psychiatric disorder.) It had effectively diluted his blood to the point that he was fitting continually (“status epilepticus.”)
A person in their right mind basically can’t do this. But he wasn’t.
(He got better.)
@trond, y
Irish has scaladóir for the oystercatcher and scalladóir for “scolder, abusive person”. I would guess “sheldrake” is an alteration of something like *scældr.
At the Chicago Marathon several years ago someone died of overhydration because they’d lost electrolytes. Is that the same condition you’re describing.
I remember that the cause was not considered to be the mere loss of electrolytes through sweat. It was somehow exacerbated by drinking water. I guess being thoroughly hydrated in that situation increases osmotic pressure?
Would that this were true.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-drinking-too-much-water-can-kill/
Also:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4027093/
The medical terms are polydipsia for too much water drinking, and hyponatremia for sodium levels too low (which is the typical result of too much water drinking, but has a separate page because there can be other metabolic issues involved)
[Akismet thinks I’m too salty. No, really, I edited “salt” to “sodium”, and it washed away what I wrote below]
Would that this were true.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-drinking-too-much-water-can-kill/
Also:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4027093/
The medical terms are polydipsia for too much water drinking, and hyponatremia for sodium levels too low (which is the typical result of too much water drinking, but has a separate page because there can be other metabolic issues involved).
Sheldrake is (“probably”, OED) from sheld + drake, the former meaning ‘variegated’, which Tadorna ducks are.
“Apparently guided by non-ornithologists, King Haakon regularly went to services there during WW2 while in exile from wherever it was he would have gone in Oslo.”
The Wikipedia page for St Olave’s, Hart Street (Samuel Pepys’ parish church) gives two somewhat contradictory statements – that King Haakon worshipped there 1941-5, and that it was bombed out in 1941 and not restored until 1954, with the king presiding at the rededication ceremony.
@Trond Engen: Yes, that’s probably a simpler way to put it.
Sorry, I wasn’t looking for a simpler way, just checking that my reading comprehension had turned on.
@Kate: I think the story may be confusing the two churches of St. Olave/Olav.
@Jerry: i understood that. Nothing to be sorry about.
from sheld + drake, the former meaning ‘variegated’, which Tadorna ducks are.
Is there some subtle distinction amongst Tadorna with Shelducks vs drakes?
There’s a good reason why you’ve never heard of Sir Francis Duck.