In reading Life: A User’s Manual
As for their language, it was quite close to the coastal tongues, and Appenzzell could understand it without major difficulty. What struck him especially was that they used a very restricted vocabulary, no larger than a few dozen words, and he wondered if the Kubus, in the image of their distant neighbours the Papuans, didn’t voluntarily impoverish their vocabulary, deleting words each time a death occurred in the village. One consequence of this demise was that the same word came to refer to an ever-increasing number of objects. Thus the Malay word for “hunting”, Pekee, meant indifferently to hunt, to walk, to carry, spear, gazelle, antelope, peccary, my’am — a type of very hot spice used lavishly in meat dishes — as well as forest, tomorrow, dawn, etc. Similarly Sinuya, a word which Appenzzell put alongside the Malay usi, “banana”, and nuya, “coconut”, meant to eat, meal, soup, gourd, spatula, plait, evening, house, pot, fire, silex (the Kubus made fire by rubbing two flints), fibula, comb, hair, hoja’ (a hair-dye made from coconut milk mixed with various soils and plants), etc. Of all the characteristics of the Kubus, these linguistic habits are the best known, because Appenzzell described them in detail in a long letter to the Swedish philologist Hambo Taskerson, whom he’d known in Vienna, and who was working at that time in Copenhagen, with Hjelmslev and Brøndal. He pointed out in an aside that these characteristics could perfectly well apply to a Western carpenter using tools with precise names — gauge, tonguing plane, moulding plane, jointer, mortise, jack plane, rabbet, etc. — but asking his apprentice to pass them to him by saying just: “Gimme the thingummy”.
“Hjelmslev and Brøndal” are the well-known linguists Louis Hjelmslev (1899-1965) and Viggo Brøndal (1887-1942), but Hambo Taskerson seems to be an invention. There is a Kubu people, but I have no idea to what extent Perec’s description matches what they were like 70 years ago. I’m not going to go to the trouble of transcribing the original French of the passage, but you can see it here (the blockquoted paragraph at the bottom of p. 112); the final “Gimme the thingummy” is “passe-moi le machin.”
the Malay word for “hunting”, Pekee, meant indifferently to hunt, to walk, to carry, spear, gazelle, antelope, peccary, my’am — a type of very hot spice used lavishly in meat dishes — as well as forest, tomorrow, dawn, etc.
I love an author who can just string together a bunch of nouns with commas, and have it sound so lovely.
“Thingumy” is the name of a character in Finn Family Moomintroll, no idea what his name is in Finnish though.
People from the Jeolla-do region of Korea are famous for using the word “koshigee” in place of all manner of nouns and even verbs.
I wonder therefore if, along the same lines, more specific terms exist but that for whatever reason it is culturally appropriate to be as vague as possible.
Appenzeller (so spelled, with one “z”) is the name of a Swiss cow’s-milk cheese. And is “Hambo Taskerson” Otto Jespersen, or am I reaching?
“Pekee” is not the Malay word for “hunt”… it’s “buru”. In fact, “pekee” to me sounds like “pergi”, which means “to walk, to go”.
… a Western carpenter using tools with precise names — gauge, tonguing plane, moulding plane, jointer, mortise, jack plane, rabbet, etc. — but asking his apprentice to pass them to him by saying just: “Gimme the thingummy”.
For one thing, a mortise and a rabbet (known nowadays, when it’s exposed, as a ‘reveal’) are not tools, they are details used in wood construction. For another, you could not in any case ‘hand’ someone a mortise because a mortise is an enclosed volume of space, not a thing. For a third, most of the tools mentioned haven’t been used professionally by jobbing carpenters since power tools took over, probably in the nineteen-seventies. The premise, that a carpenter usually says ‘gimme me the thingummy’, has never happened in my presence and I’ve spent an awful lot of time around carpenters. Probably the translator was thinking of what he or she would say. Siganus Sutor is an expert in wood joints in both languages.
A carpenter, were he or she still using a jack plane, would be quite likely to say ‘Give me the plane’, or ‘Give me that’. That’s a usage (omitting adjectives or using pronouns) that is more in keeping with the rest of society. In films a surgeon barks ‘Scalpel’, he or she doesn’t say ‘Gimme the thingummy’.
There’s the apocryphal story (which may or may not make it past spam filters) about the mechanic in the North African campaign shouting out “the fucking fucker’s fucked!”, and it being widely understood that he’d managed to strip yet another screw.
Gavagai.
When I see Appenzzell, I think “why two z’s?” And also I think Gruyere, Emmental, and fondue (shared an apartment with a Swiss guy many years ago). And Kirschwasser.
I have been thinking that there are two contrasting forms of lexical richness in languages. Some have an expansive lexicon with many near-synonyms, allowing one to define one’s meaning with precision and creativity (my favorite feature of English), whereas others have words with broad semantic ranges and hence a great amount of meaning contained in a single utterance. This language, whether in reality or in creative license, sounds like an extreme example of the latter. Greek also comes to mind, and Haitian Creole offers some fun semantic and syntactic ambiguity in the same vein.
most of the tools mentioned haven’t been used professionally by jobbing carpenters since power tools took over, probably in the nineteen-seventies.
The book is from the nineteen-seventies. As to the tool (or non-tool) names, I know nothing; perhaps the translator will drop by again.
Jeremy Osner: “Thingumy” is the name of a character in Finn Family Moomintroll, no idea what his name is in Finnish though.
Although Tove Jansson, the author of the Moomintroll stories was Finnish, she belonged to the substantial Swedish-speaking minority, and so the books were written in Swedish. Wikipedia has a list of characters which gives the original Swedish names. “Thingumy and Bob” are “Tofslan och Vifslan”. The article also notes that they speak a strange language with “-slan” appended to the ends of some words in the Swedish original. Interestingly, in the English translation this is represented by having them speak in spoonerisms.
So, imagine a language with only one verb, meaning “do”, only one preposition, meaning.. uhh.. “preposition”?, no nouns (only pronouns), no adjectives, and the only productive class of words left is adverbs.
It’s better documented than the language of the Kubus, but even less likely to be real.
It’s called Shigudo, from Speculative Grammarian.
‘perhaps the translator will drop by again’
Yeah, how do they know? Do all translators always read Language Hat, or do translators develop antennæ to alert them when their work’s being talked about?
The histories of the words [machine] and [engine] in the various European languages are fascinating. They were both derived from words meaning “trick”, “trap”, etc., and often weapons: cf. “machinations”, “ingenuity”. The Chinese graph ji which is a component of the names of many mechanical devices has a similiar origin.
If I’m not mistaken words originally meaning “trigger”, as in a crossbow, whereby a large amount of stored energy is released suddenly by a tiny movement of the finger.
Widget. A word for a generic manufactured item back in the 90’s that was more recently appropriated to name a very specific item in the blog sidebar.
Trey: The two Kubu dialects (Western and Eastern Jambi Kubu) are at least as well documented as Shigudo:
Anderbeck, Karl Ronald. 2008. Malay dialects of the Batanghari river basin (Jambi, Sumatra). SIL e-Books, 6. S.l.: SIL International. 173 p. http://www.sil.org/silepubs/abstract.asp?id=50415
Nijma, widget was earlier (in the 1980s?) appropriated for a specific item in Guinness cans that allows the stout to pour with a good head of nitrogen bubbles.
I can attest that “widget” was the generic term for “article of manufacture” in law school Contracts courses in the 1960’s, and probably much earlier.
Trey, that’s wonderful—thanks very much!
Rootless, I thought you were a professional train driver. Are you also an amateur lawyer?
OED has generic “widget” attested in 1931 and computer “widget” from 1987. Wiki says the Guinness widget launched in March 1989. OED gives the etymology “Perh. alteration of GADGET.” I surmise influence from “whatsit”.
I’ve never heard of the Moomins, but the language with the smurfiest smorphology is Smurfish.
I thought ‘widget’ was something invented by Roald Dahl after the war, but maybe it was something else, like dohickey.
How can a ‘computer “widget” from 1987’ be possible? There weren’t even blogs back then. Just dial-up modems where you put the telephone in a cushioned modem contraption and could play dungeons and dragons where the teletype would ask you “kill the dwarf with what? With your bare hands?” And if you typed “yes” it would come back with the message “dwarf dead” on the teletype. There were CRT’s back then, but with the same slow speed (maybe 2400 baud max, as opposed to 300 for teletypes). Graphics was an esoteric specialty limited to hospital type imaging.
Must have been a hardware widget in the manufacturing sense and not a software widget for containing sidebar blogrolls, comments, archives, and such.
DRAFT ADDITIONS NOVEMBER 2003
widget, n.
* Computing. A visual symbol on a computer screen; a graphical device in a graphical user interface; the software and data involved when the operations represented by such a device are invoked, esp. regarded as jointly constituting a tool.
1987 Nifty Little X Hacks Wanted in comp.windows.x (Usenet newsgroup) 2 Aug., The sort of things I want are akin to desk accessories on the Macintosh, little useful programs that can be called from the menu or (ideally) from a widget or icon.
“thingummy” as a translation of machin
un machin in France is much, much more common than “thingummy” or “thingamajig” or “thingy” in North America. There is no English translation which is as common in speech or as general in meaning: “widget” refers to some kind of tool or implement, but machin has a wider and vaguer meaning. For instance, you would not refer to a piece of furniture as a “widget”, but you could refer to, say, a wardrobe as un grand machin. You would not refer to a person, or call them, as “Thingummy”, but in French you can address someone (slangily) as Machin or Machine (not recommended with total strangers in polite company), or refer to those people as les Machin “the So-and-So’s” if you don’t know or remember their name (this implies also that you don’t really care what their real name is).
I was at school with a boy called Machin. He was a bit of a thingy.
It was, of course, ‘gremlin’ that I was thinking of in connection to Roald Dahl, not ‘widget’. Silly me.
“Hambo Taskerson”
In Swedish
Hambo is a folk dance
Task is slang for penis, bad things
A piece of trivia that has stayed with me for 25 years is that Appenzell Ausserrhoden, a canton of Switzerland, first allowed women to vote in canton-wide elections in 1989.
Maybe 20 years.
There is an early cinematographer called Alfred Machin (he was in charge of the first film studios in Belgium). Before I knew better (and actually went to see some of his films at the film museum), I thought this was a made-up name.
Women’s suffrage was forced on Appenzell Innerrhoden in 1990 by those bozos inside the Bern beltway.
Robert Barnard’s mystery Death of a literary widow (= Posthumous Papers, 1979) features a writer known as Walter Machin. The story takes place in Lancashire.
No, it’s a better story with 25.
My daughter was given the impression at school that Switzerland is an especially democratic country because they have referenda. Do they actually have the internet in Switzerland? There are never any Swiss here, or we’d be able to taunt them about their form of government.
There are apparently people who sit around discussing Machins.
Gentle kooks! And they give the English pronunciation, MAY-chin, which I was not sure of when I read the novel.
There’s also a conservatory manufacturer called Machin. I think they’re quite expensive.
Widgets are not the same as icons. As least not now. They are containers for information one wants to appear in the sidebar. I notice the word “icon” appears in the same entry but I don’t remember icons back in the 80’s either. Computers didn’t have a whole lot of memory back in those days–aren’t visuals pretty memory intensive? The entry seems to be talking about things to design for the future. The words were retained, but once the tools (widgets and icons) were designed they looked a little different.
Henry Machin is the hero of The Card, by Arnold Bennett. There are other more recent fictitious Machins. One is the main character in the Sixties’ English film ‘This Sporting Life’, about a professional Rugby League player in working-class Yorkshire. It has such realistic depictions of mud and scrum violence that it put me off wanting to visit Yorkshire. When I was forced to, I found out that it is in fact a virtual paradise, a vestige of rural England.
There’s another male Machin, I think in recent fiction, but I can’t remember where …
“the fucking fucker’s fucked!”
I heard this exclaimed by an irascible Scottish reporter (“irascible” is probably pleonastic there) called Roddy around 1979 in a newspaper office in Welwyn Garden City as he threw his jammed typewriter across the office …
Oh, and
“(the Kubus made fire by rubbing two flints)”
….no they don’t because rubbing flints together is not how you make fire. You rub sticks together or you strike flints for a spark.
…the mechanic in the North African campaign shouting out “the fucking fucker’s fucked!”, and it being widely understood that he’d managed to strip yet another screw.
Sorry, Preachy Preach but surely your (apocryphal?) North African annecdote is a (or nearly a) verbatim quote from the mechanic in the delightful movie The Gods Must Be Crazy. Perhaps that is where you got it and time has played a bit of a trick on the old memory. But, then, if you have yet to see the movie, do!
I personally suspect independent invention, meself. The phrase must be like, um, calculus. People keep on coming up with it and then sticking it in a drawer for twenty years. Maybe that’s not quite the right analogy.
And exactly this is the case. Appenzell-Innerrhoden, you see, is insanely conservative, and this attitude is precisely represented in the politics there.
That probably depends on the canton or half-canton. I’m not sure about Appenzell-Innerrhoden.
(Appenzell-Außerrhoden, though, probably has it. Hmmmm. And it may not even be conservative enough to still spell itself with ß, though someone will have to check.)
Kenneth Rexroth passed through Switzerland at some point and described the people as dreadfully stodgy: “Kansas stacked vertically”.
Kenneth Rexroth passed through Switzerland at some point and described the people as dreadfully stodgy: “Kansas stacked vertically”.
Nijma, the original Mac came out in 1984, but WIMPy (windows, icons, menus, pointing device) computers have been around since at least 1973, when Xerox PARC (the research labs) first built the Alto workstation.
Indeed, “widget” is a technical term in X-Windows (the GUI mechanism, as opposed to policy, on Unix-style boxen) referring to user interface components: buttons, drop-down lists, menus and menu bars, text boxes, scrollbars, tree views, etc.
“If the designers of X-Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles — but you’d be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that.” –Marcus J. Ranum
It was destined never to take off, by sheer weight of palindromy: CRAP XeroX PARC. (Data? A tad.)
😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀
Um… was that deliberate? Is it an in-joke?
It is common computer-geek usage (an offshoot of Tolkien’s “elven,” if I am not mistaken).
I’d like a half-canton of appenzell, please. No ice.
you are mistaken; it’s a deliberate overgeneralization of “ox”>”oxen”. Similarly “Unix”>”Unices”: Imperial Roman operating systems were 3rd declension.
“the fucking fucker’s fucked!”
Norwegian equivalent: “Det helvetes helvetet er gått til helvete!”
Which reminds me of this legendary recording of a man from Northern Norway fixing a washing machine. From the year of Ausserrhodesian women’s suffrage, incidentally.
If you’ll provide the URL, I’ll fix the link.
Link doesn’t work. 🙁
I’ll try again.
I understand very little – just enough to laugh nonstop.
(Of course, some of that is probably precisely because I don’t understand more: the concept of traveling to hell amuses me to no end.)
Well, it’s plain old “go to hell” with emphasis by synonym.
Some glosses:
faan orig. “the devil”, now mostly an all-purpose curse
(hain) Tytje (rather ‘Tykje’) a personal name used (in this region) to mean “Satan”.
steitje (rather ‘steikje’) “roast, fry”. “The devil roast …” is a common theme for curses.
førbainna(de) “cursed, diabolic”
jævelskap “devil’s work; evil”
dæven “the devil”
Gammel-Erik “Old Eric”, i.e. “Satan”
fett “vagina” (with i > e and apocope.)
ræva “the arse”
mainnsjit (rather ‘mainnskit’) “man-shit”, i.e. “shit”
David: “That Hell-Bound Train”, by Robert Bloch. It’s interesting to note, apropos our thread on hobos, that Martin sees being a bum as a step up from a tramp rather than vice versa: hey, at least he’s an urbanite.
I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
intrigued by your ideas
So am I, all the time. What I mean by emphasis by synonym is that the meaning of a set phrase, like a curse, can be made more clear, and hence the phrase stronger, by substituting a word that is less semantically bleached (in the context). It’s much the same as adding detail. “Faen steike meg” is just a rude curse and no one pays attention to the meaning, “Faen riste meg over høy varme” is heard, parsed and understood.
I should also add that I’m intrigued by your quotations and want to subscribe to yours,
The wrong words, but the right things.
The right place, but the wrong time.
I’m confused as to whether Kirschwasser uses sour or sweet cherries. Is morello a sour or sweet cherry?
(BTW, where does Шпанка (вишня) slot in? Its fruits are larger than sour cherry’s and its limbs are like those of sweet cherry, but it’s not very sweet. We had one in our garden.)
Both sweet and sour. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirschwasser
Morelle is a type of Sauerkirsche. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morelle
Thank you! Is it ever matured in casks, as whisky or brandy?
Sorry, I know naught about the evolution of spirits. The Kirschwasser link says the stuff is processed in glass or stoneware containers.
>you strike flints for a spark.
With steels?
Or is there a pre-pyrite neolithic tradition using two flints?
Flint and marcasite (orthorhombic FeS₂, as opposed to pyrite which is cubical FeS₂) until the Iron Age. After that, flint and iron/steel until 1830 when the friction match was invented.
I used to climb a sour cherry tree in my family’s back yard and eat the fruit one by one on the spot. Sweeeeet! We also had a sweet cherry tree, but it was too old to bear much, too high to climb (the first limb was easily 6m off the ground), and most of the fallen cherries were eaten by birds.
An important part of the flavor of fine kirshwasser is supposed to be the “bitter almond”* flavor of the cyanide in the pits. (Kirshwasser is made from whole, unpitted cherries.) Finishing the liquor in wooden casks would tend to overwhelm the subtle bitter almond, so I think it is generally not done. Wikipedia says that ash barrels are sometimes used—ashwood being less saturated with aromatic (not in the strict chemical sense) compounds than oak—or in barrels coated with paraffin. (But if the distiller is going to coat the interior surface with paraffin, they might as well just use an impermeable inorganic container.)
* The almond is another member of the stone fruit genus Prunus, although it is obviously cultivated solely for the seed, rather than the flesh. So the almond flavor found in the pits of cherries and apricots is not a coincidence, and the sweet almonds we eat would not have their characteristic flavor without the cyanides.
The cheaper “confectionery mass” (konfektmasse) sold here (all year, but mainly in the run-up to Christmas) as a substitute for marzipan (marcipan) can be made from apricot kernels and sugar, no almonds in sight. The cyanide is removed by soaking or mechanical means — cf tapioca. “Raw marzipan” has to have at least 60% almonds, making it a object of desire in Sweden where mandelmassa only has to have 40% or so.
@Lars Mathiesen: Apricots usually have the next highest concentrations of amygdalin of any fruit pit, after almonds. I guess that tends to make their pits more flavorful than, say, peach pits, although I have to admit I would be pretty leery of eating anything made out of apricot pits.
Some apricot pits are more cyanidey than others. The really strong ones, I can barely eat one of them. The smell’s really strong. I’ve eaten really mild ones, but those were packaged and came from a US store, so maybe they had been steamed or something. The strong ones came from a market stand in Israel, and had a big warning sign on them as to how many you can eat at one time.
I’ve often wondered how many peasants the original local chief had to sacrifice in the course of his agricultural experiments that eventually revealed that, yes, you can eat cassava after all – once you’ve leached all the cyanide out.
Anything is edible once you’ve leached it or boiled it long enough. Everyone knows that.
I’ve read that that kind of experimention was usually done by “ medicine men” / shamans, on themselves.
@David Eddyshaw: I always feel like that sense of leach should be spelled “leech,” since it refers to drawing a liquid out of something. The words are actually unrelated, although both have peculiar etymologies. For this sense of leach, the OED says:
The noun form is “apparently < leach v.2 (though recorded much earlier than the verb in the cognate sense)”; the OED also notes that the (etymologically identical) regular form letch does exist as a noun, with the meanings
The etymology of leech, the blood-sucking worm, is more regular, except that it has been contaminated by the meaning “physician,” which is older. (Old-fashioned quacks were not named after their bloodletting annelids, but the other way around!)
Letch is interesting. It’s like “reach” (pronounced “retch.”) It looks rather like the usual pronunciation of “leach” is a spelling pronunciation.
I will henceforward adopt the One True Correct Pronunciation “letch”, in order to amaze the groundlings and confuse the Germans.
Germanic “leech” is evidently connected with Old Irish lieig “physician.” I wonder if it’s a Celtic loan into Germanic, like Reich? Some Hatter will know …
you can eat cassava after all – once you’ve leached all the cyanide out.
But don’t throw it away!
Tucupi is a yellow sauce extracted from wild manioc root in Brazil’s Amazon jungle. It is also produced as a by-product of manioc flour manufacture. The juice is toxic when raw (containing hydrocyanic acid).[1]
Tucupi is prepared by peeling, grating, and juicing the manioc. Traditionally, a basket-like instrument called the tipiti [pt] was used. After being squeezed through the tipiti, the juice is left to “rest” so that the starch separates from the liquid (tucupi). Poisonous at this stage, tucupi must be boiled for from 3 to 5 days to eliminate the poison. The tucupi can then be used as a sauce in cooking. It is seasoned with salt, alfavaca and chicória.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucupi
The ancestral sauce of black tucupi is making its way onto the menus of some of South America’s best restaurants, bringing a new sense of pride to an age-old tradition.
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20201122-the-amazons-mouth-watering-fifth-flavour
I would be pretty leery of eating anything made out of apricot pits.
And you would be wrong. I remember eating almond-pit kozinaki/gozinaki (nuts or seeds in (kind of) molasses) that were sold during public holidays like May 1 or November 7.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gozinaki
Some more ways of using them:
https://1000.menu/catalog/yadra-kostochek-abrikosa (in Russian, sorry, but with pictures)
Mother made cookies with ground apricot pits, and they tasted just great!
Here is urbech (ürbech?), a Daghestanian specialty, made with ground apricot pits:
https://www.iamcook.ru/showrecipe/15226
apricot pits: 300 g
butter: 40 g
honey: 40 g
salt: a pinch
First, the pits are processed in a blender, for about 7 minutes, them the butter is melt in a bain-marie, the honey and salt is added to it, and the mixture poured into the almond meal.
Sure, all apricot trees are not equal. We had a tree that produced apricots with sweet kernels, while Grandmother’s were bitter.
Шпанка
I’have found it: it’s a cross between a sweet and a sour cherry.
Вишня Шпанка – украинский сорт, имеющий несколько разновидностей. Был получен в результате народной селекции, гибрид вишни и черешни. Это высокое дерево с шарообразной кроной. Ветки отходят от ствола под тупым углом. Поскольку крепление веток не достаточно прочное, иногда случаются разломы кроны.
http://www.udec.ru/derevo/shpanka.php