Language Hat

The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (which I highly recommend you visit if you're ever in New Haven, which, incidentally, is a much nicer city than some people think) has produced a wonderful lexicographical blog called Dr. Johnson?s Dictionary:Welcome to Dr. Johnson?s Dictionary, a word-a-day dictionary from Samuel Johnson?s A Dictionary of the English Language (London: Printed by W. Strahan for J. and P. Knapton, [1755]), one of the first dictionaries to document the daily working life of the English language.

In celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of Johnson?s birth in 1709, a definition from the first edition of the dictionary will be posted each day for readers? lexiconic delight, beginning on January 1, 2009. Words will be taken from the annotated proof copy of the first edition, extra-illustrated with Johnson?s and his helpers? manuscript corrections, which is held in the collections of Yale University?s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.They're also going to be "offering an exhibition on the writing of Boswell?s Life of Johnson in July - September, 2009, drawing on the Beinecke?s Boswell Family Papers collection. As a contribution to the tercentenary festivities, and in support of scholarship on Johnson and Boswell, the Beinecke will be scanning the entire James Boswell segment of the Boswell Family Papers and making the collection available in its Digital Images and Collections." Now, that's the way to share your rich holdings with the public! (N.b.: They call it "a word-a-day dictionary," but it's arranged in reverse chronological order and allows comments, so I say it's a blog.) Thanks for the link, Paul!

I don't know if anyone younger than me and a few of my similarly well-aged readers remembers Victor Borge, the musical comedian; he had a routine called "Inflationary Language" in which he added one to numbers embedded in words, so that "once upon a time" becomes "twice upon a time," "wonderful" becomes "twoderful," and so on. (You can read a version of the routine here and see him performing it via YouTube here.) I just ran across a parallel game played in Russia a century ago in Teffi's memoir (in Russian) of Fyodor Sologub (whom I wrote about here). She writes (original Russian below the cut):We [those gathered at one of Sologub's literary evenings] decided to write a novel in the new style [this would have been after the 1905 revolution, when informality and popular language were all the rage]. It started like this:

"На улицу вышел человек в синих панталонах" [Na ulitsu vyshel chelovek v sinikh pantalonakh] ('There came out onto the street a person in dark-blue pants').

In the new style it was written like this:

"На у-роже ты-шел лоб-столетие в ре-них хам-купо-нах" [Na u-rozhe ty-shel lob-stoletie v re-nikh kham-kuponakh: here улицу [ulitsu] 'street' is analyzed as containing a form of лицо [litso] 'face' and thus the latter is replaced by the slang word рожа 'mug'; вышел [vyshel] 'went out' is taken as containing вы [vy], the polite form of 'you,' which of course is replaced by the informal ты [ty]; человек [chelovek] 'person' is analyzed as чело 'forehead' (archaic) + век 'age, century' and replaced by the standard words for 'forehead' and 'century,' лоб [lob] and столетие [stoletie]; the си in синих [sinikh] 'dark blue' is taken as "si" of solfège (i.e., B) and replaced by "re" (i.e., D)—I confess I don't understand the rationale for this; and панталонах [pantalonakh] 'pants, trousers' (at the time—now it refers to women's undergarments) is taken as пан [pan] 'gentleman' + талон [talon] 'coupon,' which are replaced by хам [kham] 'boor' (reflecting the trendy new anti-bourgeois feeling) and купон [kupon] 'coupon' (newer word).]

The game was thoroughly stupid, but terribly captivating, and many of our circle of writers eagerly took part in this nonsense. And many serious and even gloomy people, like Sologub himself, at first shrugged their shoulders doubtfully, then, as if unwillingly, thought up a word or two, and off they went. They got into it.

Continue reading "INFLATIONARY ENGLISH AND REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIAN."

As the first decade of the twenty-first century draws near its close, there is still no accepted way to refer to it (parallel to "the teens," "the twenties," and so on), and perhaps there never will be. But on the radio today I heard a startling abbreviation for the coming year; an economist talked about the prospects for "oh nine and oh ten."

Bill Poser sent me a link to Our Ninilchik Language, "an online dictionary of the old language of Ninilchik, Alaska"—said old language being Russian! From the Introduction by Andrej Kibrik Wayne Leman [thanks, Peter!]:In 1847 Gregorii Kvasnikoff, a Russian Orthodox Church missionary, brought his wife Mavra of Kodiak Island, half Alutiiq and half Russian, and their large family, to Ninilchik. They settled into the valley at the mouth of the what is now called the Ninilchik River and stayed. Not long after Kvasnikoffs arrived, Oskolkoff sons came with their mother and stepfather. Oskolkoff sons married Kvasnikoff daughters and all the old families of Ninilchik descend from these unions.

The Kvasnikoffs and Oskolkoffs brought the Russian language to Ninilchik. Russian continued to be spoken in the village long after Alaska was purchased by the U.S. from the Russians in 1867. There was a Russian school in the village which taught basic Russian literacy to the children and probably schooled them some in the Old Church Slavonic language used in the Russian Orthodox Church services in the village church...

This dictionary is an attempt to preserve some of the language of the people of Ninilchik. Our village language was mostly Russian, reflecting the vocabulary of Russian spoken by the Kvasnikoffs and Oskolkoffs in the late 1840s. It is Russian unaffected by the changes which have occurred in the Russian language (in its various dialects) in Russia through the tumultuous years of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Communist era, modern technological advances, and the fall of Soviet Communism. Our village language also included some words from southern Eskimo dialects as well as borrowings from Athabaskan dialects...

I grew up in the 1950's hearing Russian spoken a great deal in Ninilchik. Villagers regularly spoke Russian to each other. My father spoke Russian to his mother and siblings. Some of my cousins spoke some Russian if they came from families where Russian was spoken in the home. I did not; my mother had come to Ninilchik from California. But I learned a number of Russian words and could understand some of what I heard of conversations.

Then, suddenly, in the mid 1950's, Russian stopped being spoken in public. My father stopped speaking Russian to his siblings and his mother (until just before she died).

I have done my best to spell and record the words of our village...What a remarkable find! Once again my hat is off to someone who took the time and trouble to record an obscure and "useless" form of language, this one of particular interest to me. I should add that the words are spelled phonetically: "So the word for 'dog' is written in this dictionary as sabaka, which is how it is pronounced in Ninichik as well as in Moscow." Here's the A section of the dictionary, from which we learn that initial y- gets dropped (az'ík ЯЗЫК. n. tongue, language). I had no idea Russian Alaska had left this heritage behind. Thanks, Bill!

It's very strange: I've been reading and memorizing great swatches of Mandelstam (I'm working on "Tristia" now), and just last night I was thinking that perhaps he was the greatest poet of the twentieth century; today I ran across an essay "Collecting Mandelstam" (pdf, Google cache) by R. Eden Martin (in the Caxtonian, November 2006) that makes the same suggestion:Who was the greatest poet writing in any western language during the 20th Century? Many would answer: Osip Mandelstam...

Russia produced many excellent poets during the past century. Cab drivers in Petersburg regularly quote Pushkin at length. The very best Russian poets of the 20th Century would certainlyinclude Akhmatova, Blok, Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Tsvetaeva?and one could make a case for dozens of others. I believe that many of these Russian poets were greater artists than any poet writing in America at the time, including Frost and Stevens. And some experts in a position to make such judgments believe that Mandelstam was the greatest of them all.You needn't agree with such an extravagant claim, however, to enjoy Martin's essay, which provides a handy summary of the poet's life and—since he is a book collector—includes photographs of some rare editions and (perhaps my favorite) an enticing one of a complete run of Apollon magazine ("the greatest Russian literary and arts journal of the pre-War era"), 1909-1917, as well as the title page of the August 1910 issue that included Mandelstam's first published poems. I've just sent off for Clarence Brown's 1978 biography Mandelstam; I'll have to take Omry Ronen's widely praised An Аpproach to Mandelstam (Jerusalem, 1983) out of the library, since it doesn't seem to be available for love or money.

Incidentally, while we're on the subject of Russian literature, I also ran across a blog I'm surprised I haven't seen before, Lizok's Bookshelf, written by Lisa Hayden Espenschade, who says "I'm a writer and Russian tutor/teacher who loves reading fiction, particularly Russian novels," and has very informative notes on Russian books she's read or that have won prizes. Definitely worth a bookmark.

Oh, and happy new year! May 2009 be better for all of us.

Ben Zimmer has a Slate article about the use of "X Czar" to mean "official in charge of dealing with X" ("drug czar," "energy czar," etc.). There's all sorts of interesting history in there, but what grabbed me was this:Czar first entered English back in the mid-16th century, soon after Baron Sigismund von Herberstein used the word in a Latin book published in 1549. The more correct romanization, tsar, became the standard spelling in the late 19th century, but by that time czar had caught on in popular usage, emerging as a handy label for anyone with tyrannical tendencies.As it happens, Herberstein's book, Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii, is online (you can find versions in other languages linked from the end of the Wikipedia article), and sure enough, he writes "Czar Rhutenica lingua regem significat" ['in the Ruthenian language czar means king'; the entire paragraph is below the cut].

The question is: why on earth did he choose such an odd spelling? (Incidentally, there's an amusing dispute about the proper rendition of the word at Latin Vicipaedia.) Any ideas?

Continue reading "WHY CZAR?"

A simple idea, well executed:Forvo is the place where you´ll find words pronounced in their original languages. Ever wondered how a word is pronounced? Ask for that word or name, and another user will pronounce it for you. You can also help others recording your pronunciations in your own language.When I visited, the "Language of the day" was Slovenian, and one of the "Top pronunciations" was Ljubljana; I clicked on the little triangular symbol and heard "ingridzb (Female from Slovenia)" say it. Addictive and educational. (They're coy about what "forvo" means, but apparently it's something close to "FOR-VOcalization.") Thanks, Kári!

Dan Visel (of The Institute for the Future of the Book, and I can't help but wonder how Visel is pronounced: VYE-z'l? vi-ZELL?) has put online a long, fascinating, infuriating interview with that amazing writer Helen DeWitt, who should by rights have had a dozen or two books published by now but who instead has seen The Last Samurai on actual bookstore shelves and has sold a few pdf copies of Your Name Here (and gotten a review by Jenny Turner in the LRB). The whole thing is worth reading (and I don't say that just because she has nice things to say about me), but what I thought I'd excerpt here is a section full of thought-provoking ideas about books and what they might be:When Ilya and I were working on YNH, one thing that interested me was the way that a text is the result of all sorts of discussions and constraints that normally aren't visible. Every single published book is governed by a contract, a text readers don't see, and it is generally the result of an enormous amount of scurrying around behind the scenes. So I thought: how can we possibly assess the texts we see when we don't know the contractual restraints on the author? when we don't know whether the publisher was willing to respect the contract? when we don't know whether the author had a powerful agent or a weak one, whether the published book was substantially what the author wanted or the result of a lot of arm-twisting off-stage? Editorial comments are never made public; why not?

So I thought, not that all this material should be included in a book, but that it would be interesting if all the background correspondence and the contracts and so on where available on a CD. For that matter, why not include earlier versions of the book, or at least significant earlier versions?

I like books, actual printed books, a lot. It seems to me, though, that the culture which produces the ones we see has some misplaced anxieties. We live in a culture where standards of 'correctness' and consistency are applied to the printed word, so that 'properly' published books are expected to eliminate the traces of composition. A text is not supposed to bear the marks of the circumstances of its writing. That seems to me to be an unnecessary concern ? but you don't really need the Internet to stop fretting about it.

There are some things you can do more easily if you can draw on the resources of Hypertext. You can write a text in several languages unselfconsciously, or maybe I mean, without obtrusive consciousness of the reader. You can just have a couple of characters speaking Spanish, or Arabic, or Japanese, and readers who can read the languages can read the text, but those who can't can click through to a translation. So you can make use of the textures of those different languages without giving the primary text a lot of extra baggage ? and still make it comprehensible to readers who need more in the way of explanation. This isn't especially relevant to YNH, but it's the sort of thing I think could more easily be done online or in an e-book than in print-on-paper. I came across a wonderful website a while back with graphics which enabled you to drill down on results of Grand Prix racers, if one did this in a work of fiction online one could have something very stylish whereas if one tried to do it in a book it would feel not just long but cumbersome and messy.Why not package books the way Criterion does DVDs, with alternate takes and translations and commentary from the author and informed readers and... well, who knows what all? Why is a book expected to stand on its own (unless it's a Classic, in which case it gets a solemn Classic Edition with obtrusive footnotes), while a movie is thought to benefit from as much auxiliary information as possible?

I won't even get into what she has to say about the hell that is commercial publishing, with its ignorant editors and unkept promises, and the terrible financial pressure that makes writers stifle current work they're excited about to try and sell long-finished work they're bored or nauseated by, because it gets me too upset. Why do zillionaires give zillions to museums and operas and never think of, as she says, sponsoring an admired writer's travel expenses or offering them six months' writing time at a vacation home? If I were a zillionaire, that's the kind of thing I'd want to do... but of course to become a zillionaire I'd have to care about money and the making of same in large quantities, and then I'd be a different person and probably never think about the problems of writers. It's a conundrum.

A letter from Charles Ellwood Jones (head librarian at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World) in the October 23 issue of the NYRB contains the following enticing information:Indeed, the Oriental Institute has taken the bold and laudable decision to make all the published products of its research programs accessible without charge. A convenient list of the more than one hundred volumes of scholarship currently accessible can be found at oihistory.blogspot.com/2008/04/oriental-institute-electronic.html. Much of it documents the intellectual and material remains of the people who inhabited Iraq in the past.Here's the actual catalog; click on the categories to get the lists of publications. I hope this generous policy is imitated by more institutions. An informed public is a public that is likely to purchase scholarly publications.

I'm still digesting filet mignon and Yorkshire pudding and asparagus (all washed down with pinot noir), but before I collapse completely I thought I'd give a brief report on some of the goodies I got. Pride of place goes to the magnificent Criterion edition of Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz (based on the 1929 Döblin novel, of which I have a beat-up and much-annotated copy); I saw the whole 15½-hour series when MOMA did a retrospective in 1997, and ever since I've longed to own it so I could watch it at my leisure, novel and maps at my side. Then there are Kate Brown's A Biography of No Place, about the dreadful 20th-century fate of a borderland between Russia and Poland that's been ethnic-cleansed and homogenized to within an inch of its life, and David Garrioch's The Making of Revolutionary Paris, about the history of 18th-century Paris (a city in whose history I have an inordinate interest), and the winter boots, and the slack-key guitar CDs, and various other goodies. A thousand thanks to those who made this a memorable day: you know who you are!

Even as I type, my wife is cooking up a huge batch of Norwegian meatballs for our traditional Christmas Eve dinner, and one of the accompaniments (along with akvavit) is lingonberries. Well, I wanted to know how to say "lingonberry" in Russian (because I want to know how to say everything in Russian), and my dictionaries weren't helping me; fortunately, Wikipedia came to my rescue, and I learned that the word I was looking for was брусника [brusnika]. This is not defined as "lingonberry" in my trusty Oxford, but as "foxberry; red whortleberry (Vaccinium vitis idaea)"; as a matter of fact, the Wikipedia entry isn't called "lingonberry" but "Vaccinium vitis-idaea," and it opens with this remarkable list of alternatives: "often called lingonberry also called cowberry, foxberry, mountain cranberry, csejka berry, red whortleberry, lowbush cranberry, mountain bilberry, partridgeberry (in Newfoundland and Cape Breton), and redberry (in Labrador)." And the OED qualifies "lingonberry" as Canadian, which seems odd since none of us who use it here in my extended family (in the States) think of it as Canadian. (Incidentally, the OED's first cite for the word is 1960 J. J. ROWLANDS Spindrift 156 "In Sweden the cranberry is known as the lingonberry," and the most recent is 1971 D. NABOKOV tr. Nabokov's Glory (1972) vi. 24 "Supper at the station (hazel hen with lingonberry sauce).")

So I have two questions for you all. If you are familiar with this tasty little berry, what name do you know it by? And if you call it "lingonberry," do you think of that word as Canadian?

I've written about Karl Kraus here and here; Adam Kirsch's NYRB review of The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe, by Paul Reitter, discusses Kraus's more wild-eyed ideas (he apparently seriously thought journalists were more responsible for war than anyone else, and he said things about Jews and Jewish influence that have kept the label "self-hating Jew" attached to him for a century now), but leads into the more distressing stuff by talking about his more likable (if still wild-eyed) fixation on language. He attributed to misprints the same sort of significance that his nemesis Freud gave to slips of the tongue:In 1912, for instance, he published an item titled "I Believe in the Printer's Gremlin," which reproduced a provincial newspaper's announcement of a performance of "King Lehar, a tragedy in five acts by W. Shakespeare."

To Kraus, who revered Shakespeare, the conflation of Lear with Franz Lehar, the operetta composer he regarded as the acme of kitsch, was "no laughing matter. It's horrible," he wrote in his gloss on the item. As with a Freudian slip, precisely the fact that the mistake was accidental is what makes it significant: "The printer was not trying to make a joke. The word that he was not supposed to set, the association that got into his work, is the measure of our time. By their misprints shall ye know them." No wonder Kraus proofread each page of Die Fackel [the magazine he wrote and published from 1899 until his death ini 1936] up to a dozen times, not just insisting on correct spelling but making sure that every comma appeared exactly halfway between the adjoining letters.I laugh, but I'm also glad I don't have to set type for this blog, because I'd probably be almost as obsessive about the commas.

This is old news, and anyone who's plugged in to the world of contemporary poetry doubtless knows about it, but it was new to me when the Growler told me about it, and I'm sure it will be new (and hopefully amusing) to many of you: at the start of October there was an announcement of a new online publication, Issue 1, "edited by Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter. Now available here as a 3,785-page PDF (3.9 MB). This issue features new poems by Nada Gordon, Evelyn Reilly, Julianna Mundim ... [hundreds of names elided] ... and Snezana Zabic." The thing is, the poems aren't actually by those people, and as word spread (more or less instantaneously, as is the wont of the internet age), many of them left outraged comments at the announcement site (as you'll see if you scroll down). There's a good discussion in a Nation article by Barry Schwabsky, one of the poets "represented":What first caught my eye was that I couldn't recall ever having submitted my work to its editors. And when—thank goodness for that "find" function—I saw page 2,039, I knew why: "my" poem was one I'd never written. Neither had any of the other thousands of authors written theirs. The anthology's "editors," Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter, using a computer program of Carpenter's devising, were responsible for its entire contents—and thereby for the most provocative hoax to hit the poetry world since the Araki Yasusada scandal in the early '90s. ...

I rather liked "my" poem, not as a poem in my own style, naturally, because it isn't, but as an example of one particular present-day period style. But neither I nor anyone else has read the whole book, so none of us can come to grips with the totality of the oeuvre. Random dips into it also turn up some pretty boring pages—still in the same style—but then the same is sure to be true of any fairly prolific poet. ...

...That a computer can generate better poetry than some poets can write should not be shocking. Remember Kleist's great essay on the marionette theater, where his interlocutor proves to him that a puppet has the potential to be made to dance more gracefully than any human, because "grace will be most purely present in the human frame that has either no consciousness or an infinite amount of it, which is to say either in a marionette or in a god." There's a glimmer in Issue 1 of what poetry written without consciousness might be—but just a glimmer, luckily, because were it entirely so, we flesh-and-blood poets might not stand a chance any more than the chess players do. For now, it's a good reminder that we really ought to try and write better than a computer, while we still can.And some of the other "victims" had what I consider healthy reactions; F. James Hartnell wrote: "A splendid spoof. Well done indeed. Can't believe that some people actually got annoyed. I was so honoured to read my own perfect gibberish."

Roger Shuy at the Log has a post about the legal use of inure, which the OED defines as "To come into operation; to operate; to be operative; to take or have effect," used in the context of something being for someone's benefit:
1651 G. W. tr. Cowel's Inst. 137 This Legacy shall inure not only to A. but to B. and his Heires also.
1879 PARKMAN La Salle 92 The results.. were to inure, not to the profit of the producers, but to the building of churches.
Shuy's example is from the Montana Department of Revenue: "No part of the net income of a Montana tax-exempt organization can inure to the benefit of any private stockholder or individual." As he points out, this is confusing to non-lawyers, since everybody else is familiar with it only in the context of getting used to something bad:
1781 COWPER Hope 7 The poor, inured to drudgery and distress.
Shuy says:I challenged the use of inure in this letter, but the lawyers in the tax department strongly objected. I argued that these tax letters are replacing a word with one meaning that lay people know with a word that has another meaning known only to lawyers (probably) and accountants (possibly). But the lawyers informed me that inure is one of those magical words that is absolutely necessary for legal reasons.The other usage that caught me by surprise recently is an odd use of the verb trespass. You might not think it's a transitive verb, and if you accept that it could be used transitively you might think only laws and the like could be trespassed, but these days it's said of people; the best explanation I've found is in Charles A. Sennewald's Shoplifters Vs. Retailers (New Century Press, 2000):Some stores will "trespass" a person caught shoplifting. ... To be "trespassed" simply means the customer has become a "persona non grata," a person not wanted.I can't say I care for it, but the English language doesn't seek my approval before moving on. I'm not sure if this is used by lawyers or only by security personnel, and I also don't know how far back it goes. It doesn't seem to have reached the dictionaries yet.

Recently my brother sent me a copy of Deep Survival (website), by Laurence Gonzales, telling me it was one of the best books he'd read recently. Since I respect his opinion, I put it on the mental pile of "books I intend to get around to sometime in the foreseeable future" and went back to Tolstoy. But then during a phone call he asked me if I'd started it yet, assuring me that I'd really like it, and I said "OK, I'll read it, I'll read it," and with a dutiful sigh I picked it up... and found it (with apologies for the cliche) impossible to put down. It's not at all the kind of macho "I'm tougher than you can possibly imagine, and if you follow my training program you too can kill alligators with your bare hands" kind of book I took it for; he tells a lot of hair-raising stories (a seventeen-year-old girl fell out of an airplane into the Peruvian rain forest... and survived!) and passes on fascinating facts (did you know that one of the demographic groups most likely to survive in the wilderness is children six and under?), but his focus is always on the habits of mind necessary for survival in tough circumstances, and even this bookworm who avoids anything more strenuous and perilous than hiking and cross-country skiing in well-marked areas, finds it riveting and educational.

But what I wanted to pass along was a particular passage on pp. 189-90, where he's describing a survival course he took in Vermont:As we hiked through trailless forest, Morey stopped every 20 or 30 yards to point out something, and we'd examine and discuss what we found. After we'd followed him deep into the woods, he asked us to close our eyes and point the way home. It is a humbling experience to find that you can't. I'd been following him, which is never a good idea. I had not walked my own walk, and as a result, I was lost.

Morey directed our attention to the last place we'd stopped to talk. We could still see it from where we stood. "Remember, we talked about the bittersweet vine there?" We'd taken a sample from a vine that's good for making cordage. So we hiked back to that spot. Then he pointed to another spot, where he'd shown me ways of seeing and walking that were used by Native American trackers and other Aboriginal peoples. He called it "Owl Eyes and the Fox Walk," that full-body alertness I'd seen when he listened to the birds. It can put you in an altered state of perception, he said. We returned to that spot. From there, we could see the place where we thought we'd found the hoof print of a deer, but it turned out to be the entrance to a vole tunnel. We had squatted there to discuss the difference between voles, moles, and mice.

Thus, hopping from one conversation to the next, we were able to retrace our steps exactly and to remember in great detail not only where we'd been but what we'd said and done at each spot. In what seemed to be a featureless and homogenous forest, Morey had given us tangible cues, like road signs, which we could easily follow home. He had discovered an effortless way to embed a reliable mental map in our brains.At this point I was thinking "songlines!" The very next paragraph read:"It's called song lines," he said. "And it's an ancient navigational technique used by Australian Aboriginals."Somehow it never occurred to me that you could apply songline techniques in another part of the world, but of course you can. It's just a matter of being attentive to your surroundings.

Anggarrgoon says:AUSTLANG is now public. It?s an absolutely fabulous resource for Australian languages and there should be a huge round of applause for Kazuko Obata at AIATSIS who did most of the legwork.

So what is Austlang anyway? It?s a web database of information about Australian languages. It includes summaries of speaker estimates, genealogical classification in a variety of publications, an estimate of degree of document, and there?s a nice interface with google maps.I have nothing to add except: what a great thing, and bless the internet that allows us to use it!

I had known that J. B. Van Helmont (1577-1644) invented the word gas based on Greek χάος 'chaos'—it makes sense if you know that in Dutch, the letter g is pronounced kh—but I had no idea he also created blas for "a supposed ?flatus? or influence of the stars, producing changes of weather" (OED). You can read all about it, with a funny quote from Richard Franck's Northern Memoirs, Calculated for the Meridian of Scotland; To Which is Added, The Contemplative and Practical Angler. Writ in the Year 1658, at Mark Liberman's post at the Log, and the comment thread there brings up the question of the family name Degas, originally De Gas: Ray Girvan points out that "Degas' paternal grandfather, Rene-Hilaire De Gas, was a baker from Orléans" and the commune Gas "is very close to Orléans." To which Bryn LaFollette adds:Well, that leads to the question of where the commune Gas gets its name. There is surprisingly little information on either the French or English Wikipedia pages, nor on any of the easily found pages on les communes de France.Of course, it may be that there is no known etymology for the name of such an obscure commune, but I'll bet Brichot would have a theory.

Some students at MIT have created an online edition of Ezra Pound's famous 1914 anthology Des Imagistes. (The linked Wikipedia article has a great Richard Aldington quote about the title: "What Ezra thought that meant remains a mystery, unless the word 'Anthologie' was assumed to precede it. Amy's anthologies were called Some Imagist Poets, so she may have supposed that Ezra thought 'Des Imagistes' meant 'Quelques Imagistes.' But why a French title for a collection of poems by a bunch of young American and English authors? Search me. Ezra liked foreign titles.") Unfortunately, it's a somewhat careless job—Joyce's poem "I hear an army charging upon the land" is pretty much spoiled by the typo "My heart, have you no wisdom thus to dispair?"—but fortunately there's a pdf of the anthology that allows you to read from the book itself, and a beautiful thing it is. (Via MetaFilter, where I wrote "It's pretty funny to see poor Amy Lowell facing W.C. Williams across the gutter, and if you turn the page you're confronted by Joyce and Pound?those were the days!")

A Caleb Crain review (in The Nation) of a couple of new slang dictionaries (Stone the Crows: Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang, edited by John Ayto and John Simpson, and The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English, edited by Tom Dalzell) has some interesting things to say about slang in general, and makes this nice point about the impossibility of pinning it down:To a lexicographer, slang's abundance may present an even greater challenge than its definition. Although humans coin words as prolifically as bees make honey, dictionaries of standard English only include lexemes that have become a stable currency among strangers. Slang is not confined by this useful limit. My boyfriend and I refer to going online as checking our bids, in memory of a bygone fascination with eBay. Because we once elaborated the no-chicken label on a box of vegetarian broth into a fowl-friendly warning—"No, no, chicken! Keep away from the boiling water!"—we now always call the broth no-no chicken. The glossy young rich who crowd us out of our favorite restaurants are known to us as kittenheads, on account of a bus-side ad I once saw that juxtaposed an enormous fluffy white feline head, a crystal goblet full of glistening diced organ meats and the slogan "Next Stop, Uptown." This is just the tip of the iceberg of our private slang, and we're only two people. Multiply our sample by all the groups, large and small, who improvise with the English language for their own convenience and pleasure, and you see the problem. Slang is virtually infinite.Thanks, Paul!

This USA Arts interview with Nabokov was filmed, I believe, in early 1965, since he says he's still working on the Russian translation of Lolita, which he'd finished by March of that year; its 25 or so minutes are broken up into four parts. He starts off talking about how difficult it is for him to speak extemporaneously, making a comparison to the "beautiful, limpid" speech of his father, "with an aphorism here and a metaphor there ... I can't do it! ... I have to write it down laboriously; I don't think like that." He complains about the "crude, medieval" Freud; then, after the titles and a quick summary of his biography (the announcer claims he learned English before Russian, which is of course untrue; he once claimed to have learned to read English first, but I'm not sure that can be taken literally either) he reads the start of Lolita in English and then in Russian, and from there on it's completely absorbing if you care about Nabokov. (We also get to hear him chatting in French with the proprietor of a kiosk.) It ends with him playing chess with his wife (and laughing heartily, as he had earlier when talking about throwing out the index cards he wrote his novels on when they became too overwritten) and comparing writing to composing chess problems, with deception being part of the pleasure in each case. Thanks for the link go to Anatoly (whose commenters point out the oddity of Nabokov's having such a strong accent in English, considering that he learned it as a child, attended Cambridge, and had spent twenty years in America).