Closing tabs

Rather grumpy about ongoing minor respiratory ailment. Had hoped I might be able to run for a bit today, but really I'm still hawking up huge gobs of disgusting phlegm, it will not do lungs any good to strain them with exercise! Behind on various work stuff, generally feeling rather low. (About to dig in on clearing some of these overdue tasks, which with any luck will lead to a feeling of considerable relief .)

Nice writeup of last week's Swift symposium. I had a very funny conversation afterwards with an elderly Irishman who was peculiarly vivid of conversation. He was excited to tell me that I was "a BORN LECTURER: BORN TO THE PODIUM" - also I used two words he was unfamiliar with, paratactic and hypotactic, which let him tell me a wonderfully complex multi-part anecdote about an alcoholic friend of his, now deceased, who was a great lover of language and once told this gentleman, when he used the word "creature" to describe a lady, "to refer himself to the discipline of the dictionary"! This is now a good new phrase in my repertoire. Said friend died in hospital of complications due to alcoholism, but on his deathbed sung this gentleman two songs which I promised I would go and hear online: one I think was "The Parting Glass," if I am remembering correctly, and the other was a Gaelic song whose title loosely translated into "Nobody knows her name" (various versions here). Some reciting of Yeats was also involved....

Fun to see this profile of an old friend in my Digg feed!

Jane Goodall's jungle.

The link B. sent me yesterday really did bring a smile to my face: the Shetland Pony Grand National!

Works on paper redux

Brad Pasanek at People of the Book: especially good bits on watermarks, as well as a nice shout-out to the now-deceased Jay Fliegelman, author of one of my favorite books in eighteenth-century studies.

Reboot

Pretty grumpy at this end, thus lack of blogging (my general policy is to stay offline if I'm down in the dumps) - I have been mostly horizontal with a dreadful cold!

(At the end of last week I was still able to persuade myself that I was just having raw lungs of some minor description, but really I spent the weekend almost entirely in bed; managed to get one set of grades in today, but it left me feeling the need for more horizontality. I think it will be Wednesday at the earliest before I can exercise, which has a strongly negative effect on morale....)

Closing tabs:

Cat stars of the new Coen brothers movie!

"It glows when you lick it."

Mike Tyson, philosopher.

Standardization of the "last meal."

Resurgence of the Presto direct-to-acetate audio recorder. (It is a very cool project, and the Rosanne Cash bit is especially worthwhile.)

What's your OED birthday word? (Via Anne F.)

Closing tabs

The cold I have is making me feel distinctly glum. Exercise deprivation not helping. Came home after morning work and midday meetings and went back to bed for about three hours in the afternoon; am hoping a long night of sleep tonight may make me feel a bit better in the morning, though I think it will be Saturday before I can exercise. (Chelsea Piers is finally reopening on Saturday post-Sandy, and I am much looking forward to attending Joanna's 10am spin class, which I have sorely missed!)

Minor light reading: Jussi Adler-Olsen, The Absent One (don't think I'll continue with this series, too preposterous); Michael Connelly, The Black Box (suitable reading for illness, but fairly slight).

Closing tabs:

Chinese typewriters anticipated predictive text functions (via Wen Jin).

Further clarification on the OED's supposedly missing loan words.

Human skulls carved from books! (Via Nico.)

Abattoir, svelte, bamboo

At the Guardian, Alison Flood on Sarah Ogilvie's scandalous revelations about OED deletions (via Liz Denlinger):

Examples of Burchfield's deleted words include balisaur, an Indian badger-like animal; the American English wake-up, a golden-winged woodpecker; boviander, the name in British Guyana for a person of mixed race living on the river banks; and danchi, a Bengali shrub. The OED is now re-evaluating words expunged by Burchfield, who died in 2004, aged 81.

"This is really shocking. If a word gets into the OED, it never leaves. If it becomes obsolete, we put a dagger beside it, but it never leaves," Ogilvie said.

"T for take all"

From the OED online, definition for "teetotum":

 

A small four-sided disk or die having an initial letter inscribed on each of its sides, and a spindle passing down through it by which it could be twirled or spun with the fingers like a small top, the letter which lay uppermost, when it fell, deciding the fortune of the player; now, any light top (sometimes a circular disk pierced by a short peg), spun with the fingers, used as a toy.The letters were originally the initials of Latin words, viz. T totum, A aufer, D depone, N nihil. Subsequently they were the initials of English words, T being interpreted as take-all: see quot. 1801. On the French totum or toton, the letters are T, A, D, R, meaning, according to Littré, Totum, tout, Accipe, prends, Da, donne, Rien (nothing).

1720   D. Defoe Life D. Campbell (1841) 50   A very fine ivory T totum, as children call it.

1778   F. Burney Evelina III. xxi. 240   And turn round like a tetotum.

1800   Sporting Mag. 15 48   A man was lately convicted..for selling a teetotum.

1801   J. Strutt Glig-gamena Angel-ðeod iv. iv. 341   When I was a boy the te-totum had only four sides, each of them marked with a letter; a T for take all; an H for half, that is, of the stake; an N for nothing; and a P for put down, that is, a stake equal to that you put down at first.

1818   T. Moore Fudge Family in Paris v. 23   Though, like a tee~totum, I'm all in a twirl, Yet even (as you wittily say) a tee~totum Between all its twirls gives a letter to note 'em.

1893   W. S. Gilbert Utopia (Limited) 11,   She'll waltz away like a teetotum.

Slab to zydeco

Dust-bunny regionalisms!  (Via Brent, who saw it at GeekPress.)

"A 'lobster trick' rewriteman"

This article has just introduced me to the phrase "the lobster shift."  Green's Dictionary of Slang gives a first usage from 1927 (of the variant "lobster trick") and suggests it derives from "the slow pace of the crustacean; i.e. such a shift, usu. between 2:00a.m. and 9:00a.m. is rarely busy."  It would make a great title for a novel...

Etymological

At Slate, Paul Collins considers the etymology of the term "shit-faced." (Via John Staines.)

Paul must not have had a copy of Jonathon Green's Dictionary of Slang to hand. If he had, he would have surely quoted an early entry for the first sense of "stupid, ignorant" (a letter by Hemingway: "Some shitfaced critic writes Mr Hemingway retires to his comfortable library to write about despair"), and also the classic instance of the second sense ("very drunk") as it appears in the movie Heathers: "Okay, just as long as it's not one of those nights when they get shit-faced and take us to a pasture to tip cows."

I will write a longer post at some point (possibly even later this week) about The Florestine Collection. One of the most moving things was learning that the beautiful little cinema in Columbia, South Carolina called the Nickelodeon, whose proprietors have been hugely supportive regarding Helen's films, has raised significant funds towards expansion and is going to name the new media education center after Helen. This is definitely a cause I'll be doing some fund-raising for; I'll perhaps post something here once I have more details.

Have only really been consuming the most undemanding of light reading, given travel etc.: Henning Mankell, The Troubled Man (highly worthwhile, and possibly even my favorite installment in the entire series); Michael Connelly, The Fifth Witness (reliably enjoyable, only a bit dull in parts due to high levels of courtroom content and also the central "clue" unduly jumps off the page, I didn't work out the twist but I was well aware that it must incorporate this detail, which I think is a slight technical failure on Connelly's part).

Before I was traveling (too busy last week to update, or else I have already listed these and subsequently forgotten?): Holly Black, Red Glove (enjoyed very much); Graham Joyce, The Silent Land (unsettling, good in many ways, not perhaps so much my cup of tea - too much Sartrean afterlife as a teenage reader, no strong preference for this sort of Jonathan Carroll-style vision of afterlife!); Sophie Hannah's Little Face (implausible and with a needlessly complex timeline but more or less readable); Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog (loved it - I will read anything she writes, the texture paragraph by paragraph is just so good!).

The books of knowledge

The Widow Blackacre, in Wycherley, The Plain Dealer:

O do not squeeze wax, son. Rather go to ordinaries and bawdyhouses than squeeze wax. If thou dost that, farewell the goodly manor of Blackacre with all its woods, underwoods and appurtenances whatever. Oh, Oh! (Weeps)

From Green's Dictionary of Slang: "squeeze-wax (n.) a surety for a loan; 'a good-natured foolish fellow, ready to become security for another, under hand and seal' (Grose)"; the first example, from a 1698 dictionary of cant, "Squeezing of Wax, being Bound for any Body."

CABOB: "a loin of mutton roasted with an onyon betwixt each joint"

At the TLS, James Sharpe on Jonathan Green's dictionary of slang and one of its early precursors:

Slang relating to sex, of course, figures prominently. Taking a non-exhaustive list from the first two letters of the alphabet, we find the penis being referred to as Aaron’s rod, Adam’s arsenal, arse-wedge, augur, bacon bazooka, bald-headed bastard, and bayonet.

Alas, there is not yet a copy of Green's Dictionary of Slang in the Columbia library system, I suppose it is not yet actually released in the U.S. - I will have to console myself with The A-Z of Nuclear Jargon for now...

(Really I want my own copy!)

"A small hump around 1700"

At the LRB, Jenny Diski on Google's searchable book database (I know at least one person who will be dismayed if she reads this piece - sorry, Alice!):

Melancholy is virtually non-existent before 1570, but begins to rise and then falls until it drops off completely around 1625, about the time of the death of Dowland. It builds again to a great surge in 1650 (when, it says in Wikipedia, ‘the Age of Discovery ends’: reason enough), falls and then picks up, growing nicely and rising with the Romantics in 1800, and then declines gently before starting to increase again after 2000. Sting recorded a very terrible version of Dowland’s songs in 2006. Fuck is quite absent from books until about 1590 when it jolts up the chart for about eight years and then plummets, before returning in the 1630s, holding its own quite robustly until, of course, it disappears completely between 1820 and the mid to late 1950s when it surges once more (Look Back in Anger, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the Beat Poets) and remains ever on the up after that. Not as much as shit, however, which overtook fuck in the 1950s and has remained in the ascendant. Cunt is something of a rarity, hardly visible apart from a small hump around 1700, but then it starts to perk up and continues to rise until the latest available date. I imagine it will have made something of a spurt in 2010.

A "ham sandwich"

At the FT (site registration required), Henry Hitchings has an absolutely lovely essay about dictionaries of slang old and new (the first is one I consulted when I was long ago writing about Jonathan Wild, and the second is probably out of my price range but does indeed sound, as Hitchings says, "lusciously" browsable):

Leafing through the pages of Green’s Dictionary, one accumulates a stock of favourite oddments: an “Oklahoma credit card” is a siphon tube for stealing petrol, a “knocking-jacket” a nightdress, and a “fogle-hunter” a pickpocket who specialises (or really “specialised”, one imagines) in stealing silk handkerchiefs. Some of the illustrative quotations are equally droll: one letter-writer recalls that “I told you in my last how she gave the athletic stockbroker at Hove the mitten” – to be given the mitten is to have one’s proposal of marriage rejected – and another makes the seemingly far-fetched claim that “Penrith is becoming a real funk-hole”, though a funk-hole is here a place of refuge rather than somewhere James Brown might have frequented.

Grumbletonians and bundletails

At the Independent, Rob Hastings on the rediscovery of a seventeenth-century dictionary of slang.

Many rivers to cross

My two favorite Wikipedia consultations of the day (a lazy but effective way of making sure what one thinks one knows about a topic is more or less in line with the conventional wisdom!): tilt-shift photography; roman-fleuve.

Also: at io9, Annalee Newitz on five ways the Google Book Settlement will change the future of reading.

X.

Is a letter, which, though found in Saxon words, begins no word in the English language.

The discovery of Uqbar

Now I want to teach a class that will start perhaps with Kafka and then move through Beckett, Borges, Nabokov, Primo Levi, Georges Perec, David Markson...

So - Borges' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius":

The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) "primitive language" of Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty - not even that it is false. Numismatology, pharmacology and archeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics also await their avatars...

"Cockamamies"

Reading Roland Barthes is amazing for many reasons, but the latest one is that by looking up the word decalcomania ("Fiction: slight detachment, slight separation which forms a complete, colored scene, like a decalcomania") I have learned the origin of the term decal!

(And: the decal craze of the late 1800s!)

"On to Z!"

Celeste Headlee on the pleasures of the Dictionary of American Regional English (via Bookforum):

[W]hen this reporter tested out some words from the DARE at a Starbucks in suburban Detroit, none of the patrons seemed familiar with a "monkey's wedding" (a chaotic, messy situation in Maine); "cockroach killers" (pointy shoes in New Jersey) or "mumble squibbles" (noogies, North Carolina-style).

While it's fun to learn about colloquial language, Hall says, there are serious practical uses for the DARE as well. Forensic linguists once used it when a little girl was kidnapped and police had only a ransom note to go on.

"In this ransom note, the writer said, 'Put $10,000 cash in a trash can on the devil's strip,' " Hall says.

The key phrase in the note was "devil's strip," a term used only in a tiny section of Ohio to refer to the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street. As it happened, one of the suspects on the police list was a man from Akron. After being confronted with the evidence, linguistic and otherwise, the man ultimately confessed.

Doctors also use the DARE to understand patients who use colorful language to describe their illnesses. A patient complaining of "the groundage" or "pipjennies" likely has a rash on the feet or pimples.

"Lovelily dreadful"

A new adverb for Light Reading?