languagehat.com (Unofficial) / languagehat.com (Unofficial) is on Nostr

Unofficial automated RSS/Atom links from the source languagehat.com, covering Samples are language/word-history essays and cultural-linguistic discoveries by Languagehat. Original creators are credited at the source; follow original links. Zaps support the independent feed operator, not the source creators.

Last Notes

2026-11-05 17:22:38 GMT

Frown.
In making one of my occasional visits to Lynne Murphy’s blog Separated by a Common Language, I was directed to a decade-old post on frowns that begins:
A 2010 blog post from the Prosody Lab at McGill University was pointed in my direction last week, and judging by the reaction when I tweeted it, I’m not the only one who was surprised by the should-be-evident-but-nearly-invisible difference between British and American it reported. The post is by a non-native speaker of English, ‘chael’ (who I assume is Michael Wagner, the lab director) […]
The 2010 post quotes a friend’s question “Do you think this is a frown or a moustache?” and a dictionary definition of frown, “a wrinkling of the brow in displeasure or concentration,” and says “When I expressed my puzzlement, I learned that frown, in fact, also means the opposite of smile: a downward facing mouth expressing sadness, and that this is in fact the most common/salient meaning of the word, at least to some.” Lynne then continues:
The author goes on to express surprise that in 10 years in North America he hadn’t learned that. But I’m 21 years outside North America and a near-lifetime owner of a Merriam-Webster dictionary (what he’s cited above), so I’m even more surprised that I hadn’t discovered that other people think frowns are on the forehead. For me, a frown has always meant a down-turned mouth. Sure, the rest of the face gets involved, but a frown is what a sad mouth does.
When I tweeted the question “Where is a frown?” British people told me “on the forehead”. When I asked the Englishman in my house, he said the same thing. Fourteen years together and only now do I know that he’s been frowning much of the time.
And like one of the blog commenters, the Brits I talked with had an epiphany: so that’s why Americans say “turn your frown upside down!” to mean ‘cheer up!’.
The Brits who responded to my question were mostly northwards of 50, and I do suspect that younger, emoji-centric Britons may have a different perspective, knowing that the above emoji is called ‘slightly frowning face’ and having been exposed to the upside-down rhyme for more of their lives. (I am tempted to wake up the 8-year-old and ask her.)
(See Lynne’s post for more data and thoughts.) I too was surprised to learn about the difference, and I’ll ask the Brits in the audience: are you aware of the American down-turned-mouth sense?
https://languagehat.com/frown/
#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

2026-11-04 04:02:26 GMT

The Tamizdat Review.
Back in March I posted about the Tamizdat Project; today I learn from Lev Oborin’s Facebook post that the (bilingual) first issue of The Tamizdat Review is out, and it includes his own Sixteen New Notable Books (Russian version), “including novels by Leonid Bershidsky, Dmitry Bykov, and Anya Makeeva, poetry by Aleksandr Del’finov, a collection of historical studies devoted to the future, and an anthology that conceptualizes the loss of home.” A number of them sound intriguing, e.g. Pesni i sny narodov eseser (Songs and Dreams of the Peoples of the Uesesar) by Valery Nugatov:
Valery Nugatov, one of the best Russian translators of French and English transgressive prose, spent several years writing serial poetry that varied linguistic clichés and sound patterns ad nauseam. Online, he adopted the persona of Deduzhgo Khossan, a parodic figure based on a Russian mafia boss that was murdered in 2013. Khossan spoke in a language distorted almost to the extent of gibberish—and, like his creator, caustically questioned every possible ideological discourse. By 2026, Nugatov has grown weary of both roles.
And Mal’chik Yura (The Boy Named Yura) by David Markish:
Yuri Olesha was once the first reader of David Markish’s prose. Now, decades later, Markish publishes a novel about Olesha that quickly turns from conventional biographical fiction into phantasmagoria. Actually, “free fantasies from the life” of a given historical figure are Markish’s usual method. Here, these fantasies grow from the extraordinary world of Odesa at the turn of the 1920s—the world that had created the “Southern School” of literature. Another source is the far gloomier literary world of Stalinist Moscow. Alongside the titular boy Yura, the novel features Kataev, Ilf and Petrov, and Babel; their stories are woven into the larger history, about which Markish writes with the persistent, unkind irony of a veteran antisovetchik.
Of course, this novel cannot be taken for a documentary account, although there’s plenty of authentic detail (for example, Olesha really did joke about the island of Borneo—Ilf and Petrov probably borrowed the joke from him). Monya Rivkin represents the writer Veniamin Ryskind (Riskin), a close friend of both Olesha and Babel—but Kubat, Olesha’s interlocutor in Ashgabat, is imagined. He’s something of Olesha’s double, one who has achieved the freedom that eluded the protagonist.
But the one I most want to read is Chernaia rechka (Black River) by Dmitry Bykov, an old favorite of mine:
As Dmitry Bykov notes, classic Russian literature has encountered the Black River three times. There is Chernaya Rechka—the Black River—in St. Petersburg, on whose ice Pushkin fought in his deadly duel. Then, there is Valerik (the “River of Death” in Chechen), where Lermontov fought in battle. Finally, there is the river Chernaya (Black) in Crimea—an unfortunate battle there inspired Leo Tolstoy’s only significant poem. In Bykov’s new novel, Black River is the codename of a secret state project for expelling geniuses abroad before it’s too late. The idea that Russia is the womb in the world’s body, pushing geniuses out into the world, is one of Bykov’s favorites: it’s recurrent in his recent poetry and public talk shows, and the novel gives him an opportunity to develop it in detail. A novel, as Pushkin wrote, requires chatter, which matters more than the plot. Black River, accordingly, is a novel of ideas, of many notable thoughts fused together with a speculative postmodern plot where Pushkin doesn’t die in his duel but is finally set free, settles in France, lives to a ripe old age, and writes all of Mérimée, some of Nekrasov, and even almost all of Rimbaud. In a real and popular internet tale, Pushkin faked his death, slipped away, and became Alexandre Dumas, but Bykov resists the temptation to send him down this path: the temperaments and intellectual horizons of Pushkin and Dumas are too far apart. In the novel, Pushkin’s great love turns out to be George Sand, who is also Tatyana, who is also Nikolai Korsakov, a female graduate of the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum. And then, other figures from school textbooks follow the fugitive poet across the Black River.
Another connection is made in the novel. The motif of escape is important not only in Bykov’s fiction (in one form or another, it’s present in Orthography, The Evacuator, and Living Souls) but in Russian literature as a whole. Imagining his secret emigration machine, Bykov constructs transparent allegories of current events, extending to Russia’s war against Ukraine (whose counterpart is the suppression of the Polish uprising of 1863–64) and the mutual hostility between those who have left and those who have stayed. In doing so, he creates a philological novel rooted in Russian literary mythology. It will please both a literature major who would recognize many direct quotations, and a more knowledgeable reader who would notice numerous allusions to less obvious texts, from Nikolai Glazkov to Pelevin, and episodes in the recurring cycle of literary repression. (Bulgarin, eavesdropping on the interrogations of the Decembrists from a secret room, would reincarnate about a century later as Petr Pavlenko, who amused himself in the same way.) Perhaps the clearest mark of any philological novel are numerous references to Vladimir Nabokov. In Bykov’s book, Pushkin and Tatyana’s love, which they carry from adolescence into old age, echoes Ada, while Nabokov’s conjectures in Pushkin’s drafts expand here into two full-fledged verse chapters written in the Onegin stanza (though with assonant rhymes that Pushkin would never use). Finally, following another trope of the genre, an important clue to the entire plot—its alternative reading—is given in the book’s synopsis (and confirmed several times in Pushkin’s italicized remarks): “Or perhaps all this is merely the hallucination of a mortally wounded man.” Thus the Black River also becomes Owl Creek.
I read Bykov’s Orthography almost twenty years ago (see this post) and would like to read it again; this new one definitely sounds up my alley. And it all makes me want to get back to my Russian Prose Literature Chronology, which I let lapse several years ago both because the Russian literary world suddenly fragmented and because my sources for updating it stopped appearing.
https://languagehat.com/the-tamizdat-review/
#tamizdatproject #blackriver #dmitrybykov #valerynugatov #olesha #davidmarkish #russian #anyamakeeva #leonidbershidsky #notablebooks
#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

2026-11-03 03:37:15 GMT

Varia V.
Another collection of random bits that wouldn’t make very substantial posts on their own (the “V” is ‘five,’ not ‘vee’ — there have been four previous such posts):
1) My wife and I were watching a Morse episode last night — I think it was “Deadly Slumber” — and outside one of the pubs Morse and Lewis visited was a sign that said FREE HOUSE. I’m sure every Brit knows what this is, but I had to look it up:
free house
in British English
noun
British
a public house not bound to sell only one brewer’s products
2) I was watching the 1945 movie Dead of Night (quite effective, apart from a ludicrous segment about a pair of golfers) and learned a word new to me when a woman gives her husband a fancy mirror for his birthday and says “It’s an improvement on that barbola thing your aunt gave you.” OED (entry from 1933):
In full barbola work, decorative work composed chiefly of flowers and fruit modelled in a plastic paste and coloured, used to embellish small articles of wood, glass, pulp, etc.
1927 Tiny porcelain-looking flowers..for the newest buttonholes..which are really a form of barbola work, are arranged in small round posies.
Daily Express 26 September 5/5
It’s pronounced /bɑːˈbəʊlə/ (UK) or /bɑrˈboʊlə/ (US); etymology: “Proprietary term, arbitrarily < barbotine n,” the latter word meaning “A thin creamy mixture of kaolin clay used to ornament pottery” and that in turn being a borrowing from French, “< barboter to work noisily with the bill in water or mud (as a duck, etc.).”
3) I was humming the song “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis” when I wondered when it was written; the Wikipedia article told me it was 1904 but also said:
“Louis” in the song is pronounced “LOO-ee”, akin to the French. The song is one of the few instances of pronouncing the city’s name that way. It is normally pronounced “LOO-iss”.
I’m pretty sure that’s a tissue of nonsense: it’s pronounced “LOO-ee” because that’s how the name was said back in 1904, and the spelling pronunciation “LOO-iss” didn’t become prevalent (in the US) until decades later (at which point Louis Armstrong started insisting on it because “LOO-ee” now sounded like an undignified nickname). But I can’t correct the article because I can’t find a printed source for what I think is the truth; can anyone else? (Of course, it’s possible I’m completely mistaken, in which case I’d like to be so informed.)
4) A brief history of the decline of hat-wearing (YouTube). Thanks, Ariel!
https://languagehat.com/varia-v/
#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

2026-11-02 03:33:52 GMT

Linguistic Interiority.
The Random Link feature took me to this decade-old post on Eva K. Barbarossa’s Adelphi Project, and once again I wondered what Eva’s been up to and whether she ever finished her project. I think the answer to the last question is “no,” but in the course of searching I found this post at her (archived) tumbler, and it seemed interesting enough to repost here:
I’ve begun reading the Italian books in both Italian and English, as, for many authors, my Italian is good enough to read them. What a statement that is. The reality is, it may never be good enough for all the nuance, but it works, for now. My perspective is that I would have to live here for years to truly understand, but enough on that for now.
One of the things that strikes me is how different the English and Italian versions are. (I should read one of the Italians in French and see how that fares.) The structure, the sound, the length of the sentences, all, quite different. The sentiments feel off to me as well, at times.
I find, in the Italian and English versions, that there is more space, and more freedom taken by the translators. It doesn’t make the books not as good but they definitely feel different.
I am particularly pondering this, this morning, because I don’t feel that level of distance between French and English translations, though I often wonder at word choice of something specific, it is less large, except for a few authors who I feel translate so poorly you should skip reading them, if English is your only option.
The question I have though, is if this gap is due to the newness of my Italian, if it will diminish over time, and my brain will fill in the additional parts, the structures and nuances, so that even in English, I can hear the Italian, get a sense of what the original likely was.
I’m always fascinated by this kind of comparison, and I can’t help wondering how the question in the last paragraph was resolved. In any case, long live mad projects!
https://languagehat.com/linguistic-interiority/
#italian #english #randomlink #eva #adelphiproject #barbarossa
#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

2026-10-30 04:08:22 GMT

Kandata.
I recently discovered a director I’d never heard of, Yoshishige Yoshida (aka Kijū Yoshida, but why?), who has become one of my favorites after seeing just one movie, his 1969 Eros + Massacre (エロス＋虐殺, Erosu purasu gyakusatsu). I’m not going to recommend it to all comers, because it’s over three and a half hours long and fairly incomprehensible on first viewing, but any fan of late-’60s Godard should eat it up with pleasure; I would go so far as to call it a mashup of Two or Three Things I Know About Her (the prostitution/labor/money nexus), La Chinoise (the endless far-left factional arguments), Week-end (the sex/violence nexus, with wildly surrealistic scenes), and Le Gai savoir (good-looking young people discussing philosophy, politics, and life), not to mention that it’s so consistently gorgeous you don’t really care what it all means. The movie is available (for the time being, presumably) here; having watched it on YouTube, I immediately sent off for the Arrow Video three-Blu-ray set of the trilogy that also includes Heroic Purgatory (1970) and Coup d’État (1973) — it’s still on half-price sale for $25.00, if anyone’s tempted.
But this isn’t a movie site, and what brings it here is a tossed-off reference (at 10:08 in the YouTube video; there’s a transcript of the subtitles here) “The thief Kandata saved a spider.” I imagine most viewers let it slide amid the general chaos, but I’m not that kind of viewer, so I looked it up and found a very interesting network of references. Kandata is the protagonist of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s short-short “The Spider’s Thread” (蜘蛛の糸, Kumo no ito), summarized at Wikipedia and available in en-face Japanese and English here, in Edwin McClellan’s translation here, and on a “translation and commentary” page by Timothy M. Kelly here. Kelly writes:
In the case of “The Spider’s Thread” three separate sources served as Akutagawa’s inspiration : 1) a fable found in The Brothers Karamazov, 2) a captioned illustration found in The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, and 3) a story titled “The Spider’s Web” in Karma: A Story of Early Buddhism. Simply uncovering or naming the “sources” is insufficient. In order to appreciate Akutagawa and “The Spider’s Thread” properly, these sources must be examined closely.
Akutagawa read The Brothers Karamazov by the famous Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky’s (1821-1881) in English translation during the period from October 1916 through July 1917. The fable he gleaned from this novel is relatively short and is given here in its entirety.
Once upon a time there was a woman, and she was wicked as wicked could be, and she died. And not one good deed was left behind her. The devils took her and threw her into the lake of fire. And her guardian angel stood thinking: what good deed of hers can I remember to tell God? Then he remembered and said to God: once she pulled up an onion and gave it to a beggar woman. And God said: now take that same onion, hold it out to her in the lake, let her take hold of it, and pull, and if you pull her out of the lake, she can go to paradise, but if the onion breaks, she can stay where she is. The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her: here, woman, he said, take hold of it and I’ll pull. And he began pulling carefully, and had almost pulled her all the way out, when other sinners in the lake saw her being pulled out and all began holding on to her so as to be pulled out with her. But the woman was wicked as wicked could be, and she began to kick them with her feet: ‘It’s me who’s getting pulled out, not you; it’s my onion, not yours.’ No sooner did she say it than the onion broke. And the woman fell back into the lake and is burning there to this day. The angel wept and went away.
There is an illustration found in The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil from the Earliest Times to the Present Day of Buddha extending his hand to a sinner in hell. The caption reads: The goodwill that a poor wretch had shown in his former life to a spider, his only good deed, serves him in hell as a means of escape. It turns out that this picture is a reproduction from an illustration in Karma: A Story of Early Buddhism.
He continues by quoting the story accompanying the illustration, and says “It should be quite clear that Akutagawa did not simply copy or borrow wholesale.” Unfortunately, he then goes on to discuss “whether or not ‘The Spider’s Thread should be read as a Buddhist story” and concludes that because it is not “consistent with the teachings of the Buddhist tradition,” for him “the story has paled in significance as a result of probing into it.” Which is silly, but never mind, all of us have our peculiar partis pris.
At any rate, I wanted to know about the name Kandata; when I checked my copy of Monier-Williams, the only plausible source I found was kandaṭa कन्दट ‘the white esculent water-lily.’ I don’t know whether that’s a likely name for a thief.
Yet another layer is provided by Nobuhiko Kobayashi’s “Can the Spider Web of Paul Carus Be a Variant of Saint Peter’s Mother?” (Human Sciences Review, January 2006), which discusses the folkloric variants of the spider’s thread motif; you can see a description/abstract here.
I was also struck by some wordplay in the movie (a very Godardian feature); one of the characters is a woman named Megumi, and one of the protagonists says “Megumi… Grace. Blessing. Merciful. Thanks. Favour.” The kanji is 恵, and at that Wiktionary page you can see a similar range of senses. And when a detective asks the modern-day (i.e., 1969) protagonist her name, she says “Eiko Sokutai. Ei as in ABC. Ei means immortality, permanence, forever… Whatever.” The kanji is 永, and again you can see the range of senses at that page.
Finally, my wife and I are reading The Brothers Karamazov these days, and just last night we got to the onion parable. Spooky!
https://languagehat.com/kandata/
#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

2026-10-29 03:30:01 GMT

Transistor.
Another post on scientific terminology! Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s latest New Yorker piece, “Computer Chips Are the Most Magnificent Things Humanity Has Ever Made” (archived), has a section on the history of the relevant technology that begins:
The original computers were essentially thickets of light bulbs. The basic logic of computing is that practically any set of instructions can be executed by an interconnected constellation of switches that can be turned on and off. Those first computers, developed during the Second World War, evoked the basement warehouses of a chandelier wholesaler. They required a platoon of soldiers to race around replacing bulbs as they burned out. In theory, these devices could accomplish tasks of great complexity. In practice, even a relatively basic job might result in a cairn of charred copper and broken glass.
After the war, at Bell Labs, the physicist William Shockley and two colleagues invented a switch that was smaller, faster, and didn’t explode. The transistor, as it was called, exploited the peculiar disposition of a kind of element known as a semiconductor: it could be flipped on to conduct electricity, the way a metal would, and it could be turned off to block the current, like glass. The little gizmo earned its inventors a Nobel Prize and almost immediately improved lives. The portable transistor radio, which appeared just in time for Christmas in 1954, became a consumer blockbuster. The computers of the future would no longer need to be enormous things that caught on fire. Their potential seemed limitless.
The passive “as it was called” annoyed me, so I went to the OED, where the entry (revised 2019) has what seems to me, a layman, an admirably comprehensible definition with a small-type addition of encyclopedic content:
Electronics.
1. A semiconductor device, typically having three terminals and two junctions and capable of being used as an electrical switch or amplifier.
Transistors allow the load current to be made to be proportional to a small input current and during the 1950’s and 60’s largely replaced thermionic valves as a means of amplifying and controlling electrical current, their smaller size, lower manufacturing costs, and lower power consumption leading to the mass production of smaller and more affordable electronic devices. Since their invention, transistors themselves have been manufactured in ever smaller sizes, with modern microprocessors typically containing billions of transistors (see Moore’s law n.).
The first citation is from the New York Times of July 1, 1948 (“A device called a transistor, which has several applications in radio where a vacuum tube ordinarily is employed, was demonstrated for the first time yesterday”) and the etymology is as follows:
Either (i) a blend of transfer v. and resistor n., with reference to the device transferring electrical signals across a resistor,
or (ii) < trans- (in transconductance n.) + ‑istor comb. form (compare earlier varistor n.).
Which seems oddly tentative for a word so recently invented, and you will note there is no named creator. Anybody know more about its history?
Incidentally, the piece also uses the term fab, which isn’t in the print version of M-W but is in the OED (entry from 2007), defined as “An industrial plant for the manufacture of electronics components, esp. microchips” (first citation 1984: “Probably the biggest problem is that many people seem to think semiconductor capacity can be turned on with a flip of a switch when actually it takes about 2 years to bring a new fab online”) and with the etymology “Shortened < fabrication n.” I presume everyone but me already knew it.
https://languagehat.com/transistor/
#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit