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Silje Bekeng is a young Norwegian writer/journalist/critic who gives (or once gave) her location as "Brooklyn/Oslo"; she has a funny essay at N1BR ("the book review supplement to n+1 magazine") called Into the Woods, about the peculiar obsessions of Norwegian literature going back to Hamsun. I'm sure she exaggerates for effect, but she provides a great series of "excerpts from the jacket copy of novels published by young(ish) writers in recent years" that certainly seem to illustrate her point, which she states here:

One character keeps showing up in our books: the young man having a breakdown in the woods. The plot goes something like this: the young man has never left his hometown, or has returned (because of the death of a parent) after an unsuccessful attempt at life in the big, unruly world. He has some problems communicating. Sometimes the reader is left to wonder if he might be mentally retarded.

He might meet a traditional animal, like a dog or an elk, that plays a significant role in the novel.

He listens to the silence, falls apart. The story mostly stays within the tradition of realism, though it sometimes flirts with surrealist tendencies. How crazy is he really? Would he ever hurt himself—or someone else? Toward the end, he might seem about to regain his composure. He will probably decide to remain in the countryside. Norwegians resemble Americans in this respect: we know that truth is something people find while walking in golden fields of wheat, that small-town life is more real than city life, and that real people are those who grow up with dirt under their fingernails.

She concludes that Hamsun was a great writer, but they need some other role models; it's hard to disagree. And she mentions Jante Law, a series of ten rules that all boil down to "Don't think you're someone special," which according to Bekeng "is commonly used to describe how provincial and intolerant other Norwegians are"; it was invented by the Danish-Norwegian writer Aksel Sandemose (not, as the N1BR text has it, "Sandemo"). I wish I could ask my late mother about it; I suspect it had not lost much of its force in the tiny Norwegian-American Iowa town she came (I almost said "escaped") from.

A side note: Silje is originally a Finnish name, Silja, that was popularized throughout Scandinavia by its use in Frans Eemil Sillanpää's 1931 novel Nuorena nukkunut (The Maid Silja); it's a vernacular form of Cecilia.

Silje Bekeng is a young Norwegian writer/journalist/critic who gives (or once gave) her location as "Brooklyn/Oslo"; she has a funny essay at N1BR ("the book review supplement to n+1 magazine") called Into the Woods, about the peculiar obsessions of Norwegian literature going back to Hamsun. I'm sure she exaggerates for effect, but she provides a great series of "excerpts from the jacket copy of novels published by young(ish) writers in recent years" that certainly seem to illustrate her point, which she states here:

One character keeps showing up in our books: the young man having a breakdown in the woods. The plot goes something like this: the young man has never left his hometown, or has returned (because of the death of a parent) after an unsuccessful attempt at life in the big, unruly world. He has some problems communicating. Sometimes the reader is left to wonder if he might be mentally retarded.

He might meet a traditional animal, like a dog or an elk, that plays a significant role in the novel.

He listens to the silence, falls apart. The story mostly stays within the tradition of realism, though it sometimes flirts with surrealist tendencies. How crazy is he really? Would he ever hurt himself—or someone else? Toward the end, he might seem about to regain his composure. He will probably decide to remain in the countryside. Norwegians resemble Americans in this respect: we know that truth is something people find while walking in golden fields of wheat, that small-town life is more real than city life, and that real people are those who grow up with dirt under their fingernails.

She concludes that Hamsun was a great writer, but they need some other role models; it's hard to disagree. And she mentions Jante Law, a series of ten rules that all boil down to "Don't think you're someone special," which according to Bekeng "is commonly used to describe how provincial and intolerant other Norwegians are"; it was invented by the Danish-Norwegian writer Aksel Sandemose (not, as the N1BR text has it, "Sandemo"). I wish I could ask my late mother about it; I suspect it had not lost much of its force in the tiny Norwegian-American Iowa town she came (I almost said "escaped") from.

A side note: Silje is originally a Finnish name, Silja, that was popularized throughout Scandinavia by its use in Frans Eemil Sillanpää's 1931 novel Nuorena nukkunut (The Maid Silja); it's a vernacular form of Cecilia.

Nick at Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος has an informative and amusing post answering a question a reader asked in the comment thread to an earlier post, Generalised use of να in Early Modern Greek (which itself is well worth your while if you're interested in the development of Greek syntax): "My aged relatives also say, or used to say, χάμω [khámo] for 'down' and ολούθε [olúthe] for 'everywhere.' Are these hopelessly rustic?" Nick disposes of the second question in a few paragraphs (summary: "it sounds literary or folksy in Modern Greek" and "it's not a word I'd use casually") and devotes the rest of the post to an exegesis of the word χάμω, beginning with its history:

Ancient Greek distinguished between κάτω "down" and χαμαί "on the ground" (as in the last oracle Julian heard from Delphi that all Greek schoolchildren know, χαμαὶ πέσε δαίδαλος αὐλά, "fallen is the splendid hall"). In Modern Greek, χαμαί has survived as χάμω (remodelled after κάτω "down" and [ε]πάνω "up"), and still means "down" as in "on the ground". So κάτσε κάτω means "sit down", on a chair; κάτσε χάμω means "sit on the ground".

He goes on to explain that in fact "Modern Greek" here means the southern form of that language, the variety he (as a Cretan) speaks:

...the word is completely absent in Northern Greek. It's so absent, Salonicans calls Athenians χαμουτζήδες.

There's two ways of understanding the word. The first, which I'd always assumed, is "the people who say χάμω" (with the same Turkish -τζής suffix as in opoudjis [Nick's online moniker]). Actually, it's more like χάμου, which is an (even more colloquial) variant of χάμω.

The second isn't the primary way of understanding the word, but it's a cute pun. Southern Greece is down below Northern Greece; and Salonica, which is acutely aware of being in second place to Athens, gets its revenge by calling the Athenians "down-below-ers".

If they're thinking that, it's revealing. Southern Greek makes a semantic distinction between "down" and "on the ground" which Northern Greek doesn't. Somewhere south of you is never χάμω, it's always κάτω, because the Peloponnese is not sitting on the ground. But to Northern Greek, both are κάτω, and χάμω is just that funny Southern way of saying κάτω.

He then proceeds to translate a discussion of the word on slang.gr, culminating in xalikoutis's "scale of linguistic moral development, where stage 1 is total linguistic autism":

Continue reading "KHAMO AND THE LINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENT SCALE."

John McIntyre, a truly old-school copy editor (the man wears a bow tie, for God's sake), has a delightful hard-boiled detective story celebrating National Grammar Day, Pulp Diction. To whet your appetite, here's a bit from Chapter 2, "The last copy editor":

At the old Sun building on Calvert Street the front door yielded with a rusty creak. Dust lay thick on the guard’s desk, and small birds flew through broken windows. Bundled stacks of the last print edition displayed the headline: SEE US ON THE WEB.

Windows were out on the second floor, too, and scurrying and skittering sounds preceded me as I rounded the corner into the main room. Row on row of cubicles stretched out, each with a computer terminal like a headstone, each with a sad little collection of photos, figurines, long-dead plants. It was like walking the deck of the Mary Celeste.

On a bulletin board near the old copy desk, dangling from a single push pin, a yellowed memo listed a set of banned holiday cliches. The office next to the bulletin board was empty except for a Webster’s New World College Dictionary missing its cover.

A quavering voice asked, “Who’s there?”

A stooped figure, brandishing a red stapler, rose from one of the copy desk work stations where he had been dozing on an improvised pallet of final-edition bundles. His hair was white, his beard untrimmed, his gaze wary. He wore a green eyeshade, and I recognized my quarry: the last copy editor.

He spends his time "writing in a small, crabbed hand" in a beat-up copy of the Associated Press Stylebook, "fixing all the stuff those arrogant fools got wrong for years." It's a terrifying glimpse at what I might have become if I hadn't been rescued by the love of a good woman.

John McIntyre, a truly old-school copy editor (the man wears a bow tie, for God's sake), has a delightful hard-boiled detective story celebrating National Grammar Day, Pulp Diction. To whet your appetite, here's a bit from Chapter 2, "The last copy editor":

At the old Sun building on Calvert Street the front door yielded with a rusty creak. Dust lay thick on the guard’s desk, and small birds flew through broken windows. Bundled stacks of the last print edition displayed the headline: SEE US ON THE WEB.

Windows were out on the second floor, too, and scurrying and skittering sounds preceded me as I rounded the corner into the main room. Row on row of cubicles stretched out, each with a computer terminal like a headstone, each with a sad little collection of photos, figurines, long-dead plants. It was like walking the deck of the Mary Celeste.

On a bulletin board near the old copy desk, dangling from a single push pin, a yellowed memo listed a set of banned holiday cliches. The office next to the bulletin board was empty except for a Webster’s New World College Dictionary missing its cover.

A quavering voice asked, “Who’s there?”

A stooped figure, brandishing a red stapler, rose from one of the copy desk work stations where he had been dozing on an improvised pallet of final-edition bundles. His hair was white, his beard untrimmed, his gaze wary. He wore a green eyeshade, and I recognized my quarry: the last copy editor.

He spends his time "writing in a small, crabbed hand" in a beat-up copy of the Associated Press Stylebook, "fixing all the stuff those arrogant fools got wrong for years." It's a terrifying glimpse at what I might have become if I hadn't been rescued by the love of a good woman.

More fun from my dictionary editing! To begin with, two pairs of homonyms that one might think had the same Greek origins but that come from words with different vowel lengths:

colon 'part of the large intestine' goes back to Greek κόλον [kolon], but colon 'punctuation mark (:); rhythmical unit' is from κῶλον [kōlon] 'limb; part of a strophe.'

coma 'cloud of gas and dust around a comet; optical aberration' goes back to Greek κόμη [komē] 'hair,' but coma 'state of unconsciousness' derives from κῶμα [kōma] 'deep sleep.'

colporteur 'peddler' is straight from an identical French word, but that in turn is from Old French comporteur, someone who "comports" in the etymological sense, carrying things with them (comporter from Latin com-portare 'carry with'); the American Heritage Dictionary says that it's "influenced by col, neck, from the idea that peddlers carry their wares on trays suspended from straps around their necks."

Finally, a funny-sounding word that looks like it should be Latin but in fact has no known etymology: colugo, a kind of flying lemur.

Oh, and I keep forgetting to mention that MMcM at Polyglot Vegetarian, after months of radio silence, has burst out with three new posts, Pineapple, Zapiekanki, and Bhut Jolokia; hie thee thither for more multilingual etymology than you can shake a stick at!

I've left the topic of my book unaddressed for too long, preoccupied as I have been with more highfalutin' topics, but thanks to the indefatigable John Emerson I hereby bring you Русский Мат.net! Don't worry, it's not just Russian, though it does have a nice Russian as they speak it section from which I've already learned a lot (I've seen ыыыы but had no idea it represented laughter); there's a useful section where you can search "Argot français classique" in dictionaries ranging from 1827 to 1907. I looked up pine 'cock' and got this delightful quote from Delvau (1864): "L’outil masculin, l’engin avec lequel l’humanité pine et se perpétua. On n’ose pas prononcer le mot, mais on adore la chose..." [The male tool, the appliance with which humanity screws and has perpetuated itself. One does not dare pronounce the word, but one adores the thing..."] Thanks, John!

The answer requires both an ability to read Arabic script and a knowledge of West African languages, so I'm not especially hopeful that even my Varied Readers will be able to provide it, but it's such an interesting puzzle I can't resist passing it on. Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat, in his latest post, says:

A scan of much of the manuscript MS Leiden Or. 14.052 is available online [pdf]. The main text of this manuscript is in a rather poor Arabic. The marginal and interlinear notes, however, are "in one or more West African languages", as yet unidentified. My best guess is that they're in Mandinka, based on the orthography's use of tanwīn and on the frequent word-initial a/i (suggestive of Mande's 3rd person subject pronouns), but I'm not sure; I haven't been able to decipher any phrases. Anyone else feel like having a look?

You have to scroll down a couple of pages to get to the reproduction of the MS. Good hunting!

I just discovered that Open Library ("One web page for every book.") has a blog, and it has an entry that will upset any bibliophile, The Enemies of Books by George Oates:

I learned a new word today: biblioclast, or destroyer of books. Found it on the frontispiece of The Enemies of Books by William Blades.

As you can see from its Table of Contents — Fire, Water, Gas and Heat, Dust and Neglect, Ignorance, The Bookworm, Other Vermin, Bookbinders, Collectors & Servants and Children — the author, William Blades, has spotted elemental, entomological and occupational enemies, even as far back as 1880.

John Bagford, “shoemaker and biblioclast,” appears in the chapter about Collectors. He apparently “went about the country, from library to library, tearing away title pages from rare books of all sizes,” intent on creating a key to the history of printing, but detaching key bibliographic information from parent works. You can see glimpses of The Bagford Fragments on the British Library’s website.

He has a touching quote from the conclusion, "A Reverence for Old Books," beginning: "It is a great pity that there should be so many distinct enemies at work for the destruction of literature, and that they should so often be allowed to work out their sad end. Looked at rightly, the possession of any old book is a sacred trust, which a conscientious owner or guardian would as soon think of ignoring as a parent would of neglecting his child...."

Copyediting dictionaries is tedious work but I always learn things. I just discovered that the word collation, in the sense of 'light meal,' comes from the title of John Cassian's early fifth-century work Collationes patrum in scetica eremo (Conferences with the Egyptian hermits), which was read in Benedictine communities before a light meal.

Another etymology that stunned me: collard, as in collard greens, is just a slightly collapsed version of colewort, an extension of cole 'cabbage-like vegetable,' which we know today primarily as part of coleslaw. I love collards (it's part of the Southern half of my heritage), but I never knew that.