Oldest Recording of Spoken Kouri-Vini. Leo Sands reports for the NY Times (archived) on the rediscovery of a forgotten recording from 1935: In a doctor’s waiting room in Lafayette, La., Emma Benoit was puzzled: A bespectacled academic was there with a hulking machine that looked like a wooden closet. He wanted her to speak into it. The man was Lorenzo Dow Turner, a pioneering Black scholar of linguistics. He was crisscrossing southern Louisiana in the summer of 1935 with an enormous recording device that weighed 100 pounds and required at least two people to carry. Ms. Benoit leaned toward the machine and began outlining the “passing of my life.” A 69-year-old widow, she was born in the ashes of the Civil War to a formerly enslaved mother and a white father. She spoke in Louisiana Creole, a language that only a few thousand people now use but was once the predominant one in parts of the state. Nearly a century later, the machine’s aluminum disc recordings were analyzed and shared publicly on Friday for the first time. Oliver Mayeux, the Cambridge University linguist who found Ms. Benoit’s interview alongside 12 others from Dr. Turner’s trip, said they were the oldest known examples of someone speaking Louisiana Creole, also known as Kouri-Vini. (Older recordings exist, from 1934, but the language is sung rather than spoken.) “The moment I heard these recordings, I knew that they would drastically change our understanding of this language,” Dr. Mayeux said. His research findings were published in the journal “Language Documentation and Description.” (The LDD article is open access.) It’s great to be able to hear the recording; I was surprised at how much it sounds like regular French, but Sands covers that: The rediscovered spoken recordings revealed that the language borrowed far more from French than was previously known, Dr. Mayeux said. They showed how speakers of Louisiana Creole readily threw in French grammatical forms and switched between the languages midflow. (We covered Kouri-Vini back in 2023.) Thanks, Eric and Bonnie! https://languagehat.com/oldest-recording-of-spoken-kouri-vini/ #louisianacreole #recording #language #spoken #oldest #mayeux #french #emmabenoit #lorenzodow #dowturner #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

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

Invertebrate. Ian Tattersall’s NYRB review (October 8, 2026; archived) of The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, by Jessica Riskin, is full of fascinating ideas and details; it begins: In the eighteenth century, human knowledge was not as compartmentalized as it is today. Indeed, the boundaries between intellectual disciplines that we now view as distinct remained tenaciously blurry until remarkably recently. To give just one example, your admittedly venerable reviewer once attended a university that still awarded its physics and chemistry graduates degrees in natural philosophy, while those who actually studied philosophy received theirs in the moral sciences. This difference goes a long way toward explaining why, from the perspective of our own age of specialization, it is so hard for us to appreciate just how different our planet must have appeared to the people who were observing it during the era in which the fledgling United States declared its independence and the French staged their revolution. Back then the age of discovery was at its peak, and startling new information about what had previously been a very parochial planet was flooding into the academies of Europe and the Americas. Inevitably, much of that knowledge was still undigested and poorly sorted; as a result the planet, viewed from Europe, must have seemed a rather impressionistic and formless place. The elaborate vocabulary that we now depend on for attributing structure to it, and thereby for grasping how it works, didn’t yet exist. Tattersall discusses Linnaeus, Hutton (“It was not until 1785 that the Scottish geologist James Hutton had the temerity to turn convention on its head and evoke a dynamic planet in a continuous state of flux”), and Erasmus Darwin (whose “words certainly contain central elements of a theory of evolution” but “did not mark any general shift in either popular or scientific understanding of the natural world”) before getting to the main course: Career paths in the eighteenth century were just as haphazard as knowledge itself, and that of Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck, was an excellent case in point. […] After trying his hand at music (which he loved) and banking (which he hated), Lamarck took a year off, living in the Parisian countryside. There he met Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who reawakened in him an interest in botany that eventually culminated in the publication, in 1778, of Flore française, a groundbreaking reference work that allowed its users to identify plants using the “either/or” dichotomous key system still familiar from field guides today. The book gained Lamarck some welcome financial liquidity along with both the patronage of France’s foremost natural historian, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, and an association with the Royal Academy of Sciences. The well-connected Buffon’s support also brought Lamarck a corresponding membership in the Jardin du Roi, a magnificently idiosyncratic institution of informal research and education that had grown up around the plot of land on the left bank of the Seine where medicinal plants were cultivated for the king’s use. […] Then came the Revolution. As the old apparatus of state fell apart and the Académie Royale des Sciences was abolished, the strangely egalitarian Jardin du Roi (astutely renamed the Jardin des Plantes, on Lamarck’s initiative) became a hotbed of intrigue. Eventually, in 1793, the Museum of Natural History was established around it, with an assembly of twelve professors to run the operation. Following extensive jockeying, Lamarck wound up with the twelfth and implicitly lowliest professorship, in the “Natural History of I and Worms”—it wasn’t the post he wanted, but he quickly came to take his remit seriously. Riskin gives a good sense of the tenor of the times: On June 10, 1793…he arrived at this curious pass: Upon going to bed the night before, he’d been a botanist, but that day the revolutionary committee in charge of reorganizing the King’s Garden, with a stroke of its pen, turned him into—not a frog, exactly—but a zoologist. Robespierre was maneuvering into position at the helm of the Committee of Public Safety, accelerating the use of the guillotine to separate the heads from the necks of many aristocrats and anyone else the committee deemed counterrevolutionary. Lamarck, a middle-aged widower with six children, had little choice. He kept his head but had to remake himself overnight in middle age, leaving botany to take up the professorship in i and worms, creatures about which he knew, as yet, very little. Whatever his strengths, Lamarck was not a great diplomat, and one of his early actions at the new museum was to foster a future enmity by passing over the fast-rising comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier for a job there as aide-naturalist. Cuvier, who was shortly thereafter hired by another professor and would rapidly become the most influential French biologist of his time, was a convinced creationist and utterly opposed to Lamarck’s emerging ideas about the dynamic nature of the living world. Renowned for his “principle of correspondence of parts,” which saw every organism as so optimally designed that the structure of any part could be inferred from those adjacent to it, Cuvier was wedded to the idea that species were fixed and unchangeable. He saw the extinctions and replacements of ancient faunas that were already evident in the nascent fossil record as evidence for a succession of natural “catastrophes,” each followed by a subsequent recreation, the last such event having been Noah’s flood. It was to this intellectual foe that the task of eulogizing Lamarck would one day fall. Lamarck made no secret of his disdain for Cuvier’s ideas, and over the years he continued to explore his insight that nature was in flux and that whether an organism’s traits were “perfect” or “imperfect” depended entirely on their suitability for the prevailing environment. He also heroically tackled the chaotic state of understanding of the i and worms—living and fossil—that were now his official bailiwick, finding it necessary not only to fundamentally reorganize the classification of the group but to create an entirely new category of “invertebrates” for it. There’s a lot more, including Lamarck’s sad end (“Frail and blind for the last decade of his life, Lamarck died in 1829 and was interred in what amounted to a pauper’s grave, his reputation dealt a final blow by Cuvier’s condemnation in the guise of a eulogy”) and posthumous transformation into “a whipping boy for failed evolutionary notions” (“All of that adds up to one of the most egregious injustices in the entire history of science, not least because fundamentally Lamarck had been right all along”), but it was the creation of “invertebrates” that set off the Hatsignal. I went to the OED (entry revised 2019) and found the first citation from 1819 (“Of invertebrate animals a few novelties were also found; but as they were not well preserved, we shall not describe them further”) and an etymology as follows: “< scientific Latin invertebrata Invertebrata n., after French invertébrés, plural noun (1800 as adjective in animaux invertébrés invertebrate animals; 1807 or earlier as noun).” There is no mention of Lamarck, and I wonder to what extent he is responsible for the terminology. https://languagehat.com/invertebrate/ #lamarck #jessicariskin #revolutionaryscience #sciences #jameshutton #unitedstates #buffon #tattersall #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

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

Citogenesis. Martin Langeveld (“Old newspaper guy”), a longtime friend of the Hattery, sent me a link to Elizabeth Bromstein’s NiemanLab article about her search for the origin of the “statistic” that 75% of your emotions are generated by smell, which turned out to be unsourceable: There’s a name for the particular way an unsupported claim can acquire the appearance of fact through citation: citogenesis. Coined by Randall Munroe in an XKCD comic, the term describes the process by which an unsupported claim gets repeatedly cited until the citations themselves make it look like truth. I called Jodi Schneider, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Information School whose research includes scientific evidence and citation integrity, to talk about it. I sent her the 75% statistic, and she went looking for the source herself. “It was not a casual ‘Let me look for 20 minutes, and there it is,’” she told me. “I would find a thing, [it] would go to something else, and that would be a dead end.” Her conclusion: “It’s hard to source.” The problem, Schneider said, is that repeating a claim is much easier than investigating it. “Somebody says something, it sounds like a thing you’d like to know or repeat, and you don’t trace it back to where it came from. You just pass it on.” Then repetition becomes the “evidence,” and “if you hear the same thing from multiple places, it’s harder to question.” This psychological phenomenon is known as the illusory truth effect: We’re more likely to believe information we’ve encountered before. The effect was first demonstrated in the 1970s and has since been replicated many times. More unsettlingly, research has found that repetition can make a false claim seem more believable even when it contradicts something we know to be true. It’s hard to fully check every claim. Writers build arguments from dozens of pieces of information, and tracing each one all the way back to its origin can take an absurd amount of time. Newsrooms have spent years cutting staff and budgets, including the fact-checkers and copy editors whose job was to catch this kind of thing. At the same time, the volume of information journalists have to sort through has exploded. Finding a source for a claim can take seconds. Establishing where it actually came from can take hours (or an eternity). Meanwhile, the consequences of not checking facts compound. Once a bad claim gets published, it becomes another source for the next journalist, another search result for the next reader and another apparent confirmation that the claim must be true. Martin also sent a link to Wikipedia’s list of examples of citogenesis, saying “See especially the Hirohito ‘Jewel Voice’ one”; it reads: Is the radio broadcast where Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s WWII surrender referred to as the “Jewel Voice Broadcast” in English? Google Books search results and the Google Books Ngram Viewer reveal that this moniker appears to have been non-existent until a user added this literal translation of the Japanese name to the Wikipedia article in 2006 (and another user moved the article itself to that title in 2016). Since then, the usage of this phrase has skyrocketed and when it was suggested in 2020 that the article should be moved because this “literal translation” is actually incorrect—a better translation of the original Japanese would have been “the emperor’s voice broadcast”—it was voted down based on it appearing in plenty of recent reliable sources. The list also includes a section of “Terms that became real”; this one is of obvious Hattic interest: In 2007, an editor added that “A group of rabbits or hares are often called a ‘fluffle’ in parts of Northern Canada” to Rabbit. This statement was removed in 2010, but found its way back to the article in 2015 with a source dated 2011. The expression “a fluffle of rabbits/bunnies” can be found in books published since the 2010s. In 2023, linguist Ben Zimmer traced its origin to the 2007 edit. (Click through for more links than I’ve bothered to carry over; the XKCD comic is from 2011, if you’re curious.) Thanks, Martin! https://languagehat.com/citogenesis/ #elizabethbromstein #randallmunroe #information #jodischneider #googlebooks #jewel #martinlangeveld #hirohito #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Litmus, Anleth. I recently ran once more into the tangle drasvi recorded here; litmus is: From Middle English litmose, lytmose, litemose, from Old Norse litmosi (“moss used for dyeing”), from lita (“to dye, stain”), from litr (“colour, dye, blee”), from Proto-Germanic *wlitiz, *wlituz (“appearance, blee”), from Proto-Indo-European *wel- (“to see”) + mosi (“moss”). Cognate with Old English wlite (“appearance, form, brightness, countenance”). And Dutch lakmoes is: From Middle Dutch lecmoes (1252), Middle Dutch lijcmoes (1459), early modern Dutch leeckmoes (1514), modern Dutch lackmoes (ca. 1620 and 1679).[1][2][3] Equivalent to lekken +‎ moes, the first element was later adapted by folk etymology to lak. Likely related to Old Norse litmosi, but the details of how they are related remain unclear. I followed the trail in the OED from litmus, “Altered from Middle Dutch leecmos, lijcmoes (modern Dutch lakmoes) lacmus n., probably from association with lit v.,” to lit ‘To colour, dye; to stain’ “< Old Norse lita, < lit-r: see lit n.¹” to lit ‘A colour, dye, hue’ “< Old Norse lit-r colour, also countenance, corresponding etymologically to Old English and early Middle English wlite n.” to wlite ‘Beauty; splendour; Face, countenance”: Old English wlite (masculine), beauty, splendour, appearance, form, corresponding to Old Frisian wlite, Old Saxon wliti sheen, form, Old Norse litr colour, countenance (see lit n.¹), Gothic wlits πρόσωπον, ὄψις, μορϕή; also in the compound Old English andwlite, onwlite, beside andwlita (see anleth n.). So I saw anleth ‘A person’s face or countenance; (also) a person’s appearance or looks,’ which was revised as recently as 2022; the etymology is correspondingly expansive: Cognate with Old Frisian andlēte, ondlēte, Old Dutch antlito, anlito (Middle Dutch antlit), Old High German antlizzi (in late sources; Middle High German antlitze, German Antlitz), Old Icelandic andlit, annlit (Icelandic andlit), Norwegian andlit, Old Swedish andlite, anlite (Swedish anlete), Old Danish andled (Danish andlet), and further with Gothic andawleizn < the Germanic base of and- prefix + the Germanic base of Old English wlītan to look (see litten v.¹). Notes The noun shows different stem formations in the Germanic languages. In Old English it inflects as a weak masculine or (less commonly) a strong masculine. The Middle English forms in ‑lete, ‑leth could be of phonological origin (compare Old English forms with back mutation, such as Anglian ondwliot-), but may perhaps reflect influence from early Scandinavian (compare the Danish forms cited above). I have a feeling all that is never going to get completely untangled, but I may try to revive anleth ‘face’; it seemeth a goodly word. https://languagehat.com/litmus-anleth/ #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Memorate. Bloggers Karamazov has posted an interview about what sounds like a very interesting book: Today Robin Feuer Miller sat down with Barbara Henry to discuss her book, Tales from the Netherworld: The Katabasis in Russian Literature, which came out with Northern Illinois University Press this month. […] RFM: I have to confess! I needed to look up the word “katabasis.” Possibly others might too, so could you give a quick, handy definition of it before we go further in our conversation? BH: Strictly speaking, a katabasis is a descent, understood in the literary sense as a descent to the underworld, a key stop on the heroic journey. But almost as soon as you define it, questions arise. Is Odysseus’s visiting Hades a katabasis if he actually sails over Ocean and makes blood offerings at Hades’ entrance? Isn’t that a nekyia, a summoning of ghosts? Is Gilgamesh’s journey really a katabasis if he doesn’t make a descent, and there don’t seem to be any, well, dead people, in the place he visits? There’s no normative model of a katabasis, even in the literary works that supposedly codified it. I define it as a journey in which the protagonist meets death in its own kingdom. Which might be underground, or in the forest, or even in your own head. Or mine. Definitely mine. RFM: I already alluded to the unusually wide-ranging aspect of your book, whether through time, genre, or space. At the same time, you had to make difficult choices, for example, in the first two chapters on the magic tale and the memorate, how did you choose one version of a tale or memorate over another? What was something you had to leave out that you wished you could include? BH: The chapters on folktales were a challenge, and not only because folklore and folk literature are disciplines in their own right, and have methodologies quite distinct from the study of modern literature. Folktales themselves straddle ancient and modern worlds and literatures, and because of this longevity, I was interested in the kind of transformations that they exhibit, not just in terms of their plots, where transformations are part and parcel of magic tales in particular, but in their forms. I believe that katabatic narratives not only mark historical changes in the world without, but generate formal change in the literary works that they inhabit. I focused on the best-known versions of a particular tale, not only because they’d likely be known to a reader, but because the most widely-reprinted versions of a tale are that way because they themselves are poised between tradition and the innovation that the katabasis generates. This was easier to do with a magic tale like “The Magic Swan-Geese” (“Gusi-lebedi,” 113), which conflates characters in a way that is entirely unlike other tales of its type. Those differences in a given story to our idea of what a magic tale should look like are the very things that suggest a katabatic influence. It is also challenging to work with the memorate, best known now as the “urban legend.” The overlap and interchange between the worlds of the living and the dead are rendered in the memorate as a textual exchange. I looked at memorates that exhibited a particularly marked porosity in their use of literary intertexts, “dead” stories that were dead because they were printed and unchanging, versus the memorate, which weaves in a bit of Gogol’s “The Nose” or Zhukovsky’s “Lyudmila” for its own purposes, animating them in unexpected and ghoulish ways. The memorate is such an interesting form that I wish I could have looked at how they’re operating today online, especially on social media, but this period and mode of circulation was beyond my purview. RFM: In Chapter 2, “A Local Call: The Memorate,” I was fascinated by your discussion of how Russian peasant cultures distinguished between the benevolent and the malevolent dead, and how there was a belief that the earth would reject the bodies of the “unclean,” so they were often dumped in ravines or exposed in wasteland swamps. It is such a chilling insight, especially as you move forward in your analysis to the Soviet period. But I wondered, too, about the building of St. Petersburg on a swamp? You write compellingly about St. Petersburg as a kind of underworld in several of your chapters, but I was wondering in particular if those engaged in constructing the city experienced something of the uncanny and if it was reflected in either magic tales or memorates of that period.) BH: I first encountered this idea of the earth as a moral force that rejects evildoers in the film Repentance (Pokayanie, 1984), which I saw in a sweltering Leningrad cinema in the summer of 1988. I’m not aware, though, of memorates on the subject of St. Petersburg’s dead, mostly because a lot of the legends collected by folklorists focus on rural areas, especially on remote regions of the Russian north. I could be mistaken about Petersburg memorates, particularly if they’re circulating today in electronic form. It would be interesting to see if they borrow from Pushkin’s, Gogol’s, and Dostoevsky’s uncanny Petersburg. Maybe the “Petersburg Myth” is itself a memorate, for its collective construction and indelible impress on how we see the living city of St. Petersburg through the eyes of the dead. They go on to discuss Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island, Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Dead House, and many other things. I was, of course, familiar with katabasis (we discussed it in this thread and probably elsewhere), but I don’t think I’d run into memorate, which the OED (entry from 2001) defines as “= memorat n.” even though it is attested earlier (1948: “Memorates are narratives of personal happenings which may pass into the tradition as memorial sagns” [sic!] vs. 1965: “Whether to include memorats in classificatory schemes is vexing, for these special stories..do not qualify as a possession of the folk at large”); memorat is defined as “Cultural Anthropology. In folklore studies: a narrative relating personal experience,” and the etymology is: < German Memorat (C. W. von Sydow in Volkskundliche Gaben, John Meier zum Siebzigsten Geburtstage Dargebracht (1934) 261) < classical Latin memorātus, past participle of memorāre (see memorate v.). Compare earlier memorate n. I googled that 1948 citation to make sure it wasn’t a typo and discovered that a fuller version of the sentence is “Memorates are narratives of personal happenings which may pass into the tradition as memorial sagns [Erinnerungssagen]”; I can’t imagine who thought it was a good idea to render sagen as “sagns,” but such is life in academia. The chapter title “A Local Call” refers to a joke, relayed at the start of the interview, about a call to Moscow from Hell being local. And I really have to watch Repentance (მონანიება) again; it’s been several decades since my first and only viewing. https://languagehat.com/memorate/ #katabasis #todayrobin #barbarahenry #feuermiller #illinoisuniversity #northernillinois #universitypress #which #rfm #literature #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Mimeo Doesn’t Fully Dry. Gill Partington’s LRB review (8 October 2026; archived) of After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960-2025 by Steve Clay and M.C. Kinniburgh is chock-full of interesting tidbits; it starts off with sheets of typescript stuffed under Ohio windshield wipers in 1975 and continues: These baffling bits of ephemera were the first two issues of the Lost and Found Times, produced by the poet John M. Bennett and the painter D.C. Landies. Having sent some copies through the post as a ‘mail art stunt’, they developed the alternative (and cheaper) distribution method of putting flyers on cars in a shopping centre parking lot. Landies died in the late 1970s but the Lost and Found Times continued for another thirty years, sometimes with variant titles (Exploding Horse and Dog Cake Hat). Bennett would print things people sent him, sometimes text, sometimes images, but always ‘unclassifiable materials … that no one else would publish’. Richard Kostelanetz, elder statesman of the American avant-garde, called it ‘the most persistently experimental literary magazine to survive for more than a decade in America’. To bemused Ohians peeling it off their windscreens, this description might have been surprising. Is it literature? For that matter, is it even a magazine? These questions are prompted by many of the artefacts in Steve Clay and M.C. Kinniburgh’s After Words. Published in parallel with an exhibition last year at New York’s Grolier Club, it’s a generously illustrated guide to a sprawling field, which over time has generated its own tangle of niche subcategories: concrete poetry, mail art, sound poetry, found poetry, asemic writing, performance poetry, cut-ups and erasure. There is no shortage of labels, but like Lost and Found Times, much of this is material more easily defined by what it’s not, and sometimes it doesn’t much resemble poetry. In The Desert (2008), Jen Bervin reworks an existing prose book, using a needle and thread to obscure most of the text. Cecilia Vicuña’s Chanccani Quipu (2012) consists of long strands of unspun wool with letters stencilled on them, a reimagining of the ancient Inca writing system of knotted cords. These are experiments in pushing poetry to the boundaries of legibility, into new forms, and even off the page entirely. Arranged in loose thematic chapters, After Words is a compendium and catalogue rather than a chronological account. But the start date of 1960 is significant, giving all this activity a point of origin: the explosion of independent, underground publishing known as the ‘mimeo revolution’. The mimeograph machine (sometimes known as the Gestetner) was a simple stencil duplicator, forerunner to the office photocopier. By the early 1960s these devices were inexpensive and portable enough for home use and, co-opted by the emergent counterculture, they generated a deluge of pamphlets, manifestos and magazines. No special skills or training were needed. You simply needed to type – or even draw – onto the stencil paper, wrap it around the ink drum and then crank the handle. As the drum rotated, ink squeezed through the holes in the stencil onto the waiting stack of blank sheets. As Clay put it in an earlier book, ‘for the price of a few reams of paper and a handful of stencils, a poet could produce, by mimeograph, a magazine or booklet in a small edition over the course of a few days.’ The ethos was not just ‘do-it-yourself’ but, in Ed Sanders’s words, ‘do-it-now’. Sanders was the Che Guevara of the mimeo-revolutionaries, writing one of his earliest poems on prison toilet paper while briefly incarcerated in 1961 for taking part in an anti-nuclear protest. The following year he acquired a cheap Speed-o-Print duplicator, small enough to perch on the porcelain bathtub cover in his Lower East Side apartment, and launched Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts. Carrying work by the most experimental poets and writers of the time – William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Charles Olson – it wasn’t so much printed as ‘zapped’, ‘puked’ or ‘stomped’, as the title page announced. (The odd boot print could reputedly be found on its pages of salvaged construction paper.) […] With its crude Courier typeface, Fuck You was the publishing equivalent of a punk 7-inch single – spontaneous and scabrous, capturing the raw energy of the moment. Or, to use an analogy more in tune with the early 1960s, these poetry magazines had the force of protest music, and amid the bohos and beatniks of Lower Manhattan, the two often overlapped. In D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary Dont Look Back, Allen Ginsberg, a frequent contributor to Fuck You and semi-permanent fixture at Sanders’s Peace Eye bookshop, poses in the background as Bob Dylan is filmed holding up the lyrics to ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. On the cover of 1965’s Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan is pictured surrounded by carefully curated records and paraphernalia. Behind him, propped up on the mantelpiece, you can see the distinctive pink cover of the single-issue ‘one-shot’ magazine Gnaoua, not strictly mimeograph but featuring poetry by Ginsberg. In late 1964, Sanders made his own move from print to music, opening another front in his ‘total assault on culture’. With his fellow poet Tuli Kupferberg, he founded a psychedelic garage rock band – the Fugs – whose most famous performance was an ‘exorcism’ of the Pentagon in protest at the Vietnam War. The mimeo magazine lifted restrictions not only on what you could print, but the way you could present it. If anyone could now become a publisher, they could also become a typesetter, arranging the words on the page however they wanted. Instead of inserting the stencil paper in the typewriter as intended, you could take liberties, typing at strange angles, layering text, breaking it down and arranging the letters to create images or shapes. In this respect the trailblazer isn’t Sanders but d.a. levy, who, as the critic Karl Young has written, ‘was almost completely alone in making mimeo an art form in its own right’. Now revered as something of a cult figure, levy (he insisted on the lower-case spelling) embodied the archetype of the dishevelled outlaw poet. He remained in Cleveland, rather than moving to New York, living on less than a dollar a day and reciting his work on street corners. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound aged 26. Yet he was prolific and industrious, publishing his own and other people’s work through his Renegade Press and launching probably the most innovative of the 1960s mimeo magazines, the Marrahwanna Quarterly. It became a vehicle for cutting-edge concrete poetry type scattered across the page or clustered in dense, abstract patterns. Having previously used letterpress printing, levy switched the magazine’s production process, exploiting the capabilities of the mimeograph and embracing its lo-fi aesthetics. There’s something defiantly amateurish in this presentation, refusing any kind of standardisation. Issues weren’t uniform in size or paper type, covers were constructed from scraps of repurposed newspaper: a copy from 1966 has a torn-out page of an old elocution manual inexplicably pasted inside. Like the Lost and Found Times, some had variant titles on the front – the Mary Jane Quarterly or the Majoon Quarterly – and others had no title at all, just a rough hand-painted doodle. More than anything, there’s a sense of haste and urgency: you can feel the force of typewriter keys as levy hammers out an embattled stream of consciousness editorial. ‘Again no paper … no money … tons of postage needed and equipment’, he fumes, while sending ‘HATE RAYS’ to the small-minded citizens of Cleveland and the police. (He had been indicted for obscenity, a case that was never prosecuted but which exacerbated his sense of persecution.) Sometimes he hits the wrong keys (typing ‘predd’ instead of ‘press’) and has to overtype with the correct letters; sometimes he scratches into the stencil with a stylus. Then there are the blotches and surface noise, the ink pooling in the hollows of the ‘o’s as he cranks the handle of the machine. More so than letterpress, mimeograph printing is a visceral snapshot of an instant in time, preserving the flux and mess of its own moment of creation. Even now, after sixty years, you come away from handling these things with ink on your hands, since one quirk of mimeo is that it doesn’t fully dry. There’s much more, including a discussion of levy’s Tibetan Stroboscope (1968; description, with scans) and La Monte Young’s An Anthology of Change Operations (1963; “contains a poem by Jackson Mac Low, which ‘may be used in any way as a score for solo or group readings, musical or dramatic performances, looking, smelling, anything else &/or nothing at all’”). Gnaoua is presumably a reference to the Gnawa, you can see Chanccani Quipu here and Bervin’s The Desert here, and I was freshly taken aback to relearn that Dont Look Back dont have an apostrophe. https://languagehat.com/mimeo-doesnt-fully-dry/ #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Cutting Didos. A friend who found the word dido in a crossword puzzle fell into a rabbit hole, as she put it, and came out with this Stack Exchange thread that starts with a question about the odd phrase “conniption dido” (apparently used only by the questioner’s great-grandmother) but quickly turns into an examination of the second word, partly focused on the unlikely but apparently irresistible “connection between the term dido and Dido of the Aeneid.” There are a great many piquant responses, of which I’ll reproduce two: **Cutting didos is an antique expression. Comedian Fred Allen in his 1950 book “Much Ado About Me” mentions sitting in the parlor with his grandmother in 1915 and “cutting didos” (clowning around to kill time apparently–this was before smart phones and you had to do SOMETHING with your time. You could also “walk in the woods like Beethoven”!! What a fun, archaic phrase!! ** answered Nov 8, 2015 at 3:28 Tony Rizzi My grandmother’s memoirs quote her father (1930s, Oklahoma) talking about his 1860s Kentucky childhood. A hen had hatched some duck eggs, and the new ducklings had jumped in a pond. “Daddy, who had followed to watch, said the hen was absolutely beside herself trying to get those babies out of that water…stalking back and forth, and clucking and cackling at them while the little ducks completely ignored her. Daddy said she did ‘flip-flops and die-does[sp]’.” The phrase in our family meant someone who was completely freaking out or acting out. answered Nov 10, 2023 at 19:40 Nom DaGruyere The OED (entry from 1895) says “Origin uncertain” and has this as its first citation: 1807 A jolly Irishman, who cut as many didos as I could for the life of me. J. R. Shaw, Life ix. 140 Thanks, Brooke! https://languagehat.com/cutting-didos/ #stackexchange #fredallen #nov #tonyrizzi #daddy #life #aeneid #comedianfred #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Relay Translation. James Folta writes at Literary Hub about what is alleged to be an unfair business practice: Translator and writer Lin King released a statement on Instagram on Tuesday laying out her claim of copyright infringement of her Booker-Prize-winning English translation of Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-Zǐ, originally written in Mandarin and titled Táiwān Màn Yóu Lù (《臺灣漫遊錄》). King discovered that a European publisher was “planning to release a translation of the book that was translated from my English text,” known as a “relay translation” where a book is translated into a third language from a previous translation. King sent “repeated warnings” to this publisher that this new translation wasn’t legal. “As I am the sole copyright owner of the English Taiwan Travelogue,” she writes, “an unauthorized third-language translation violates my copyright.” King has begun legal proceedings against this unnamed European publisher. King’s defense of translation as an art form are the most moving parts of her statement. […] I am often asked whether I identify more as a writer or translator. This is a false binary. Not all writers are translators, but all translators are writers. I chose, from the chaotic expanses of the English lexicon, every single word in Taiwan Travelogue. Shuāng-Zǐ cannot read it, much like how I will not be able to read most translations of my novel when it is published next year. Our translators will write those books, not we. […] King similarly stresses that she’s trying to shine a light on the unfair business practices that have become too accepted, and allow for these kinds of copyright violating, third language translations. “This is not about the money,” King writes, which will not surprise anyone familiar with the finances of literary translation. King notes that she “volunteered, without compensation, to begin translating Táiwān Màn Yóu Lù and pitch the book directly to US publishers.” “Translation is a horrendous business plan,” King writes, “I do it because I believe in the books.” King is looking at the broader business practices of translation. In bringing suit, she hopes to set a new legal precedent and shift the “status quo” that lets these copyright violations slide. “Since when has ‘it’s always been done this way,’” she writes, “been a sufficient reason for continuing to infringe on people’s rights?” I don’t know enough to take a firm position, but obviously I’m sympathetic to the translator. (We talked about Taiwan Travelogue last year.) https://languagehat.com/relay-translation-2/ #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit