Hummingwolf's Neighborhood

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/compulsory-anglo-saxon/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18186

Two letters from the latest LRB column (Vol. 47 No. 16 · 11 September 2025; archived):

Colin Kidd, writing about Stefan Collini’s history of English studies in Britain, mentions that ‘Anglo-Saxon is still a compulsory element in the English curriculum at Oxford despite a campaign in the 1990s to abolish it’ (LRB, 14 August). In a short interview with Mary Bennett, principal of St Hilda’s College, at the end of my first term in 1970, I politely complained about the tedium of studying Anglo-Saxon and was politely put right: the correct expression was Old English, not Anglo-Saxon (this despite our set handbooks being Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer and Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader). I was also informed that the purpose of the Oxford English course was to prepare the one in twenty or so future Oxford English scholars with the comprehensive knowledge necessary for a career in teaching and research. I wonder how much has changed since those days – one of my tutors, Anne Elliott, told me that nothing of value had been written after 1830.

                    Sharon Footerman
                    London NW4

Colin Kidd notes the survival of compulsory Anglo-Saxon in the Oxford English syllabus. When I was an undergraduate at Manchester in the early 1970s, we had to study Old English, as it was called, for all three years of the honours course. This was at the insistence of the professor of English language, G.L. Brook, who had been appointed in 1945 and whose approach to the subject was exclusively philological. I once heard him complain that the publication of his edition of the Harley Lyrics had been held up for years because the publishers required some commentary on the literary value of the poems, and he couldn’t think of anything to say.

                    Paul Dean
                    Oxford

I too can’t think of anything to say.

https://languagehat.com/compulsory-anglo-saxon/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18186

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/picking-glass/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18181

Here’s a beautiful example of a garden-path sentence that needed additional context to disentangle. I was wondering how the cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw pronounced her name, and as is my wont I tried to find a video in which someone said it aloud (ideally her, but I’ll take a well-informed interviewer). No luck so far, but at the 1:57 mark in this video she says “And obviously I’m picking glass that the director is comfortable with and works for his or her story.” I was immediately distracted from my quest by a linguistic question: what did “picking glass” mean? It sounded to me like an idiomatic phrase parallel to, say, “sweating bullets,” but I couldn’t think of an obvious interpretation. I googled but found nothing, so I decided to go back and finish the video, whereupon I heard her say “I tend to like softer glass, vintage glass…” Oh! She meant literally picking glass — choosing which lens to use! So I thought I’d share that with y’all. (Also, I’m delighted to see a female cinematographer on a blockbuster movie. I wasn’t as thrilled with Sinners as a lot of people, e.g. Richard Brody, but I’m glad it was a hit and I hope everybody involved gets lots of work.)

https://languagehat.com/picking-glass/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18181

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/boccaccios-dirty-book/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18174

Barbara Newman reviews two Boccaccio books for the LRB (Vol. 47 No. 14 · 14 August 2025; archived):

Histories​ of Italian literature begin with the Tre Corone or Three Crowns: Dante (1265-1321), Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75) and Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch (1304-74), Boccaccio’s intimate friend. All three exalted the Italian vernacular but, to the puzzlement of modern readers, entrusted their most important philosophical works to Latin. This bilingualism is a dominant theme in both Marco Santagata’s new biography of Boccaccio and Brenda Schildgen’s critical study [Boccaccio Defends Literature]. Santagata links Boccaccio’s vernacularity to his appeal to a female audience, while Schildgen considers his contributions to literary theory in the Decameron and his Latin masterpiece, the Genealogia deorum gentilium (Genealogy of the Pagan Gods).

Chaucer, a younger contemporary of Petrarch and Boccaccio, read all three writers. During his early diplomatic career, he learned Italian and eagerly sought out their works. Yet while he proudly cites Dante and ‘Fraunceys Petrak, the laureat poete’, he never mentions Boccaccio, to whom his debts were far greater. Boccaccio’s Teseida became ‘The Knight’s Tale’; his Filostrato inspired Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer borrowed several tales from the Decameron and adopted Boccaccio’s appeal to reader responsibility to defend bawdy stories such as ‘The Miller’s Tale’. Why the reticence? Why, to avoid naming Boccaccio, did Chaucer invent a fictional Latin poet as his source for Troilus? It seems that Boccaccio already had a reputation problem. From the late Middle Ages all the way to Pasolini’s 1971 film of the Decameron, he has been best remembered – understandably, if unfairly – for his most obscene and ribald tales. In Italian, the adjective boccaccesco means ‘lascivious’; the New Yorker once described the Decameron as ‘probably the dirtiest great book in the Western canon’.

Boccaccio himself would have been startled to learn that his immortality rested on that ‘dirty book’, rather than his Latin humanist works. […] Late in life he was certain he had been a failure, especially when he compared his output with Dante’s or Petrarch’s. Yet the same restlessness also led him to experiment in genre and style, making him, in Santagata’s words, ‘the most modern writer of his day’.

Some of Boccaccio’s insecurity stemmed from his inauspicious start in life. He was born in or near the town of Certaldo and grew up in Florence. His father, Boccaccino di Chellino, was a prominent merchant and banker and Boccaccio appears to have been his illegitimate son. He never knew his mother and never married, though he had mistresses and at least five children. His father insisted that he first study banking, then canon law, instead of the literary pursuits he would have preferred. Despite a lifelong aversion to marriage, he loved women and dedicated several early works to them, especially to the semi-mythical beloved he called Fiammetta, his ‘little flame’. Few women could read Latin, so writing in Italian meant writing, in part, for the ‘ladies’ who typically consumed romances and other light fare. In his preface to the Decameron, Boccaccio sympathises with the plight of women, confined to their chambers and denied the mind-broadening occupations of men. Such readers, he hopes, will derive both pleasure and sound advice (Horace’s dulce et utile) from his stories. Yet the light touch of some tales belies the learning apparent in others, not to mention the sophisticated frame story. Boccaccio undoubtedly wanted male readers as well. He was writing for a mixed audience that could appreciate scholarship and entertainment in a single work – an audience that did not yet exist. He aimed to create it through his writing. […]

Boccaccio conceived the Decameron as a kind of commedia profana, but his admiration for the Divina Commedia was unbounded. He personally copied the whole poem three times and several of Dante’s minor works would have disappeared if not for Boccaccio’s autograph copies. Much of his career was devoted to promoting Dante’s reputation, from his Little Treatise in Praise of Dante to the lectures he delivered late in his life – inaugurating a tradition of public readings, the Lecturae Dantis, that continues to this day. The readings were lavishly sponsored by the city of Florence at a salary of 100 florins for the lecturer, perhaps in atonement for the fact that the city had never recalled Dante from exile. Boccaccio’s lecture notes survive, providing one of our earliest commentaries on the Commedia. The sacro poema needed exposition, and also defence. Not only did churchmen take issue with Dante’s theological liberties, but he could hardly have condemned so many of his contemporaries to hell without making enemies of their families. More to our point, fans of Latin literature could not forgive Dante for ‘prostituting the Muses’ by treating such exalted themes in the vernacular. Petrarch himself was among the sceptics. Despite Boccaccio’s efforts, he was unable to persuade his friend of Dante’s merits. Boccaccio and Petrarch corresponded in Latin and exchanged their Latin works, but not their vernacular ones. Humanism, often misunderstood, could be a deeply conservative, elitist enterprise. While the humanists forged the vital tools of philology and textual criticism, their classical revival style was profoundly retardataire. Petrarch may have pinned his hopes for literary immortality on works like his Latin epic Africa, but it was his vernacular Canzoniere that launched an international craze for sonnets, keeping the courtly love lyric in vogue for two more centuries. The runaway popularity of both the Commedia and the Decameron, different as they are, represented the future.

The choice of a literary language was inextricable from the appeal to an audience, and in particular, the question of women readers. It was easy to mock their naivety. Boccaccio himself tells how the women of Ravenna, passing Dante in the streets, would say to one another: ‘Look, it’s that man who goes down into hell and returns whenever he likes.’ Almost perversely, Boccaccio wrote his encyclopedia of famous women (De mulieribus claris) in Latin, but his viciously misogynist Corbaccio in Italian. […]

It is impossible​ to overestimate the prestige of the Greco-Roman classics in humanist circles. Yet there had always been some Christian resistance to recycled pagan myths, filled as they were with deities committing rape, incest and other abominations. One standard response was to allegorise the myths, finding profound truths about human nature concealed beneath their artful surface. This is the line Boccaccio takes in his Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, a monument of scholarship that catalogues more than seven hundred mythical figures. More innovative is his impassioned defence of poetry in Book 14. By ‘poetry’ he means all of what we now call literature – prose and verse, pagan and Christian – and he defines it as a ‘stable and fixed branch of knowledge, founded and established on eternal principles’. Speaking against its cultured despisers, he calls poetry a ‘fervent and exquisite invention’ proceeding from the bosom of God, granted only to a few chosen souls and worthy of reverence. Nature in her wisdom has fashioned all human beings with their diverse vocations – carpenters and sailors, merchants and priests, lawyers and kings – but the list culminates in ‘poets, philosophers and sublime theologians’. Moreover, poetry is socially useful: it can teach, console and invigorate the mind. Most significant may be Boccaccio’s understanding of fiction as an autonomous category, neither factual truth nor reprehensible lies. As Philip Sidney would later put it, ‘the poet … nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.’ In Book 15, Boccaccio goes on to establish an Italian literary canon, seamlessly linking ancients and moderns, Latin and vernacular writers, culminating in Dante, Petrarch and himself. This is not so much self-promotion as a far-sighted vindication of the vernacular and the wider audience it enabled, including women. It also cements the idea of a ‘Renaissance’ with Italy as its heart and soul.

The Decameron includes a more personal, amusing, and in one sense more radical defence. In the introduction to Book 4, Boccaccio offers an early example of reader-response criticism. Although the book was far from finished, its tales had already begun to circulate and not everyone liked them. It seems that prudish critics had been complaining about Boccaccio’s desire to please ladies, interpreting his literary efforts as amorous exploits. Boccaccio disarmingly responds by accepting their critique. Why, after all, should he not love women and take delight in pleasing them? The Muses are ladies, after all, and ‘the fact is that ladies have already been the reason for my composing thousands of verses, while the Muses were in no way the cause.’ There is nothing shameful about writing for women; Dante himself did so. Where would the Commedia be without Beatrice? Concluding the Decameron in his own voice, Boccaccio makes the revolutionary move of placing the moral responsibility for literature squarely on the reader, not the writer. To the pure all things are pure, as St Paul says, while a corrupt mind sees nothing but corruption everywhere. Even bawdy tales have merit for those who know how to interpret them, but a reader who takes offence at trifles can just skip the offending stories and focus on the edifying ones. In short, ‘the lady who is forever saying her prayers or baking … cakes for her confessor should leave my tales alone.’ This is Boccaccio’s greatest contribution to literary theory: vernacularity, writing for entertainment, reader responsibility and the autonomy of fiction are all braided together and gendered feminine. For better or worse, that chain would hold – especially when more women began to write. It is more than gender that binds the elegant storytellers of the Decameron to the ‘damned mob of scribbling women’ that Nathaniel Hawthorne would denounce in the 1850s.

Lots more at the link; I posted Brown’s bilingual online version of Boccaccio over two decades ago and am pleased to see it’s still up and running. (Incidentally, Spectrum is supposedly upgrading our service, with the result that I’ve been offline most of the day; I’m taking this opportunity to post, but we may well lose service again while we’re eating lunch and who knows when we’ll get it back, so if your comment goes into moderation, please be patient.)

https://languagehat.com/boccaccios-dirty-book/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18174

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/lord-at-the-obelisks/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18166

Back in June I posted to Facebook as follows:

OK, I need to know what to make of what appears to be a meaningless sentence in Paige Williams’ article on Green-Wood Cemetery at the New Yorker [archived]. Here’s the context:

A hundred and eighty-seven years after its founding, Green-Wood resembles a sculpture garden. There are more than two hundred and fifty thousand monuments and more than five hundred mausolea. Owls, horses, baseballs, clasped hands, winged hourglasses, and empty beds are among the iconography that I have seen incised on the funerary surfaces. The angels (and they are many) weep and sag, but they also look heavenward. Lambs mean children. Broken flower stems and shorn columns symbolize early death. There are sarcophagi and plinths and cenotaphs. Lord at the obelisks.

Can anybody make sense of “Lord at the obelisks”? I thought it might be a typo (“Lord” for “Look”? — but that would be a lousy sentence even if intelligible), but it’s in the online version as well, which has been up for at least a week and a half.

(Don’t ask me why I posted it there rather than here; the past is a foreign country.) I got a bunch of replies but no clarification; I wrote the magazine but never heard back. Today I got this comment from B.J. Wills:

“Lord at the” is a Southernism. “Lord at the obelisks” means wow, *so many* obelisks.

I responded: “Huh! Well, that would certainly explain it, but googling isn’t showing me any other examples. Maybe if I had access to a spoken corpus…” So I thought I’d bring the whole mess here and ask if anyone knows anything about this alleged Southernism.

https://languagehat.com/lord-at-the-obelisks/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18166

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/tewk-and-its-descendants/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18159

I recently came upon the Wiktionary page Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/tewk- and was struck by the wide semantic divergence involved. The reconstructed meaning is ‘germ, seed, sprout, offspring’ (presumably based on Indo-Iranian *táwkma), but it gives rise to Proto-Germanic *þeuhą ‘thigh’ (see there for further descendants), Proto-Slavic *tȗkъ ‘fat, lard’ (see there for further descendants, including Russian тук ‘fertilizer’), Ossetian тог/туг (tog/tug) ‘blood,’ Irish tón ‘anus’ (whence Pogue Mahone), and Latin tuccetum ‘a kind of sausage made with meat of ox’ (whence Spanish tocino ‘bacon; salt pork’), among many others. Does this seem like trying to cram too much into one word family?

https://languagehat.com/tewk-and-its-descendants/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18159

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/jianghu-bistouri-steeze/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18152

Some interesting words I’ve run across recently:

1) I was watching Jia Zhangke’s movie Ash Is Purest White, about a couple involved in the (pretty petty) underworld milieu of Datong, and was intrigued to note that the subtitles didn’t translate the word jianghu (e.g., “You’re no longer in the jianghu”). I paused the movie to look it up and discovered it’s such a complex concept the choice to leave it in Chinese made sense:

Jianghu (江湖; jiānghú; gong¹wu⁴; ‘rivers and lakes’) is a Chinese term that generally refers to the social environment in which many Chinese wuxia, xianxia, and gong’an stories are set. The term is used flexibly, and can be used to describe a fictionalized version of rural historical China (usually using loose influences from across the ~1000 BC–280 AD period); a setting of feuding martial arts clans and the people of that community; a secret and possibly criminal underworld; a general sense of the “mythic world” where fantastical stories happen; or some combination thereof.

See the Wikipedia article for the derivation from Zhuangzi and various interpretations and uses. The Chinese title of the movie is 江湖儿女 ‘Sons and Daughters of (the) Jianghu,’ which certainly gives the prospective viewer more of a heads-up than the mysterious English one.

2) I forget where I ran across the French word bistouri ‘scalpel,’ but it’s got an interesting history; Wiktionary:

Borrowed from Italian pistorese or pistorino (“from Pistoia”, see Latin Pistōrium); the city of Pistoia was once famous for the manufacturing of blades.

It was borrowed into English as bistoury /ˈbɪstəɹi/, of which the OED (entry from 1887) says “Surgery. A scalpel; made in three forms, the straight, the curved, and the probe-pointed (which is also curved).” The etymology, after deriving it from French, adds “Said in some books to be < Pistorium, now Pistoja; but this is merely a conjecture from the similarity of the words.” I hope Xerîb will have something to say.

3) In Alaina Demopoulos’s Grauniad thumbsucker “Is it OK to read Infinite Jest in public? Why the internet hates ‘performative reading’” (archived), I was baffled by the first noun in “And maybe there’s still some steeze that comes from flexing an ‘important’ book.” Turns out steez(e) (which has not made it into the OED) means ‘a person’s distinctive and attractive or impressive style of dress or way of doing things’; Green says [SE style + -ɪᴢ- infix] and takes it back to 1990 (Run-DMC ‘Bob Your Head’ Weave with ease and please the steez with G’s). The ever-hip NY Times was onto it by 2007 (Anne Goodwin Sides, “Snowbound Neverland in Colorado“: “‘Right now I’m learning to pop off of jumps with steeze’ — style”), but it had somehow eluded me until now.

https://languagehat.com/jianghu-bistouri-steeze/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18152