Syntactaphasia

Open Table last week sent me a confirmation of a restaurant reservation.  It included the instruction that we would be cancelled "unless you call before 10 am on the day of your reservation". 

Um:  suppose our reservation is for 2 pm Thursday and we receive this message on Monday.  Clearly (yes?) a call at 955am Thursday is sufficient.  But what about a call at 1159pm Wednesday?  Or, come to think of it, a call on Monday just after we receive the instruction message? IOW, does the call have to come on the same day of the reservation?  Or is any time "before" enough?

Would the answer be different if the reservation was for next year than it would be for a reservation in the same week?

More to the point, is there a non-clumsy way to restructure the message so that it removes the ambiguity?  Or rather, two ways, one of which allows for an early message while the other does not?

Update:  David A  says:

How about judicious use of parentheses:

before 10 am (on the day of your reservation).

Or,

before 10 am on <>

Or, I think you might be overthinking it a little.

David S adds:

 Aargh.  Eat someplace else.

 Me, I'm also still worrying (I may have written this one before) about the line in the local fishwrap that said "of those who did not die in the first year, even more died in the second."   Well yes, and of those who did die in the first year, none died in the second.

Well Hey (Language Division)

Well hey--I sort of knew that this had to exist but I didn't trouble until just this weekend to figure out that it actually exists.

That is, translation.  I see that I can download a book to my Kindle app (or, I suppose, send it to the cloud*) and download along side it a dictionary in the appropriate language.  So when you poke the word, the dictionary you get is not English but, you know, whatever.  

This doesn't get you the whole way, of course.  The next step (but maybe this exists too, and I just haven't found it yet) would be to let me link to an English version so I could go friction free from English to  (shall we say) Klingon to the Klingon dictionary, etc.  And the dictionary can be a dead end: if I don't understand the dictionary definition, so far as I can tell I can't just press for the definition's definition.**

You knew all that.  Okay, but I still count it as progress. And did you also know that you can get a complete A la recherché du temps perdu plus a French dictionary for less than 10 bucks?  Ain't nature grand?

And did you know that the English translation of "ferrugineux" is "ferruginous?"  I say, ain't nature grand?
 ===
*Apparently not the cloud.  I sent the book out there, but I can't figure out how to load the dictionary.

**Well, not quite.  I can tap through to the definition and then seek definitions of words inside the definition.  And so on ad infinitum, I suppose.

Afterthought:  But then, I saw a modern mystery in French that I wanted to put on my Kindle.  I punched one-click and they told me that it wasn't available in my part of the world.  Well okay, but then why did you offer it to me?

The Accent

It seems that Captain Phillips--the real Captain Phillips, non-Tom-Hanks version--and I share two noteworthy life facts.  One, we both wanted Danny DeVito to play us in our life story.  And two, we were both born in Manchester, NH (although in both cases, our mothers lived someplace else).

I therefore feel qualified to contribute to the great Tom Hanks "accent" controversy--whether Hanks can speak Boston and whether it matters.  I was geared up to go on at length on this subject although I see others got there before me (link,  link, link etc.).   I nonetheless believe I can make a contribution.

Specifically, when I left New Hampshire at 17 I thought my accent was a mark of shame and I did my best to suppress it.  By the time I was, maybe, 25, I realized a New Hampshire accent was kind of cool and I did my best to recreate it.  But my father said I got it wrong.  He said I came up with a Maine accent and neither I nor he had ever lived in Maine.  Which was all right with him because he knew me as a fake anyway.

So, I feel for Tom Hanks.  Apparently it ain't that easy.*

On further reflection--the one situation in which I can come close to New England accent of any sort is when I'm reading aloud from Sarah Orne Jewett.  Which may be where the Maine thing comes in.  For a reading of Jewett's best-known work, though without the accent, go here.   For a full-throttle New England accent, with no apparent consciousness of itself, go here.  For the real Captain and his real accent, go here.

*On third thought: maybe Tom Hanks needs to get some dialect tips from Damian Lewis   or Hugh Laurie.

Wonder if he Said, “I'd Like to Buy a Vowel”

The Phoenicians invented the alphabet and the Greeks added vowels. But where and when did the vowels come in? Robin Lane Fox makes a case for the end of the eighth century BCE on or near Cyprus, in an encounter between one Euboean Greek and a Phoenician. The Greek seems to have written the letters down in order, alpha beta gamma, following the Phoenician protocol. The vowels, Lane Fox speculates, may have been a “creative misunderstanding”--evidently the Greeks were good at that.

 

Somewhat confusingly, the earliest extant example of written vowel-script surfaces at the no n-Greek settlement of Gabi, about 11 miles east of Rome. Lane Fox continues:

Here, a small locally made pottery flask ws inscribed with five letters after firing and was later pierced with a hole, presumably so as to pour from its side. It was then placed beside an urn containing cremated bones which were probably a woman' about sixty years old. The urn was buried in a grave-pit .. On one interpretation, the five letters on the pot are Greek and seem to spell out “Eulin,” a puzzling sequence which is not itself a Greek word. Does it stand for Eulinos, “good at spinning,' a tribute, perhaps, to the skill of the woman (if woman she is) who as cremated in the nearby jar?

But:

On an alternative view the letters re Latin, running backwards from right to left as other early writing did in Italy. They then say “Ni Lue,” perhaps signiying “do not” (ne)) “(cause yourself) to pay a penalty” (luas), perhaps by breaking or taking the object.

Gabi is a long way from Cyprus but the Euboeans traveled a lot. The Latin reading doesn't obviate the possibility of a Greek origin; the Latin writer would have had to learn his script from someone. And no problem that Latin as we know it deploys a different alphabet than Greek: evidently proto-Latin and early Greek used the same faltering Greek script.
 

They say that archaeology is the study of stuff left behind by accident. And one might add, the spinning of large tales out of small beginnings.

Source: I'm reading Robin Lane Fox's Travelling Heroes (2008), his account of the archaeological background of the world that gave us the Homeric epics The quotations at from pp 128-9.

The Linguistic Heisenberg Principle: Scandinavian Languages

It's the Heisenberg principle that holds (not so?) that the closer you look at something, the less likely it is to be there.   I guess I've written before about how true that is with language(s).  And here's a new case: Scandinavia, for present purposes meaning Sweden, Norway, Denmark.   Start at the level of the various nations.  If you wanted to say "I am a subject of the crown," Google translate says it would come out this way:

Swedish:  Jag är ett ämne av kronan
Danish: Jeg er et emne af kronen
Norway: Jeg er en gjenstand av kronen

Don't know about you, but these look suspiciously alike to me--even granting that funny-looking "gjensand" in the third line, you really want to shout "People!  It's all the same language!  Get over it!"--even though the "crown" in each case would be a different crown in each country (and no, I have no idea whether any of the three would refer to the monarch as "the crown," but it is convenient for my purpose).

 On the other hand, if you start looking at the sub national level, you begin to find there are variations which may be at least as substantial as those between nations.  I wrote a few days ago about the Isle of Gotland where it seems they speak what might be called Icelandic [Ég er háð kórónu--actually, that does look/sound a bit different.]   Aside from  Gotland, I  gather there may not be a lot that you can call separate languages in Sweden, though there may be stuff that counts as "dialect"--as, for example, Göteborg, where it is said they speak with a Scots burr.

In Denmark, they'll tell you there isn't any dialect.  Maybe not but--well, I don't find this quite plausible.  Denmark is, after all, part island, part mainland.   I'd be surprised if the (mainland) Jutlanders fromn Århus speak quite the same as the (island) Zealanders from Copenhagen.  I've had at least one Copenhagen Dane whisper that I should listen up to the person nearby talking country style (I couldn't pick up any real difference).

But I suspect it is Norway where dialect thrives: mountains, after all, and fjords, and impenetrable valleys, just the sort of places you would expect to develop their own modes of speech--and also to keep them down through the ages ("you rule Norway from the sea," it is said, and I can see why: until perhaps the 20C, you really weren't going to get to the interior, and there really wasn't that much to go for anyway).  On language, there's a pretty good Wiki  (Cf. also this) where we learn that there are two "standard" versions of "Norwegian," and a tropical (heh!) rain forest of dialect variations.  Indeed it is said that the only people who speak "pure Norwegian" are the Sami, the people we used to call the Lapps--and they learned it as a second language (come to that, Sami languages also have their own wheels within wheels, but this is getting ridiculous).
 

Back in the Ill-Behoover Administration

The estimable Michael Quinion puzzles over "behoove/behove" as in "it ill behoves":

It’s one of those few expressions in modern English that is almost always impersonal. You or I, or even they, do not generally behove. The empty agent it is usually in charge of the verb. Behove can also appear with negative sense, for which a common marker word in the UK is ill. Ill behoves implies acting inappropriately or improperly, as in this editorial pronouncement from a Sunday newspaper:

In an age of genuine austerity, it ill behoves those who have enough cash to eat as they wish to stand in judgment on those who do not.
The Observer, 10 Feb. 2013.

Americans use ["behove"] only rarely, but make up for it by using behoove more often and with a wider range of modifying words such as would, might and certainly.

I think I can help re the American instance.  Back in the 50s, all the clever people (= myself and my friends) owned an LP record called "I Can Hear it Now," in which Edward R. Murrow curated snippets of radio broadcasts of famous events.  Clever people could recite chunks of it, including this from John L. Lewis:

Labor, like Israel, has many sorrows. Its women weep for their fallen and they lament for the future of the children of the race. It ill behooves one who has supped at labor's table and who has been sheltered in labor's house to curse with equal fervor and fine impartiality both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace.

Amazing how flat ir sounds without his orotund Welsh sonorities.  Best I can do is a snippet of some testimony before the Senate, from back  in the days when private-sector unionism was stilll a public issue:

Meanwhile, I'm still looking for a good finish to the limerick about the girl from Vancouver who thought it would never behoover.  "Louvre" seems indicated, although I am not quite sure how.

Language Watch: Sourced, Rentier

It's surely* a truism that you can gauge social changes by changes in language usage.  Here are a couple of instances that caught my eye this morning.

One, sourced as in "few of the reporters ... were sourced in the Federal Reserve."  That's Ezra Klein in an encomium to his companion-wonk Neil Irwin.  Translated: Neil has good cooperative sources who feed him stuff.  That is the whole story of new-age journalism,  not so?  Your sources are your inventory, just like the lawyer who wants to make a lateral move must bring a book of business (BTW I am reading the Irwin book right now, and it is indeed pretty good).

And two, rentier, as in "he who eats but does not work."  Hardly a neologism--an online etymology dates it to 1881 but surely* it is older.   Still, the first time I remember hearing it in contemporary dialogue would have been about 15 years ago when I read the remarkable Wall Street, by Doug Henwood, the Bruce Bartlett of the left.  Henwood is proudly non-mainstream, but here's Michael Konczal now channeling and force-magnifying** Michael Lind, with an essay "towards an anti-rentier politics."    Apparently we need it again. 

[BTW, do we put rentier in italics, as a French word transmogrified into English?  Or has it been so thoroughly Anglicized that it can pass into Roman, that is, English?]

*And while I am at it: I've been lurking at another list where they have been discussing "surely," as in "Surely he hath borne our griefs."  Surely (heh) they say, we only say "surely" when we are not sure, or at least by way of admitting that we don't have a good source (heh).  The conversation quickly descended (or ascended) into the discussion of the original source (Isaiah 53:4) as rendered in Hebrew, Latin, Greek.   But surely (heh) for most people the principal source would be something like this:

**Update: a well-wisher says I could also have noted force magnifier.  Surely.

Update II:  Another faithful reader points out that I veered close to this topic before.   Sho, and at least I did not say this.

C-Suite

..or its companion, "C-level."  Never  heard them before, ran across them twice in 24 hours.  A friend runs a fleet of continuing eduction programs, at least one "for C-level executives."  A few hours later I ran across C-suite: I'm off to Wiktionary where I find:  "The group of officers of a business organization, who have the word 'chief' in their titles."  So, "C * O" where the C stands for "Chief," the  O stands for "Officer" and the * stands for Executive, Operating, Financial, Information, Restructuring, or any job that gives you digs on the umpteenth floor with the wrap-around windows and the catered lunches.

I tried it on my friends to see if they were as behind the curve as I.  Results were mixed, yes and no plus "I heard the phrase but I had no idea what it meant."   Bruce adds:

Interesting contrast with "being called to the carpet," which is, I believe a reference to when the bigwigs were on the first floor with carpet, and the minions were upstairs with linoleum.

Taxmom contributes:

I knew it meant where the heads of the company were (seat of power as it were), but I thought it was "corner suite", like "corner office".  But now everyone is in cubicles anyway, and you call people into the conference room if you need to fire them.

My friend Carter offers a twist:

"C-shift" is a term used to describe the graveyard shift (A,B, and C shifts).  In some jail litigation I was tangentially involved in, the night guards were involved in a pattern of physical abuse.  They turned it into a verb "He got C-shifted!" when they beat the hell out of somebody.  The City paid handsome settlements to a class of plaintiffs, so maybe they ended up actually being C-shifted.

 ...also new to me.  In the newspaper biz, the 11pm-7am gig qualified as "the lobster shift," of doubtful etymology but being lobster shifted doesn't sound like much fun either.

Of course we don't have chiefs here in the University but we do have chancellors and, more to the point, we have vice-chancellors who have about 15 reserved parking spaces.  I don't even know where their office is but I assume they feast on ortolans and whipped cream.   Here in the law school, we have deans--a D-suite?  I assume they also have a D-suite over at the B-school?   Much better off, I suppose, than those poor adjutants whose A-suite is down in steerage.  In any event, I am remembering the lion who escaped from the Washington zoo and survived for six months by hanging out at the  Pentagon and eating a general a day where nobody ever missed them.

Ah, I Suspected as Much...

Per the expert, there is no difference in meaning between "while" and "whilst."

Spanish Amazon

We're planning for  trip to Spain later this spring.  I don't know any Spanish, but I know a dribble of French and Italian (as if!--ed) so I figured I'd get me a  book in Spanish and see if I could guess my way through it.  Preferably narrative non-fiction, best if one I had read before in English.  I hit on Tony Judt's Postwar; in fact I hadn't read all of it but I have dipped in and out and I do, after all, know a little bit about what happened after WWII.

Anyway, I popped over to the world's favorite online bookseller and--whoa, here it is on Kindle, and at a price a few pennies cheaper than Amazon's favorite $9.99.   

Instant Kindle in any language--is this the new new thing?  Further checking persuades me that the answer is "not yet."  While I happily downloaded my copy of Postguerra, I don't find  a Kindle Dopoguerra or Après-guerre (I do find paper versions of the French and Italian but the Italian is listed as out of stock and the French seems insanely overpriced--especially seeing  as how France is a place where books are often comparatively cheap).  And I find that even the Spanish instance is a bit of an outlier: looks one publisher had made one deal, but hey, you have to start somewhere.

So like I say, I downloaded and started puzzling away and yes, I could make a bit of headway.  But I quickly thought: dictionary, boy what I need is a dictionary.  And sure enough, I was able to download a dictionary, just like you do for an English language book. The bad news: it's in Spanish, so I have to guess at the dictionary, just as I do at the book.

But then I thought: this is only a matter of time.  Any day they want to, the digital gods could configure a Spanish-English dictionary.  And more: even now as we stand here, the minions at Amazon are probably working to contract for whole libraries of French, Italian, Spanish, and trying to configure ways to ease the problem of translation. Will the next generation Samsung Android give me a translation whenever the pupil dilates?  

Now carry the logic one step further.  Recall that since the coming of the laptop (a) vastly more of us typewrite, vastly more of the time; and (b) we're all worse typists than any of us was before.  Can we see the same future for language?  Will there come a point when we won't need translation because the digital cloud will do it for us on the fly?  And will we all end up with degraded versions of the language?  One large language soup?

Anecdote, like I say I pretend to know some Italian. A couple of years back I had to write a letter to an Italian.  I knew he spoke English but hey. I went to Google translate; I got the machine reading and I tried to tart it up into a respectable version--I suppose I hoped to fool him into thinking I had done it all myself.   "Your Italian is so funny," he replied.  In English.   How long before I will no longer get this kind of response?  Not long, I suspect, not long at all.

Language Notes: Spitalian

Chatting with a Latin American student this morning, I remarked on how Argentines seem to me to speak their Spanish with an Italian flourish.  Oh yes, he said, that's well known.  And in fact--this was new to me--when Italians learn Spanish in school or as adults, they always wind up sounding like Argentinians.

Prompts me to remember an American landlady I paid rent to once in Italy.  I asked her if she spoke Italian. She said: I think so.  I have studied Italian.  But I know Spanish much better, and when I try to speak Italian, I am never quite sure which I am speaking.

Oh, and one more:  I heard one of my Shanghai students assure a Shanghai student friend that Italian and Spanish were really the same.  I guess he wasn't that far off.

Here's an instructive Wiki on the place of Italian and Italians in Argentina.

Query:  Argentinians?  Or Argentines? 

Froward

In his excellent weekly newsletter on language, Michael Quinion showcases "froward:" 

 ...means leading away. ... By the fourteenth century, froward was attached in particular to a person who figuratively moved away from others by doing the opposite of what was asked of them or what other people thought reasonable. A froward person was hard to deal with — obstinate, peevish, perverse or childish. Indeed, a difficult child was often said to be froward: ... That sense remained until froward slipped out of daily use in the latter part of the nineteenth century. 

Fine, with the observation that it probably was the concept as well as the form that is lost in the winds of time.  It is beyond thinking in a democratic age that we would have the nerve to scold anyone with "froward;" certainly not children, whose license for frowardness has been on automatic review at least since the occupation of People's Park.  Most of the observations seem to be 19th Century schoolmasters testily rebuking the brats, but the online King James Bible gives 22, mostly from Proverbs (but Deuteronomy 32:20: "...  for they are a very froward generation, children in whom is no faith").   I see that you can occasionally find it quoted in a distinguished modern publication. 

Creek Don't Rise

Michael Quinion has an entertaining item up about the phrase (as I remember it) "if the Lord is willin' and the Creek don't rise." His main purpose is to demolish the notion that the "Creek" here are Creek Indians, as in "the natives are restless tonight." But as to the provenance of the phrase itself:

The written record dates the saying from about the middle of the nineteenth century. But I know of just four instances from that century. Then there’s a long gap in the record before it began to appear again in the 1950s.

Allow me to throw a bit more light on the subject. I suspect the renewed popularity of the phrase dates from early 1964, i.e., the beginning of the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson, when it was uttered by his wife, Lady Bird (it's in the NYT obit, go look it up).

Wait a minute, what did she just say? Jackie Kennedy never talked like that. It was one more datum--there were so many--to remind us that we were functioning in a new world now--or at least an unfamiliar world. We knew that Texans talked loud and with a funny accent, but beyond that, for most of us all we knew in detail about Texas was what we had seen in Giant. And grant me this, when you really go looking for "typical Texans," you're not likely to turn up with Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson.  Now we had a president who received visitors from the toilet and lifted up beagles by their ears.  And this was his wife?  Was she kidding, or was she really a rube?

We know now that she was no rube.  By the time she died (in 2007, at the age of 94) it was clear to anybody who cared that she was a focused, discriminating and powerful personage in her own right.  If she talked about creeks, it may have been a sly prank or a genuine part of herself but it certainly wasn't any slip of the tongue.  Most first ladies are style setters.  Jackie gave us the pillbox hat.  Now this.  

Viri Galilei, etc.

Reading Galileo in Rome  by Mariano Artigas and William R. Shea, I discover a curious array of verbal curiosities.  One is the story of a young Dominican named Tomasso Cacini who  in 1614 undertook to speak out against Galileo's supposed heresies from the pulpit of Santa Maria Novella in Florence:

 Caccini seems to have chosen as his text the passage in the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, in which two men clad in white said to the disciples after Jesus' ascension into heaven: "Men of Galilee, why do you stand here looking at the sky?"  In the Latin version, which Caccini quoted, "Men of Galilee" is "Viri Galilei," which can be rendered as "Men of [Galileo] Galilei." The pun startled the congregation, but there was more to come. Caccini launched into a denunciation of Galileo, the Copernican system, and all mathematicians, whom he branded as enemies of Church and State. He was dead serious.

William R. Shea and Mariano Artigas. Galileo in Rome: 

The Rise and Fall of a Troublesome Genius(Kindle Locations 735-737). 

Two involves a polemical work of Galileo's which he entitled The Assayer--in Italian, Il Saggiatore.  A mischievous Jesuit was able to go him one better by recasting it as Il Asaggiatore, "The Wine-Taster."  "Galileo," the authors dryly remark, "knew and loved his wine."

The third is more incidental, but it caught my fancy anyway.  It's the word "Quarantine," and its etymology.  Evidently it comes from "forty"--"quaranta"--as in 40 days' isolation.  But why 40?  Because  that was the time Jesus spent in the wilderness (as if to cleanse himself) before he undertook his preaching.   

The Other, Other Europe: A Hungarian Restoration

Der Spiegel tells us that Viktor Orbán is demonstrating that he really meant it when he laid out his populist-nationalist agenda for Hungary ("Goulash Archipelago"--oh, Spiegel, you're such as kidder).  Meanwhile, from the Wall Street Journal, I learn that the Hungarian government doesn't want the folks to learn English as a "first foreign language" because it is too easy.

Boy, I can relate.  I'm not a good foreign-language speaker but in Europe I am a fairly adept guesser and in Hungary, I am toast (unless I want someone to serve me gulyásh in my kocsi).  But it is not just the utterly unfamiliar language, stranger than Klingon; it's the pronunciation of that strange language.  The Hungarians appear to trade in vocal subtleties that are beyond anyone other than, perhaps (just guessing) the Cantonese.  I recall one day in Budapest when a tourguide was trying to give us a bit of history.  In a desperate and forlorn attempt to show I had done my homework, I piped up:

"Was that Rákosi?"  I asked.

"No," she responded. "It was Rákóczi."

Or maybe it was the other way round.  Would have been lost on me either way.

By the way, that language point--would it have anything to do with the fact that Viktor was an English major?

Stanley Fish on Sentences

I see that Stanley Fish has inaugurated and concluded his contest (over at Slate, link, link) to select great sentences from the English language.  I didn't get around to entering partly because I couldn't think of a  slam-dunk entry but also because I began to suspect that Fish's own enterprise had undercut himself.  That is--of Fish's own five, I'd say that only two deserve the recognition he grants.  And they would be the first two--one, from John Bunyan (1678):

Now he had not run far from his own door, but his wife and children perceiving it, began crying after him to return, but the man put his fingers

And his second, only  26 years later, from Jonathan Swift (1704)

Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how  much it altered her appearance for the worse.

The other three, which I won't trouble to reprint here, are elegant pieces of work in their own right and on their own terms.  But  none of them has the bite, power and drive of the great originals.  By corollary, if we were really looking for sentences with the quality of these, I suspect we might go right back again to these originals--in particular Bunyan, the electricity and directness of whose prose has almost never been equalled.  Fish's own choice is fine.  But you could have done just as well with the very first sentence in the book:

As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream.

Or the second:

 I dreamed, and behold, I saw a man clothed with rags, standing in a certainplace, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back.

Or the third:

I looked, and saw him open the book, and read therein; and, as he read, he wept, and trembled; and, not being able longer to contain, he brake out with alamentable cry, saying, What shall I do?

Or if that is too  convoluted, a few sentences later, the short version:

Now, I saw, upon a time, when he was walking in the fields, that he was, as he was wont, reading in his book, and greatly distressed in his mind; and, as he read, he burst out, as he had done before, crying, What shall I do to be saved?

But forget about Bunyan per se.  I think it is no accident that his best examples comes from the relative youth of the language, before it had become as self-involved as it does in his later instances.

In this light, I'm a little surprised that Fish passed over his own guiding light, John Milton.  It may be that he intended to bypass poetry.  But Milton, in addition to being a great poet, was also our  greatest pamphleteer.  And how can you improve on:

Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks; methinks I see her as an eagle mewinher mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam; purging and unscaling her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance.

[If you think I am cheating and giving two sentences, divided it before the second "methinks" and use either half.]

Exclusion of poetry might explain why we cannot use Shakespeare's "Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks/Within his bending sickle's compass come" (The spondees!  The spondees!).   But Shakespeare too wrote prose also and here, there are almost too many choices.  "What a piece of work is a man!" is part of an electrifying paragraph, although as a sentence it might qualify in its own right.  Still if I had to choose just one, it might be:

There live not three good men unhanged in England; and one of them is fat and grows old.

Going on in the same vein, I see that at least one of Fish's winning entries comes from the Bible--more precisely the King James Version, another product of the language's raw youth.   And so it goes: it is the language fashioned by Bunyan and Swift, and Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible, that we speak today and  nothing in the later elaboration can really top the beginning.  The best one can do is to try to  match that beginning; then you may hope to come up with something like what may truly be the best single sentence in the English language:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

The Zilbergleyz Effect

When you find a frozen lemon, make frozen lemonade: my nomination for linguist of the week goes to Grigoriy Zilbergleyz, 64, who spent Sunday night on the N at the New Utrecht Avenue station in New York City, part of his 15-hour trip from Manhattan's upper west side to his home in Bensonhurst.  Zilberegleyz finally had to walk the last leg of his journey--or trudge, rather, in recognition of the paralyzing East Coast storm which, inter alia, stalled subways all over town.  Zilberegleyz took it all in commendable good spirits:

“Every time when I see the situation like this, I’m very proud of the American people,” said Mr. Zilbergleyz, who immigrated to New York 11 years ago from Belarus. “No panic, no yelling. Just understanding.”

What would have happened back home? He laughed. “I don’t know, a lot of not very good words,” he said. “And they will complain about government, about driver, about his mother, and ...

And what?  I know: you expect him to say "and so forth and so on."  Close.   But what Zilbergleyz  actually said (per the NYT) was "and so what and so on.”  Does this count as a conscious coinage?  Probably not. Zilbergleyz is, after all, a newcomer, and it's hardly a surprise if his English is a bit improvisational (don't try me on Belarus).  But that is perhaps the way a lot of language comes into being: by accident.  "So what and so on," captures an important, if hitherto unnoticed nuance in the language, fully justifying the recognition of Zilbergleyz with an honorable footnote in the annals of his adopted tongue.

Vlad the Impaler by any Other Name...

  Vanessa  Jackson, the Texas diva judge, offers a provocative insight into the forecasting of criminal behavior:

[S]he noticed that a large number of the defendants in capital cases in her court had Wayne or Lee for their middle names. After doing some informal research, Gilmore says she determined that an “oddly high number” of defendants in Texas death penalty cases have those middle names. After doing more online research, she’s determined that others have noticed the same strange propensity for people with Wayne or Lee for a middle name to have trouble with the law.

Mock on, but she may have something here.  Our names define us: Moynihan and Glazer pointed out years ago that you are more likely to be defined (and to define yourself) as "Irish" if your father is a "Hogan," than if your mother is.  And if you name the baby "Vlad the Impaler," the chances of his avoiding a schoolyard brawl are slim.

Yes, but what would it be with "Wayne" and "Lee."  Well, I wouldn't be surprised if a fair number of the "Waynes" are "Anthony Wayne," after "Mad"  Anthony Wayne, celebrated badboy of the American Revolution.   Right, I know his parents never actually heard of the general, but the bad-boy aura survives (statement of interest: the second-most-feared bully of my youth was an Anthony Wayne; he claimed direct descent from the badboy, and took great pride in it).

"Lee" is even easier.  Surely a fair number of those parents are claiming fealty to "Marse Robert," Robert E. Lee, Confederate Civil War general-in-chief and patron saint of lost-cause rebellions everywhere.  As a definer of behavior, I'd say it is almost as good as having "born to lose" tattoed on your forearm.

One Thing I Learned Today

"Horde" as in "Mongol Horde," means the central headquarters, the general's encampment.

Well, actually that I knew. What I didn't know is that it survives in "Urdu," the name of the langauge spoken in Pakistan, an offshoot of Hindi, said to be the form that evolved among soldiers.  Or as a tour guide in Delhi told me a few years bak--"it's a camp language."

That is all.  Resume your pointless entertainments.

Ety Mology

From a blog commentator at the NYT via Michael Quinion:

Bed bugs is TWO words - not one. The general rule for writing out common names of insects is as follows. If the insect name is a misnomer (e.g., the dragonfly is NOT a fly and neither is a damselfly), then the whole name is written as one word. If it is not a misnomer, then it is written as two words (e.g., house fly, which is a real fly). The bed bug is a "true" bug and therefore is two words.

Quinion appends a long discussion suggesting that this is really and truly real and true,  however obscure.  Does it mean that "bedpost" should also be written as one word because not  true post?  Or "firesale" as one because you are not really selling fire?