languagehat.com

Ben Yagoda posted on FB:

Pronunciation question: How do you say the word “housing”: A, “howzing” or B, “house-ing”? I had always said A, and feel that I exclusively heard it. But on an Ezra Klein podcast several months back, he kept saying B. (And also “house-es.”) Since then I’ve heard it on quite a few occasions. Preliminary research suggests that it might be an example of linguistic “regularization,” and it’s indeed on the rise, particularly in the U.S. and among younger speakers.

What have you been hearing and saying?

Nobody in his comment section uses the voiceless version, and probably no one here does either, but have you heard it? I’d ask my grandsons, but they’re out of town.

Before we started on The Brothers Karamazov, my wife and I were reading Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet (see this post), and I had meant to write about one of the most remarkable Anglo-Indian words I learned from it, which occurs in the sentence “Then something went wrong with the camp bandobast” (p. 323 in my edition, p. 332 here). The context is no help with the meaning, so I went to my trusty Hobson-Jobson:

BUNDOBUST, s. P.-H. — band-o-bast, lit. ‘tying and binding.’ Any system or mode of regulation; discipline; a revenue settlement.

[1768. — “Mr. Rumbold advises us . . . he proposes making a tour through that province . . . and to settle the Bandobust for the ensuing year.” — Letter to the Court of Directors, in Verelst, View of Bengal, App. 77.]

c. 1843. — “There must be bahut achch’hā bandobast (i.e. very good order or discipline) in your country,” said an aged Khānsamā (in Hindustani) to one of the present writers. “When I have gone to the Sandheads to meet a young gentleman from Bilāyat, if I gave him a cup of tea, ‘tānki tānki,’ said he. Three months afterwards this was all changed; bad language, violence, no more tānki.”

Then I turned to the OED (entry from 1933):
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Peter Brooks is always worth reading, and his NYRB review article “In Search of His Vocation” (March 21, 2024 issue; archived) has interesting things to say about Proust, but what grabbed me was the final section, much of which I will reproduce here:

Readers who can’t get enough of Proust from the novel now can delve into the beginnings of the Search in The Seventy-Five Folios. […] They apparently date more or less from 1908, when Proust, having abandoned Jean Santeuil, his first novelistic venture, finally started work on the Search.

To Proust’s biographer Jean-Yves Tadié, they give us “the sacred moment” of first creation. You can see, for instance, how the originally prolix and diffuse drama of bedtime, with his mother’s kiss withheld, becomes in Proust’s rewriting the utterly memorable, indelible scene of childhood anguish in Swann’s Way. They are surely of interest to dedicated Proustians, though not quite up to the hype that greeted their appearance in France, where their publisher, Gallimard, claimed that they offer a Proustian “holy grail.” These pages had become a legend in France: mentioned by the critic Bernard de Fallois in his 1954 preface to the Gallimard edition of Proust’s critical essay Contre Sainte-Beuve, they went missing when the novelist’s papers (originally left by his brother Robert to his daughter, Suzy Mante-Proust) entered the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in 1962. They were then discovered at de Fallois’s home after his death in 2018.

Their hyping may have to do less with their inherent importance than with a French obsession with what’s known as “genetic criticism,” which proposes to study the avant-texte and the brouillon—the pre-text and the draft—to establish the evolution of the text, the process leading up to the final version. That’s the opposite of traditional textual scholarship, which attempts to establish a “definitive” version. Genetic criticism can, of course, be highly interesting to the specialist. But in France it has attained canonical status, in the process providing a proliferation of unpublished material and blurring the outlines of familiar texts. This is a boon for publishers, who can produce “new versions” of classic texts full of alternative material, “variants,” with lots of editorial commentary, but which the rest of us may largely see as a boondoggle. With Proust, the genetic obsession has had results that are less than clearly positive, though perhaps inevitable, since he did not live to establish a definitive version of his novel. The three-volume Pléiade edition of À la recherche du temps perdu in 1954 contained 3,500 pages. The four-volume edition of 1987–1989, edited by Tadié, has over 7,000, with a large number of drafts and alternative versions in tiny font. There are of course other editions that are easier on the common reader.

The claim that texts are enriched by their earlier states—by the material their authors discarded—seems to me a dubious proposition, or at least one that should be confined to the literary geneticist’s playground. It gives pride of place precisely to material that authors wished to delete. We owe a certain respect to their decisions to revise, to abandon one version for another, to refine life in the crucible of art. It was by getting rid of the overly autobiographical—as in the discarded Jean Santeuil—that Proust created the Search. Kafka is supposed to have said that he entered literature by learning to say he rather than I. With Proust, the process was a bit different: Jean Santeuil is written in the third person, whereas by the time of the Search Proust has chosen to say I, but an I that isn’t identical with the writer, indeed an I that is shifting, elusive, in the process of becoming. As he wrote in his critique of Sainte-Beuve’s biographical approach to criticism, “A book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices.”

I entirely agree: there’s a certain voyeuristic fascination to be had in scrutinizing discarded drafts and false starts, but it’s pretty much on the same level as wanting to know what the celebrity eats for breakfast. The work of art should stand on its own, and the older I get, the more I understand and respect writers like Pynchon who avoid the whole swamp of publicity and stupid questions. Just do the work, and let people figure it out for themselves.

Another good NY Times language column (archived) by Nitsuh Abebe; after a DFW-centered opening, he continues:

The way a broad population of people speaks is a dialect, and the way a particular individual speaks is known as an idiolect, and somewhere in between is what linguists call a familylect or familect: the unique way a given family uses language.

Every family has one. A quick survey of my co-workers produced too many delightful examples to list. The price of eating too much junk food was a case of circus tummy. Whipped cream was shush, after the sound of the can. A dog was a woofnik (an epithet once used for Laika, the Soviet space-dog) and a cat a pitty pie. Instead of greebles there was phyrtche, pronounced “furch,” which meant “something small and unidentifiable that is stuck to a place where it shouldn’t be.” One family adopted a toddler’s way of asking for “Sesame Street” and started calling all television shaba; the habit became so embedded that their next child, years later, came home from day care feeling betrayed to have learned it wasn’t standard English. Another family indicates that something is frightening by saying want some coleslaw, based on the time a son was scared by a haunted hayride and tried to recite the Buddhist prayer kwan seum bosal. My in-laws use the adjective blammy to describe people who are always rushing heedlessly around having accidents and causing commotions. “I never liked Amelia Bedelia,” someone once said. “She’s just so blammy.”

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Laudator Temporis Acti presents a quote from Plautus beginning:

virtus praemium est optumum;
virtus omnibus rebus anteit profecto

The translation (by Paul Nixon) begins “Courage is the very best gift of all; courage stands before everything, it does, it does!” Which made me wonder what exactly virtus means, here and in general. Wiktionary says:

1. manhood, manliness, virility
2. courage, valor, resoluteness, gallantry
3. virtue, goodness
4. excellence, merit, worth, character
5. (figuratively) strength (of medicine or herbs)

The OED (entry revised 2013) defines the Latin word as “manliness, valour, worth, merit, ability, particular excellence of character or ability, moral excellence, goodness, this quality personified as a goddess, any attractive or valuable quality, potency, efficacy, special property.” Which makes it sound like it can mean any quality that could be qualified as “good.” Is there any reason to think Plautus means specifically ‘courage’? How do Latinists decide what such a multivalent word means in any given context?

Another Far Outliers excerpt from Philip Bowring’s Empire of the Winds (see Hindu and Buddhist Texts in Nusantaria):

As elsewhere in the maritime zone, Chinese and Europeans alike were surprised at the prominent economic role of women, particularly in trade. But even more remarked was widespread literacy, of women in particular, albeit their literacy was used only for transient or practical purposes, for messages and personal letters rather than the reading and writing of literature. Spanish priest Pedro Chirino, writing in 1604, noted: ‘So accustomed are all these islanders to writing and reading that there is scarcely a man, still less a woman, who cannot read and write.’ Similarly, de Morga wrote, of the Tagals at least: ‘Almost all the inhabitants, both men and women, write in this language, and there are very few of them who do not write it very well.’

The legacy of the Indian cultural influence which had come via Srivijaya and Java had left behind scripts which were in widespread use when the Spaniards arrived in the sixteenth century but gradually died out over the next 300 years. Although they varied according to location, all were derived from Kawi, hence arrived from Java, Sumatra or possibly Champa.

The spread and usage of Kawi-derived scripts across Nusantaria is one of the lesser-known facts of the era before Islam and European dominance brought about the supremacy of Arabic then Roman scripts. The diversity of Kawi-derived scripts was such that Bali and Madura scripts both differed from each other and from Javanese, even if largely stylistically, and Sunda had its own script. So too did the Minangkabau of Sumatra and the Bataks, the latter writing on bark rolls. Makassar and the Bugis also had their own [Lontara], as did Palawan, whose Tagbanwa script resembled Tagalog Baybayin, and Mindoro, whose related script was known as Mangyan [or Buhid, or Hanunoo]. There is debate over whether Baybayin was the result of Bugis influence – with which its script shares some unique features – or from Sumatra or elsewhere. But the essential point is that basic literacy in a local script was common throughout the archipelago.

Alas:
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Taleen Mardirossian’s The Mother Tongue of All Secrets (The Sunday Long Read, September 12, 2026) is well worth your while; I’ll post a few excerpts so you can see why I wanted to share it:

In the last months of her life, my grandmother started mentioning an unfamiliar name: Tony. At first, the name appeared in brief inquiries, like I wonder how Tony is or I wonder where Tony is. I didn’t think much of it. She was in the late stages of Alzheimer’s, and names had been slipping off her tongue for quite some time. […]

My grandmother was a talkative woman in all four of the languages she spoke, but she had never told me anything about anyone named Tony. Who was he? And how could I unravel a secret hidden in a name that my grandmother denied recognizing but couldn’t stop saying? I didn’t know where to start. […]

My grandmother’s parents were Armenian Genocide survivors who were born in Kilis, a province in the Ottoman Empire in what is now Turkey, where many Armenians didn’t speak Armenian out of fear of discrimination and violence. When the massacres against Armenians began in the early 1900s, her parents were young children. Her mother, Arshaluys, never forgot the murder of her own mother or how close she’d come to starving to death herself. Arshaluys survived and found refuge across the border in Azaz, Syria. There she met my great-grandfather, Setrak, a fellow Armenian refugee from Kilis, whose entire family had also been among the million Armenians killed across the empire. Like her, he didn’t speak Armenian. He was a baker, which meant something to her: their children would never starve like she had.

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Two rural words, one common and one not, both with interesting etymologies I hadn’t known.

1) brock ‘(male) badger’:

From Middle English brok, from Old English broc (“badger”), related to Danish brok (“badger”); both probably originally from a Celtic source akin to Irish broc, Welsh broch, Cornish brogh and thus ultimately from Proto-Celtic *brokkos.

Wiktionary says it’s a male badger, but the OED (entry from 1888) doesn’t limit it by sex; to quote its definition: “A badger: a name, in later times, associated especially with the epithet stinking.” Poor creature!

2) barn; OED (entry 1885):

Old English bęre-ern lit. ‘barley-place,’ < bęre barley + ærn, ern, place, closet, storeroom; reduced already in Old English to bęrern, bęren, bęrn, whence Middle English bern, modern barn.

Simple but surprising!

The Oxford Traherne reports on their new digital collator:

The Oxford Traherne in collaboration with the Visual Geometry Group, University of Oxford, has developed a new digital collator designed for the needs of textual scholars and scholarly editors. A major new version (3.0) has been released in September 2026. […] Collation is the process of comparing different copies of the same text in order to identify variants between them, and is a crucial part of scholarly editing, both for establishing an accurate text and for understanding the history of the printing process. This has often been done in the past using an optical collator, typically consisting of a pair of plane mirrors which can be manually adjusted so that images of two different copies are quasi-superimposed by the brain, allowing differences between them to stand out. While this method has achieved good results, it is both time-consuming and tiring to the user.

[The Traherne Digital Collator] is easier to use than existing methods of optical collation, enables faster and more detailed textual comparison, and makes it possible to analyse the printed text in ways not previously possible. It has transformed the scholarly editing process, and become a standard research tool, used by major editorial projects across the world. The software employs computer vision technology to automatically resize and overlay pages of books and other printed matter, correcting for differences in scale, perspective and page curvature. It can offer a choice of several different visualizations of the variants, including transparent overlay, two-colour channels, and a toggle.

Collation should not be divorced from examination of the original volume, and we have therefore also designed associated image capture equipment. This enables the Traherne Digital Collator to be used either in libraries by displaying live images of the physical volume on a laptop for comparison with another image set, or remotely using two or more image sets. […] It is freely available to colleagues from other scholarly editing projects, and this wider network of scholars have contributed to its development with their feedback. In September 2026, we released version 3.0 of the collator which uses the familiar user interface with some improvements, and which runs directly in a browser with no installation required.

A demonstration of the software, discussion of how it is used by editors, and examples of some of the discoveries which it has enabled, can be found here, in a recording of a seminar given by Dr Austen Saunders and Professor Rob Whalen to the Traherne Online Research Network. For an account of a major scholarly project’s experience of using the Traherne Digital Collator, see the blog post by Harriet Phillips of The Complete Works of Sir Thomas Browne.

That last link is very interesting in its own right; here’s a sample:
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The tale of classicist Erich Segal’s popular rise and professional fall in relation to the wild success of Love Story was very well known back in the day, half a century ago, but I suspect it’s been forgotten by now; at any rate, it’s well told by Beth Blum in the Chronicle (archived):

Love Story presents the unusual case of a work written first as a screenplay and only later as a novel. Paramount Pictures asked its author, Erich Segal, to produce a paperback to be released on Valentine’s Day 1970, to help preview and promote the film before its Christmas debut. The son of a respected Brooklyn rabbi, Segal went to college at Harvard, where he studied classics, graduating as class poet and class orator in 1958. […]

His sophomoric dream became his professorial nightmare. Love Story is not only about doomed romance. It is also about the university, a setting with which Segal was preoccupied — even enamored — throughout his rocky academic life. Segal’s literary oeuvre presents a fascinating, panoramic depiction of the university lifeworld: its politics, norms, and ethics, its experience from student, faculty, and administrative perspectives. His various campus fictions drew on his experiences as a rising scholar of the classics at Harvard in the ’50s and then as an assistant professor at Yale in the ’60s, where he became famous for his exuberant lectures on Greek tragedy.

On the heels of Love Story’s overnight cinematic and paperback success, Segal’s Yale tenure case was sensationally denied (the news was announced in The New York Times). Segal came to deeply regret his pursuit of paperback success, even as he relished the unexpected impact Love Story had on American readers. His tortured academic love story offers a historical window onto the ongoing tension between academic and popular taste. […]

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