Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Trebuchet

Trebuchet: A stone-throwing engine of war. The word was imported from French into English in the 13th century, when the device was invented; the French verb trabucher meant “to overturn, overthrow,” from tra- (from Latin trans-, here expressing “displacement”) and Old French buc “trunk, bulk.” (Source: Online Etymology Dictionary.)

Drawing from Real World Physics Problems, which notes that “the payload could be thrown a far distance and do considerable damage, either by smashing down walls or striking the enemy while inside their stronghold.”

Trebuchets have been in the news lately because of their role in the antigovernment protests that have been taking place in Ukraine since November 2013. “The Battle for Ukraine Is Being Fought Using Ancient Military Tactics” read a January 22 headline in Business Insider. While protesters favoring European integration built a trebuchet in the capital city of Kiev (or Kyiv), government forces adopted an ancient Roman shielding tactic called the testudo, Latin for “tortoise.”

Photo: Reuters/Maks Levin. More photos at The Atlantic and Slate.

 

What’s the difference, you ask, between a trebuchet and a catapult? I looked it up for you. According to Jarod’s Forge, a history blog written by museum curator Jarod Kearny, a catapult is “any device that throws an object, although it commonly refers to the medieval siege weapon”; a catapult uses tension for its throwing force. Trebuchets “are a TYPE of catapult, using gravity (with a counterweight) or traction (men pulling down), to propel the arm and often employing a sling at the end of the arm for greater distance.”

The distinction is sometimes overlooked in coverage of the Ukrainian conflict. RT.com (formerly known as Russia Today) called the machine a catapult:

Puzzled protesters and journalists watched Monday as a group of masked people studied some plans, standing next to a pile of long wooden poles they had carried to a central Kiev area earlier.
It soon turned out the protesters were building a catapult – or, as some argued, a trebuchet.

And there was this:

RT @Walldo: naturally the homemade catapult used by protesters in Ukraine has its own Twitter account -> @ukr_catapult

— Robert Loerzel (@robertloerzel) January 23, 2014

Other words that frequently appear in coverage of the protests include Maidan (square, plaza), a word with cognates in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu; Berkut (“golden eagle”), the riot police; and Moskal (a derogatory term for a resident of Moscow). For more, see this Radio Free Europe glossary.

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Previous Fritinancy coverage of antique weapons: Bayonets.

Socialist surrealism

In celebration of New York Fashion Week, which began yesterday, I present an article of clothing whose name expresses in a single word the blithe mishegas of la mode: the Bolshivek Dress.

It’s sold by All Saints, which spells it exactly that way and describes it thus:

The Bolshivek Dress features folded sequins in antique and matt black tones to create a lux 3D textured finish. Scattered beads in similar tones have been added to give additional depth and detailing. The Bolshivek Dress uses a fabric blend that contours the body to create a flattering silhouette.

Rise up, comrades, and recite the list of grievances!

1. It’s “Bolshevik,” not “Bolshivek.” The word means “majority” in Russian.

2. The Bolsheviks were a Marxist Communist party founded in 1903 by Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov in opposition to the czarist regime.

3. In the West during the Cold War, to label someone a Bolshevik was to disparage the person’s patriotism, loyalty, and personal hygiene.

4. Nothing about this dress suggests—to quote The Internationale—“workers  of all nations” or “oppressed of the earth.” In fact, the heavy ornamentation and slinky shape—not to mention the $250 price tag—make it seem suspiciously bourgeois if not shockingly aristocratic.

As for the descriptive copy: “matte” and “luxe,” dear writer, not “matt” and “lux.”

As George Santayana surely would have said, “Those who misappropriate history are condemned to look like ill-informed, trend-besotted twits.”

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For extra credit, read “Comradely Capitalists,” my December 2011 post about nouveau commie chic; and my What Were Those Fashionistas Thinking? posts about the Cohen shirt, the Barren skirt, Crazy B#@!h jeans, and oddly named shoes.

 

Word of the Week: Hooliganism

Hooliganism: Rioting; bullying; rough horseplay; “the characteristic behavior of hooligans” (OED). (For an alternate meaning, keep reading.) Hooliganism first appeared in print in 1898, in a police report in the Daily Telegraph (UK); hooligan also first appeared in print in 1898 in the UK, in the Daily News. When Arthur Conan Doyle used “hooliganism” in his 1904 Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Six Napoleons, he capitalized it.

Officially, the origins of hooligan and hooliganism are “uncertain.” There are theories, though, the most plausible being the one summarized in the Online Etymology Dictionary: “almost certainly from the variant form of the Irish surname Houlihan, which figured as a characteristic comic Irish name in music hall songs and newspapers of the 1880s and ’90s.”

In the English-speaking world, hooliganism is mostly seen in the UK and Commonwealth countries, where it’s frequently modified by football (i.e., soccer). “Football hooliganism” is associated with unruly, brawling, destructive behavior. But in the early 20th century hooligan and hooliganism found an adopted home—and a different interpretation—in czarist Russia and, later, the Soviet Union. The words had pointedly political meanings: In the Soviet justice system “khuliganism” was a catch-all description for offensive behavior. The words stayed in the Russian lexicon and penal code after the fall of the Soviet regime, and remain there today.

Which explains news reports like this one from CNN, published on Saturday:

Three members of Russian female punk rock band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in prison Friday after they were found guilty of hooliganism for performing a song critical of President Vladimir Putin in a church.

Malynne Stevenson, an associate professor of Slavic Studies at the University of Chicago, provided some context for this “hooliganism” in an interview published August 17 in Global Post:

In the Soviet Union and Russia today, hooliganism is legally defined this way: “In the Soviet Union ‘hooliganism’ (хулиганство, khuliganstvo) was made a criminal offence under the penal codes of the Soviet republics. In the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR), article 216 of the penal code defined ‘hooliganism’ as ‘any deliberate behavior that violates public order and expresses explicit disrespect toward society.’ This article was used to cover a wide range of behaviors such as vagrancy, stalking, foul language, etc.” …

Lenin once declared that “hooligans” should be shot on the spot, along with murderers and tsarists.

“Hooliganism” is also used as a criminal charge in China and Iran, Stevenson said.

According to reporter Ben Johnson, who wrote about Pussy Riot earlier this month for Slate, most Russian antigovernment protestors aren’t charged with hooliganism but rather with “administrative violations.” The Pussy Riot case was different, Johnson says:

Members of Pussy Riot opened themselves up to the more severe accusation of hooliganism by choosing a church as their venue, and performing in front of the iconostasis (part of the church’s sanctuary, where women and other regular parishioners are not permitted), a choice that many members of the country’s largest religious group, Russian Orthodox Christians, have found offensive. Hooliganism charges can also be more serious if committed in a group, which in Russia’s court system is defined as two people or more.

“There’s only one punishment for hooliganism,” Johnson writes, “and that is ‘deprivation of freedom,’ which usually means imprisonment.”

Details about the Pussy Riot sentence, plus video and international reactions, here. For more about the Pussy Riot name and how it’s rendered in Russian, see Ben Zimmer’s post on Language Log. For more about the English-language media have handled Pussy—e.g., “a feminist punk group with a profane name”—see Arnold Zwicky’s “The Pussy Patrol.”

Word of the Week: Office Plankton

Office plankton: Low-level office clerks; drones. English translation of a Russian slang term.

Young, formerly apolitical Russian office workers have been galvanized by protests against the Putin government, the New York Times reported on December 24:

On Friday afternoon, Denis Terekhov gathered together his employees for an impromptu staff meeting.

They were workaholics in their 20s — “office plankton,” as they are sometimes called here — punchy from an apocalypse-themed office party, some headed for winter vacations in Egypt and Turkey. But Mr. Terekhov had another order of business. Watch yourself, he told them, if you choose to attend Saturday’s antigovernment protest.…

A mystery has been unfolding here over the past month, and office plankton are in the middle of it. A critical mass of young Russians decided this month that they had the power to alter the course of political events. They organized outside the channels of mainstream politics and took the country’s leadership by surprise, as other crowds have done this year in Israel, India, Spain and the United States.

Plankton are, of course, small or microscopic organisms that drift with the ocean currents—the bottom of the pelagic food chain. The plankton name was bestowed on these organisms in 1887 by a German physiologist, Viktor Hensen, who took it from a Greek word (planktos) that means “wandering, drifting.” (Planet, which means “wanderer,” is related etymologically.) Plankton is the plural form; the singular is plankter. Neither word is related to the 2011 Internet fad planking.

Office Plankton is the title of a series of short animated features originally posted on a Russian website, Toonguru, and uploaded to YouTube. The first episodes appear to have been posted in late 2008. The cartoons feature a chaotic office, a clueless boss, and large helpings of sexism and scatology.

 

Hanging Noodles for the Holidays

I've enjoyed getting to know Jag Bhalla on Twitter, where he's always quick with a punny quip. Lately I've been laughing aloud at his little gem of a book, I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears, a collection of global idioms. (The title is the Russian equivalent of "I'm not pulling your leg.") If you're still shopping for the word-lovers on your holiday list, I recommend Hanging Noodles in multiples.

The book, Bhalla explains in the introduction, "is designed to fit into our attention-deficit-disorder-ly lifestyles." You can flip to the chapter that most interests you (animals, countries, the language of love) or linger over the charming and informative chapter intros. And by all means enjoy the delightful illustrations by New Yorker cartoonist Julia Suits.

In the chapter on numerical idioms, I discovered "Where six can eat, seven can eat" ("there's always room for one more"; Spain) and "fifty-six knives" (a dangerous woman; Hindi). German is full of scatalogical expressions like "ink pisser" (an office worker), and the Japanese have countless idioms with "belly": "to cure one's belly" means "to get revenge"; "to see through one's belly" means "to read someone's mind." 

The subsection on alcohol is especially instructive. To be "good with the left hand" is Japanese for "to be a drinker"; Argentinians say a person is "breast-fed" if he's drunk. In Spain,"drowning the mouse" is the equivalent of partaking of "the hair of the dog"—the drink that supposedly staves off a hangover.

And leave it to the French to come up with "to fart higher than your butt." It means "to be snooty, posh, to put on airs."

When I finally move Hanging Noodles from nightstand to shelf, it will occupy a place of honor next to Howard Rheingold's They Have a Word for It and Adam Jacot de Boinod's The Meaning of Tingo. Highly recommended!

 

 

Word of the Week: Soramimi

Soramimi: Misunderstanding song lyrics in one language for different words in a second language. The word is Japanese; the literal meaning is "empty ear."

I encountered soramimi in "Exploring Fact City," a March 29 New York Times Week in Review article about Wikipedia:

[A]t the bottom of most articles, there are the categories — impromptu neighborhoods, or perhaps civic organizations, that bind together the virtual encyclopedia. There are unsurprising ones, like “Jewish comedians,” found at the bottom of the Jerry Seinfeld article; and then there are the quirky kind, like this one I stumbled upon: “Literary devices playing with meaning.” It was in the latter category that I came upon the article “Mondegreen,” which describes the phenomenon of mishearing song lyrics, which led to “Soramimi,” a Japanese term for hearing lyrics in foreign languages as Japanese phrases, which led to the discovery that the heavy metal band Metallica has a line in “Enter Sandman” that frequently is heard by Japanese as “Let’s go to Chiyoda Life Insurance.”

Mondegreens are monolingual; soramimi are bilingual.

The Wikipedia entry on soramimi includes many examples taken from the "Soramimi Hour," a long-running feature on the Japanese TV program "Tamori Club." It also lists some non-Japanese examples, including one that miraculously did not cause an international incident:

The Palestinian patriotic song "Blādi, blādi" (بلادي بلادي "Motherland, Motherland") was intentionally "misheard" into Russian (as blyadi, blyadi = "whores, whores") and uploaded to YouTube with Russian subtitles. The resulting video became an instant hit on Russian-language websites and blogs with more than 2 million views, and a number of phrases from the Russian version (especially "No money, long bumblebee") became instant catchphrases.*

Can anyone suggest any examples of non-English song lyrics mis-heard as English?

UPDATE: Mark Liberman, of Language Log, discusses yaourter, a French verb "for the way people attempt to speak or sing in a foreign language that they don’t know very well." The literal translation of yaourter is "to yogurt." Be sure to read the comments on the post, too.

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* I'm considering adopting "No money, long bumblebee" as the official catchphrase of Fritinancy.

Word of the Week: Peaknik

Peaknik: A person who believes that the world's oil reserves will soon peak and that subsequent shortages will devastate civilization. (Word Spy.)

Although peaknik originated with the concept of peak oil, its meaning has lately become more inclusive. In "The Dystopians," published in the Jan. 26, 2009, issue of the New Yorker (registration required), Ben McGrath provides a short list of peaknik theories:

The Malthusian movement has expanded with time into a kind of peaknik diaspora. Peak oil and peak carbon (i.e., global warning) are the heavies, with the most obviously compelling claims on our attention, and the greatest number of advocates; their relative standings swing in rough accordance with the price of gas and the latest hurricane news. Smaller contenders like peak fish and peak dirt have their devotees as well, and are in some ways more pleasing to contemplate, because they are based on the idea that the path to destruction begins not in the Earth's atmosphere or crust but at the surface, with salmon and topsoil mites. The bailouts in the wake of the subprime defaults, however, have arguably thrust a new concern to the front: peak dollars, or the point at which the system breaks down through the simple printing of paper money. (A corollary, peak debt, was coined in 2006 by a former Cisco employee named Jaswant Jain, who calls himself the Prophet of Doom and Gloom, and who first observed the deleterious effects of unrestrained borrowing an a eight-year-old in a village near the city of Jodhpur, where debt-ridden Brahmins appeared worse off than solvent untouchables.)

Peaknik's most obvious antecedent is peacenik, a semi-contemptuous term for a pacifist that dates back to the 1960s or earlier. The -nik suffix comes from a Russian word part meaning "to pertain to or be involved in"; it was familiar to non-Russian speakers from Sputnik, the Soviet satellite launched in October 1957.  (And to speakers of Yiddish and Yinglish from nudnik, "a pest," and nogoodnik, "a worthless person.") Six months after Sputnik ushered in the era of space exploration, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen coined beatnik to describe a member of the Beat generation.

Mark Liberman, writing in Language Log last October, discussed the linguistic construct "Peak X", taking as his jumping-off point the recent coinage "peak wingnut."

According to Word Spy, in the early 1990s a "Peaknik" was a fan of the David Lynch television series "Twin Peaks."

UPDATE for Bay Area readers: Peaknik Dmitry Orlov, who features prominently in Ben McGrath's New Yorker article, will be speaking at San Francisco's Fort Mason Friday, Feb. 13, at 7:30 p.m. The talk is sponsored by the Long Now Foundation; admission is free, but events tend to sell out. To guarantee a seat, buy a $10 ticket.

Word of the Week: Latke

Latke: A pancake, especially one made from potatoes and eaten during the eight-day Chanukah/Hanukkah holiday, which began last night. Latkes are fried in copious quantities of oil (traditionally olive oil) to commemorate the historic Chanukah miracle of a small amount of lamp oil lasting for eight days.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Phyllis Glazer explains that a latke "is not just a pancake made from potatoes, it's a potato pancake with a poor man's pedigree, a history, a tradition and a neshamah, a soul."

Latke is a Yiddish word, but Glazer discovered a complicated etymology:

I found that some sources claim it derives from the Old Russian oladka, and is a diminutive of olad'ya, from Greek eladia, the plural of eladion, which means "a little oily thing" and comes from elāi, which means "olive."

Maybe, maybe not. Webster's Third International Dictionary supports the "olive" etymology, but the Shorter OED gives a different source: Russian latka, "an earthenware vessel," and stops there, so I couldn't tell whether this latka is related to Old Russin oladka. Someone with the big OED, or an authoritative Yiddish dictionary, want to help me out?

Latkes don't have to be made from potatoes. Here's a recipe for latkes made with four to five cups of chopped olives.

Latkes are much more popular in the United States than in other Jewish communities. When I lived in Israel, I never saw latkes during Chanukah. Instead, people ate sufganiyot, plump and delicious jelly doughnuts. Deep-fried in oil, of course.

In related holiday-themed news, the Jamaican bobsled team (yes, the 2008 version of that Jamaican bobsled team) includes a man named Hanukkah Wallace.

Photo: Los Angeles Times.

WOTY Around the World

The United States isn't the only country that selects words of the year. Here's a roundup of some of the national words of the year selected so far:

Taiwan announced yesterday that its 2008 word of the year is luan, the Chinese character for "chaos." The word was chosen by popular vote; of the 61,624 people who voted, 7,936 chose luan. The WOTY contest was run by a private foundation and a newspaper, United Daily News, which offered a shortlist of 72 Chinese characters from which the public was invited to select one that summarized the situation in Taiwan this year.

Our next stop is the Netherlands, where we visit the colorful category of "There's a Word for THAT?" Swaffelen is the Dutch word of the year; according to a press release, it means "to swing one's penis, making it bump against something, in order to stimulate either oneself or someone else." The word "gained notoriety through a video posted on YouTube, in which a Dutch student got arrested for 'swaffling' against the Taj Mahal in India." (Yes, it's apparently a loan word from English, presumably British English. I'd never heard of it.) As for why and how the word was selected:

Voters did not have to justify their choice, so it remains a mystery why the Dutch chose this word. Numbers two and three were "wiiën" (playing on a Wii game console) and "bankendomino" (banks falling over like dominoes). The elections are a joint initiative of Van Dale, De Pers daily newspaper and the Netherlands language society Onze Taal.

(Hat tip: Wishydig.)

Perhaps using a variant of the Orthodox calendar, Russia announced its 2007 word of the year— glamour— in August 2008. It was the first time a word of the year had been chosen in Russia; the selection is, of course, another loan word. According to Moscow News, "glamour" reflects "a dominant trend of the domestic cultural literature." (Hat tip: The Web of Language.)

In Japan, the publishing company Jiyu Kokuminsha selected the 10 trendiest Japanese words and phrases of 2008. Number one: "gu~!", a bastardization of English "good" and "the signature line of comedienne Edo Harumi, which she usually delivers while giving an exaggerated thumbs-up gesture." Read about last year's Japanese buzzwords here.

The Japanese character of the year is "hen," which translates to change.  Last Sunday, in an annual ceremony at Kiyomizu temple, chief monk Seihan Mori brushstroked the character before an audience of tourists.

The German publishing house Langenscheidt, which probably does not mean what you think it means, has announced its top 15 "youth words" of the year. Topping the list is the text-message-unfriendly Gammelfleischparty, which translates to "spoiled meat party." The spoiled meat, in this context, is "people over 30." Ergo: a Gammelfleischparty is any party attended by old folks. Thanks a bunch, kids. Now get off my lawn! (My personal favorite on the list is unter-hopft, or "underhopped": the condition of not having drunk enough beer.) (Hat tip: The Virtual Linguist.)

Still unannounced: the (grown-up) German word of the year. Last year's pick was Klimakatastrophe, or "climate catastrophe."Used in a sentence: "Al Gore invited me to a Gammelfleischparty for the Klimakatastrophe, but I said no thanks, dude. All those geezers at Al's parties are totally unter-hopft and boring."

How Wasilla, Alaska, Got Its Name

Two theories:

1. The town is named after Dena'ina Athabascan Indian Chief Wasilla. The meaning of the word “Wasilla” itself isn't certain; it may mean "breath of air" in the Dena'ina Athabascan language.

2. An alternative theory: It’s a variant of "Wassily," the Russian form of “William.” (Alaska was part of the Russian Empire until 1867, when the United States government purchased it for 2 cents per acre. The transaction was derided as "Seward's Folly," after the U.S. Secretary of State who negotiated the deal.)

Other facts about the little town on the tundra, home to Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and the First Dude, at the official Wasilla website.