Arigato

Today's linguistic puzzle: why does the Japanese for "thank you" – arigato – literally mean "there is difficulty"? I always thought it was because having to be grateful to another person was seen as a hard thing, or at least a hard thing to acknowledge. Like, "Hard as it is for me to say it, I owe you big time for that."

But I just discovered that this is not the usual interpretation.

Most linguists say it comes from Buddhist practice. One of the goals of Japanese Buddhism is to cultivate an attitude of gratitude toward the world, which is sometimes phrased as believing that all of life is miraculous. Of course, it is difficult to maintain this sense of gratitude. Other people are a particular source of difficulty, always interfering with your desire to be positive about the universe. Hence, arigato. Kaki Okamura:

Arigato means that good things in life are never obvious or a natural human right, but to be able to say thank you is actually a miracle in life. There are so many things that can come in the way of something not happening or manifesting — wrong place, wrong time, wrong person, wrong words — and consequently everything good that happens to us is a combination of many miracles. The ability to say thank you is in fact, something difficult to have.

Victor Mair adds: 

Saying "thank you" in this spirit is the linguistic equivalent of the Japanese aesthetic concepts of wabi-sabi 侘寂, "a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection".

Image is Reiji Hiramatsu, Prayer of Japan/Cherry Blossoms (2012)

What is the Soul?

The Babylonian had some idea of the soul or EKIMMU, literally "the thing which is snatched away."

– R. Campbell Thompson, The devils and evil spirits of Babylonia : being Babylonian and Assyrian incantations against the demons, ghouls, vampires, hobgoblins, ghosts, and kindred evil spirits, which attack mankind. London, 1903.

God Cancels the Rebel Angels

John Milton narrates the battle in which the loyal angels drive Satan's rebels from heaven:

I might relate of thousands, and their names
Eternize here on earth; but those elect
Angels, contented with their fame in Heaven,
Seek not the praise of men: The other sort,
In might though wonderous and in acts of war,
Nor of renown less eager, yet by doom
Cancelled from Heaven and sacred memory,
Nameless in dark oblivion let them dwell.

Paradise Lost, Book VI

Some Choice Words from Grose‘s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1788)

 

A Word for Our Time

Americans used to have a word for what happened to people who spent long Dakota winters stranded in small cabins miles from the nearest neighbor: they went "shackwacky."

How do you say "thingamajig" in. . . .?

Spanish: Chingadera
Danish: Himstergims
Japanese: Naninani
Turkish: Zamazingo
German: Dingsbums
Dutch: Huppeldepup

Source

Tyler Cowen Interviews John McWhorter

John McWhorter is a linguist and African American who briefly became a famous culture warrior for attacking the whole notion of Ebonics. When he sat down to be interviewed by Tyler Cowen, he obviously expected to be asked about his views on race politics, because that's all interviewers ever ask him about. But Tyler Cowen is a different sort of interviewer, interested in a world of things outside politics. The interview starts like this:

TYLER COWEN: Let’s start with linguistics. I’ve read that the Estonian language has 14 case endings, eight dialects, 117 subdialects, and the core population of speakers is only a bit over a million. Now, why is Estonian so complicated?

JOHN MCWHORTER: What a wonderful opening question.

[laughter]

MCWHORTER: It’s 16 cases actually, and the reason is that Estonia is like the size of New Jersey. It might be the size of Trenton. So, it’s a very small group of people, and very few people have ever had any reason — I can’t believe this is the first question — to learn Estonian as a second language. If you try, you fail.

As a result, it gets more and more complicated, more and more ingrown. Whereas, Finnish, which is a sister language to Estonian, is actually kind of easy. It’s easy Estonian. So Estonian is a small language that’s almost never learned by adults and therefore almost never screwed up. That is why it is so complicated.

They go on to discuss language in a wonderful way for twenty minutes or so, then move on to music, and only get to politics toward the end, and that part is also a lot more interesting than most American conversations about race politics. Highly recommended.

One more  bit:

COWEN: What is interesting about the language Saramaccan?

MCWHORTER: [laughs] This is delightful.

[laughter]

MCWHORTER: The sorts of things I’m usually asked — this is great. Saramaccan — okay, here’s what happens. Let’s say that you’re in South America. You’re up on the northern edge, and it’s 1660 something, and it is an English plantation colony. You bring in Africans to work there. They speak two languages. For whatever it’s worth, they’re called Fongbe and Kikongo. Some others, but they don’t really play much of a part. So you have slaves speaking those.

The English leave the place, and the Dutch come in. There’s a trade, and so New Amsterdam becomes New York. Suriname goes from the English to the Dutch. We here don’t care about the Suriname part, but that was the trade. Now the Dutch are running it. You’ve got English and Dutch. Then some Portuguese-Jewish slave owners come in from Brazil. That’s this whole other story of wandering Jews. They probably bring slaves with them.

So 350 years later, what is spoken by the slaves there who were lucky enough to escape into the rainforest and were never caught? That is what Saramaccan is. So they have their own language, and it’s been studied by many people, I am one of a great many. But it’s fascinating because it’s a mixture of all these languages. Then it’s got other stuff that it does all by itself and it’s tonal, so it’s absolutely fascinating.

Bootstraps

Nicholas Kristoff:

Back in the 1800s, the expression “pull oneself up by the bootstraps” meant the opposite of what it does now. Then it was used mockingly to describe an impossible act.

An 1834 publication ridiculed a claim to have built a perpetual-motion machine by saying that the inventor might next heave himself over a river “by the straps of his boots.” An 1840 citation scoffs that something is “as gross an absurdity as he who attempts to raise himself over a fence by the straps of his boots.”

Which got me thinking: if that's true, when did it become a metaphor for self help?

Fortunately other people have researched the question, giving us a good start. The long list of nineteenth-century uses presented here shows that the phrase was pretty quickly applied to social or moral uplift, but usually in a mocking way:

Madison City Express (Wisc.), 2 Feb.1843: His Excellency is certainly attempting to lift himself up by his boot-straps, or, what is much better, is "sitting in a wheel-barrow to wheel himself."

Southport Telegraph (Wisc.) 14 Feb. 1843: The Racine Advocate, in speaking of the subject, significantly remarks that 'the Governor must be trying to pull himself up the boot-straps.'

New Englander and Yale Review 6 July 1848: We have no great objection if teachers' conventions and associations pass resolutions of self-commendation; though this process of acquiring "due dignity" reminds us of the experiment sometimes made by boys, untaught in the natural laws of action and reaction, who try to elevate themselves to a more conspicuous position by means of their boot straps. 

This started to change in the 1920s:

The Oxford English Dictionary cites James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) as its earliest example of the phrase, and it appears to illustrate the contemporary meaning: “There were ... others who had forced their way to the top from the lowest rung by the aid of their bootstraps.”

A 1931 volume of Pattern Makers’ Journal notes, “Pull yourself up by the bootstraps; shake off your cloak of indifference and voluntary serfdom.” And in 1927, Britain’s Sunday Times published an editorial ridiculing the headstrong American belief in self-improvement as exemplified by “the American bootstrapper.”

I thought this would trace back to the British or American self-help movement, Samuel Smiles and all, but I can't find any evidence of that. The references above are the only ones I found in an hour of searching that date to before the 1950s. So I think the prominence of the phrase in a positive sense must date to the new conservatism of the Nixon/Reagan period, not so old at all.

Incidentally Robert Heinlein wrote a short story in 1941 titled "By His Bootstraps," but it concerns time travel and the resulting paradoxes, so I think we should make this another ironic use; it's easy enough to bootstrap yourself to success if you have a time machine.

Say "Uncle"

A gentleman was boasting that his parrot would repeat anything he told him. For example, he told him several times, before some friends, to say “Uncle,” but the parrot would not repeat it. In anger he seized the bird, and half-twisting his neck, said: “Say ‘uncle,’ you beggar!” and threw him into the fowl pen, in which he had ten prize fowls. Shortly afterward, thinking he had killed the parrot, he went to the pen. To his surprise he found nine of the fowls dead on the floor with their necks wrung, and the parrot standing on the tenth twisting his neck and screaming: “Say ‘uncle,’ you beggar! say uncle.”

—Iowa Citizen of 9 October 1891

This may bey the earliest recorded appearance of the phrase, “say uncle.” But that does not mean it is the origin of the phrase. To me the story sounds like a joke explanation of an idiom already in circulation, and some etymologists think the phrase comes from the Irish “anacol,” which can mean “mercy.” Still, it's a great story.

If

--The Roycroft Dictionary Concocted by Ali Baba and the Bunch on Rainy Days by Elbert Hubbard, 1914

What do Adjectives Mean?

The results of a YouGov poll in which respondents attached numerical values to terms of abuse and praise.

Reading the Riot Act

The Riot Act of 1714 provided that if English authorities encountered any group of more than 12 persons they thought looked like a riot they could order those people to disperse, and anyone who did not could be charged with a felony.

The actual proclamation they read out went like this:

Our Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the Act made in the first year of King George the First for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies.

GOD SAVE THE KING.

That was called "reading the riot act."

Words for Things Best Unmentioned

Linguists have a term, "taboo deformation," for words people use instead of the proper one when the thing to be named is best left unmentioned:

A great example of this is the word “bear,” in English. “Bear” is not the true name of the bear. That name, which I am free to use because the only bear near where I live is the decidedly unthreatening American black bear, is h₂ŕ̥tḱos. Or at least it was in Proto-Indo-European, the hypothesized base language for languages including English, French, Hindi, and Russian. The bear, along with the wolf, was the scariest and most dangerous animal in the northern areas where Proto-Indo-European was spoken. “Because bears were so bad, you didn’t want to talk about them directly, so you referred to them in an oblique way,” says linguist Andrew Byrd.

H₂ŕ̥tḱos, which is pronounced with a lot of guttural noises, became the basis for a bunch of other words. “Arctic,” for example, which probably means something like “land of the bear.” Same with Arthur, a name probably constructed to snag some of the bear’s power. But in Germanic languages, the bear is called…bear. Or something similar. (In German, it’s Bär.) The predominant theory is that this name came from a simple description, meaning “the brown one.”

In Slavic languages, the descriptions got even better: the Russian word for bear is medved, which means “honey eater.” These names weren’t done to be cute; they were created out of fear.

It’s worth noting that not everyone was that scared of bears. Some languages allowed the true name of the bear to evolve in a normal fashion with minor changes; the Greek name was arktos, the Latin ursos. Still the true name. Today in French, it’s ours, and in Spanish it’s oso. The bear simply wasn’t that big of a threat in the warmer climes of Romance language speakers, so they didn’t bother being scared of its true name.

Gender Neutral French

Surely we all knew this was coming:

“My homeland is the French language,” author Albert Camus once wrote—and many French people would agree. That’s why any attempt at changing the language is often met with suspicion. So the uproar was almost instantaneous when, this fall, the first-ever school textbook promoting a gender-neutral version of French was released. . . .

In French, pronouns, nouns, and adjectives reflect the gender of the object to which they refer. So, le policier is a policeman; la policière is a policewoman. The language has no neutral grammatical gender. And there are many nouns (including those referring to professions) that don’t have feminine versions. So, a male minister is le ministre and a female minister is la ministre. What’s more, French students are taught that “the masculine dominates over the feminine,” meaning that if you have a room full of ten women and just one man, you have to describe the whole group in the masculine.

Feminists who believe that these features of the French language put women at a disadvantage disagree about how best to remedy them. Most recommend creating feminine versions of all professional nouns and/or using neutral nouns whenever possible. Many also recommend a grammatical tool that consists of adding a “median-period” at the end of masculine nouns, followed by the feminine ending, thus indicating both gendered versions of every noun (like musicien·ne·s, which would read as “male musicians and female musicians”). Some have even recommended creating a gender-neutral pronoun (the equivalent of how “they” is sometimes used in English, or “hen” in Sweden). These and other recommendations have collectively become known as “inclusive writing.”

I don't have strong feelings about this sort of thing. Languages are always changing to reflect changing social realities, so you won't find me dying on a cross of traditional grammar. My only suggestion would be that any changes made in the cause of inclusiveness make the language simpler, not more complex. For example, there was an American a few years ago who changed her name from Cooperman to Cooperperson; why not just Cooper? Instead of complex mixes of endings, I support the adoption of single, gender-neutral words, like just dropping the word "actress" altogether and calling all performers "actors," as many women in movies already do.

The First Responsibility of Liberalism

To preserve the meaning of words is the first responsibility of liberalism.

–Daniel Patrick Moynihan

A Book Review

This short book, revised, improved, and expanded, is so good it is wasted on almost all of you.

–Tyler Cowen on Arnold Kling, The Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across the Political Divides.

Global Culture Watch: "White Left" as a Chinese Insult

Chenchen Zhang on Open Democracy:

If you look at any thread about Trump, Islam or immigration on a Chinese social media platform these days, it’s impossible to avoid encountering the term baizuo (白左), or literally, the ‘white left’. It first emerged about two years ago, and yet has quickly become one of the most popular derogatory descriptions for Chinese netizens to discredit their opponents in online debates.

So what does ‘white left’ mean in the Chinese context, and what’s behind the rise of its (negative) popularity? It might not be an easy task to define the term, for as a social media buzzword and very often an instrument for ad hominem attack, it could mean different things for different people. A thread on “why well-educated elites in the west are seen as naïve “white left” in China” on Zhihu, a question-and-answer website said to have a high percentage of active users who are professionals and intellectuals, might serve as a starting point.

The question has received more than 400 answers from Zhihu users, which include some of the most representative perceptions of the 'white left'. Although the emphasis varies, baizuo is used generally to describe those who “only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” and “have no sense of real problems in the real world”; they are hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority”; they are “obsessed with political correctness” to the extent that they “tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism”; they believe in the welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”; they are the “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours”. . . .

In an academic-style essay that was retweeted more than 7000 times on Weibo, a user named ‘fantasy lover Mr. Liu’ ‘reviewed’ European philosophy from Voltaire and Marx to Adorno and Foucault, concluding that the ‘white left’ as a 'spiritual epidemic' is on its way to self-destruction. He then stated that Trump’s win was only “a small victory over this spiritual epidemic of humankind”, but “western civilization is still far from its self-redemption”. 

The exact parallel with certain voices in America is uncanny. I suppose part of this could be the translation, which was made by an author trying to draw the parallel, but just the phrase ‘white left’ seems very telling to me. I have read that some Russians use ‘LGBT’ in the same way, as a general accusation of naïve, arrogant western decadence.

I wonder to what extent this rhetoric really points to similar issues across these diverse nations. I suppose gay rights is a global matter, but does that necessarily line up with any other big political question? Could it really be true that the whole world is experiencing a conflict between, on the one hand, authoritarian, socially conservative nationalism, and on the other the advocates of an open, democratic society with a strong focus on individual liberty? Are these at base just two personality types acting out their ancient opposition according to contemporary rules? I think that for the U.S. that description obscures as much as it reveals, so I tend to think that the same must apply even more so to other countries I know less well. But I wonder.

Words and Cultures

They say that the more a society cares about something; the more words it will have for that thing. Thus the Eskimos have 50 different words for snow – which my Googling shows may in fact be true.

And what does English have a lot of words for? According to the BBC, slang English has 3,000 words for being drunk.

The only things for which we have more slang terms are sex and money.

The Denunciation

In 1900, Congressman Edmund Driggs was part of the committee that investigated a hazing scandal at West Point in which a cadet died. He called the incident

atrocious, base, detestable, disgraceful, dishonourable, disreputable, heinous, ignominious, ill-famed, nefarious, odious, outrageous, perfidious, scandalous, shameful, shameless, villainous, and wicked.

How Long Have People been Dissing Each Other?

Using searchable databases of old newspapers, researchers associated with the Green’s Dictionary of Slang have shown that many slang terms are older than we thought:

An extraordinary case involves the word “dis” in the sense of an insult: “He dissed me!” Green had assumed the term originated among African-Americans in the 1980s. However, that theory was disproved by an example from 1905 in Australia of all places. Green located this surprising use in the Perth Sun Times: “When a journalistic rival tries to ‘dis’ you / And to prejudice you in the public’s eyes.” Rather than suggesting a hidden Australian influence on African-American vernacular, this finding is more of a testament to the latent potential of “dis” to detach from words such as “disparage” and “disrespect.”