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Trevor Joyce, the generous and inquisitive Irish poet so frequently seen around here as a source of Hattic items, writes as follows: “I’m sifting through some files of research on family history, and came across this, which drew my attention for its boozy air. The anecdote is obviously the thing, but when I went googling, expecting to find very many instances, I found myself flooded with BMX bikes, but divil the cocktail of this name.” Here’s the thing itself, quoted from the Boston Globe of June 11, 1893:

UNDER THE ROSE

Considerable curiosity has been aroused as to the exact nature of the beverage alluded to in Dr Frank Harris’ editorial of last Sunday, to wit, the “Frogtown racer.” None of the wine clerks seems to be familiar with it. Happening to meet the doctor, I ventured to ask him for the recipe. He said that the beverage was invented, or at least exploited, by that bohemian of medicine and literature, the late Dr Robert Dwyer Joyce, who consumed. according to his own account, two gallons of the “racer” while endeavoring to get Deirdre down from the tower into which he had put her in the course of his construction of the poem of that name.

The recipe indicates that the Frogtown racer is a very light whisky punch made with soda, into which a teaspoonful of maraschino is put and on top of this is carefully laid a “lemon float,” that is, a thin section of the fruit cut at the middle of the lemon. On this is gently poured a little port wine.

The effect is to make a drink of delicate flavor and presenting alternate zones of amber, yellow and purple whose relations, owing to the difference in specific gravity, are maintained during its consumption. This drink was a favorite not only of the doctor, but of the late Edgar Parker and many others of the Papyrus at a time when the club coat was a tradition.

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Per Vjosa Isai, reporting from Toronto for the NY Times, “Canadian Linguists Rise Up Against the Letter ‘S’” (archived):

Canadian linguists and editors are not pleased.

Words using British spellings have suddenly appeared in documents published by the Canadian government.

Gone was the “ize” construction standard in Canadian English in favor of the “ise” spelling used in British English. So “emphasize” became “emphasise,” and “trade liberalization” became “trade liberalisation.”

“At first we thought it was an aberration,” said John Chew, the editor of a forthcoming Canadian English dictionary being produced with the help of the Society for Canadian English. But the examples continued to pile up, both in a recent news release and, perhaps more notably, the federal budget […] Hundreds of words were spelled the British way: “de-industrialisation,” “amortisation,” “catalyse,” “digitalisation” and so on.

The choice undermines Canadian English, a group of linguists and editors said in an open letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney this month. They noted that the English adopted by Canada has been used by the federal government for half a century.

I could have gone with the similar story from CTV News, “Canadian English supporters urge Carney to abandon federal shift to British spelling,” but how could I resist the “Linguists Rise Up” hook? Thanks, Eric and Nick!

A correspondent writes:

So I’m reading a short novel called The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill and came across this description of one of the characters: “…white-handed and white-shirted, and gentleman to the very purse of him…”

My first (and so far only) assumption is that since one’s stash of money was so precious, something that must be guarded at all times, analogically his “gentleman-ness” was the most sacred part of his being, his inner core, and therefore most important for him to maintain. But I may be off base here.

Ever come across this use of “purse” before? Google didn’t help me.

I had not, so I thought I’d place the question before the Varied Reader. Ideas? (I might add that The Big Bow Mystery has apparently been called “the first full-length locked room mystery”; maybe I should give it a try.)

I wasn’t planning to do a separate Christmas post this year — I got a bunch of movies in foreign languages (Three Times by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Fantômas and Les Vampires by Louis Feuillade, Lost Illusions by Xavier Giannoli, etc.), but that didn’t seem to justify a post. But then Songdog and family came over, and they got me something I’ve been drooling over and that is eminently Hattic: Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 12th Edition. I used Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate for my entire working life, and every time a new edition came out the bosses would provide us proofreaders and editors with a copy each, and I would spend some time comparing it with the old one, checking the additions and omissions. I think I must have had the Seventh New Collegiate, which was around when I was in college, but I’ve definitely got the 8th (which I used at my first proofreading job) and every one since. I thought there would never be a 12th, since everyone kept saying the print dictionary was dead, but lo and behold, they put it out, and now I’ve got one. An impressively expanded etymology is that for abide; the 11th had simply

[ME, fr. OE ābīdan, fr. ā-, perfective prefix + bīdan to bide; akin to OHD ir-, perfective prefix — more at bide]

Look what it is now:

{ME abiden, going back to OE abīdan, from a-, perfective prefix + bīdan “to bide, wait”; a- (also ā-, ǣ- under stress in nominal derivatives) akin to OFris a-, perfective prefix, OS ā-, ō- (unstressed a-) and probably to OE or- “outward, extreme, lacking (in nominal compounds),” OFris & OS ur-, or-, OHG ar-, ir-, er- unstressed inchoative verb prefix, ur “out of, away from,” ON ūr-, ör-, “out of, from,” ør-, privative prefix, Gothic us- “out of,” us-, privative and perfective prefix; if from pre-Gmc *ud-s- akin to OE ūt “out” — more at out entry 1, bide}

(For some reason they’ve started using curly brackets with etymologies.) You’d think you’d wandered into the OED!

And Slavo/bulbul gave me Echopraxia by Peter Watts, the sequel to Blindsight, which I devoured over a decade ago and have not ceased thinking about since; I can’t wait to dig in.

The omnipercipient Trevor Joyce sent me a screenshot of what appears to be a Facebook post by the poet Ben Friedlander, which reads as follows:

Best footnote I’ve seen in a while.

34 worms sing (kyūin mei 蚯蚓鳴): Or “worms murmur”? Readers may supply for the verb mei 鳴 whatever type of sound they would like the worms to make.

A little sleuthing suggests that this is from “61. Song of the Dragon Ryūgin 龍吟,” 59 “Everyday Matters” (“Kajo”) [see Correction below], a chapter in Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō. And further sleuthing turned up this passage in Liza Dalby’s East Wind Melts the Ice: A Memoir Through the Seasons (p. 85):

 Shamisen wo hiku mo sabishi ya mimizu naku

 Plucking the shamisen
 desolately
 as the worms sing

 –Takahama Kyoshi (1918)

Do worms really sing? Even the most desultory research on the subject in Japanese leads you to confident statements that what was once considered to be the keening of lonely worms is in fact the voice of the mole cricket, a rather ugly burrowing insect that emerges on autumn evenings to chirp weakly for a mate. Yet the image of the singing worm is considered charming, and so it remains, a poetic conceit of peculiar appeal in the world of haiku. Many images like this can be found to have classical Chinese antecedents, but wormsong seems purely Japanese. The only faintly similar occurrence that I have been able to ascertain in Chinese is a reference in an ancient apothecary to the phrase “singsong girl” as a local term for “worm” in the area south of the Yangtze River delta — and that could imply any number of lubricious comparisons, not necessarily that worms were chanteuses.

Although worms do not have lungs, they do have mouths, covered with a sensitive flap called a prostomium. Just as I was ready to accept that earthworm singing was merely a Japanese poetic conceit, I stumbled across a reference to a German naturalist, C. Merker, who claimed that he was able to hear the faint voices of earthworms in chorus as they deliberately flapped their prostomia open and closed over their mouths, in a series of sounds marked by a definite and changing rhythm.

She goes on to discuss the Japanese metaphor “worms climb trees.” And for lagniappe, Trevor included a link to Tony Burrello’s “There’s a New Sound” (1953); the sound (spoiler!) is the sound of worms.

Correction. Trevor sent me this from Ben:

Good sleuthing, with one minor correction: it’s from essay 59, “Everyday Matters” (“Kajo”) (and if it makes a difference, the worm line comes from a poem by Dogen’s teacher, Rujing, that’s quoted in the essay).

My apologies to Dogen’s teacher!

The NY Times has published Quiz: Do You Speak 2025? (“An assortment of absurd, useful and funny words and phrases entered the vernacular this year”; archived), which goes from 1. “Imagine you’re wearing a new outfit. What culinary term would you not want someone to use about your appearance?” to 11. “In 2025, what phrase might one use to describe entering a state of focus in order to achieve one’s goals?” I got 7 out of 11 (“You more or less speak 2025”), but that was with a lot of luck (including the fact that I just the other day saw a story about “the Italian brain rot crew” and happened to remember the names, which are memorable). I know it’s fluff, but hey, it’s about language; actually, I might not have posted it if it weren’t for the inclusion of Le poisson Steve, which both my wife and I found irresistible.

I won’t make a separate post out of it because it will mean something only to Russian-speakers, but Anatoly at Avva has a very interesting post about how the word обыденный changed its meaning from ‘done/made in a single day’ (which apparently was an important concept in folk culture) to its current sense of ‘ordinary, commonplace, everyday.’ There’s material on etymology and on Ukrainian and Belarusian equivalents, as well as splendid examples of peevery (Yakov Grot: «обыденный, как ясно показывает его происхождение, может значить только однодневный»).

Also, let us all join Joel at Far Outliers in his “profound gratitude and appreciation to the doctors, nurses, technicians, and orderlies of Wojewódzki Szpital Zespolony w Kielcach for saving my life during my sudden blogging hiatus this month.” Click through for his harrowing experience.

Stan Carey at Sentence first posted A list of animals who:

The recent death of the great Jane Goodall brought me back to an old post about the use of who-pronouns with non-human animals, as in ‘swallows who flew past her window’, as opposed to ‘swallows that/which flew past her window’.

Goodall’s first scientific paper was returned to her with who replaced by which, and he or she replaced by it, in reference to chimpanzees. Goodall promptly reinstated her choice of pronouns, presumably seeing them as markers of the animals’ intrinsic value, and their substitution as an unwarranted moral demotion.¹ [¹ I learned about this incident from Gaëtanelle Gilquin and George M. Jacobs’s paper ‘Elephants Who Marry Mice are Very Unusual: The Use of the Relative Pronoun Who with Nonhuman Animals’. It has lots of data-informed commentary and is well worth reading if this topic interests you.]

Since then I’ve made note of other examples of animals who that I’ve read in books. This post compiles them in one place, where they form a kind of homemade menagerie of zoolinguistic solidarity.

There are sheep, ducks, cows, and many more, ending with ants, rats, and even trees (“As soon as the bright sunlight increases the rate of photosynthesis and stimulates growth, the buds of those who have shot up receive more sugar”). He ends with:

I’m sure my usage is inconsistent – it’s one of those grey areas in language that I find interesting. Maybe it’s something you’ve noticed in your own usage. In any case, it’s fun to see new animals join the who club (or the very important person club). All it needs now is some fungi and microbes.

Interesting stuff; I’m pretty sure I’ve come to use who for non-humans more and more in recent decades, and I think it’s a good development. (Not sure about the fungi, though.)

1) Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti quotes Robert Burns (1759-1796), “A Dream,” lines 30-31:

But Facts are chiels that winna ding,
  And downa be disputed.

He gives the glosses from The Canongate Burns: chiels ‘fellows,’ winna ding ‘will not be upset,’ and downa ‘cannot.’ But ding (pa.t. dang, pa.p. dung) means ‘knock, beat, strike; defeat, overcome; wear out, weary; beat, excel, get the better of,’ so I think “winna ding” is rather ‘won’t be defeated.’ And “downa” defeats me — it’s presumably a form of dae ‘do,’ but neither “downa” nor “douna” occurs in the list of forms at DSL. If we assume it belongs here:

(3) Negative: formed in the ordinary way or by the addition of the neg. particle -na, e.g. dinna, disna; dunna […]; düna […]; also daena, disnae, dinnae, dinny, dinnie, doesna, doesnae, doesny, doesni, den no’, döna, donna, din-not.

Then how does it work semantically? Shouldn’t it be ‘can’t be disputed’? Calling all Scotspersons!

2) Bunin’s 1943 story “Речной трактир,” “A Riverside Inn” in Hugh Aplin’s translation, opens with its protagonists doing some drinking at the famous Praga restaurant in Moscow (named Prague not because of any Czech connection but because it was fashionable to name fancy hotels and eateries after European capitals); the first paragraph ends:

Пообедали вместе, порядочно выпив водки и кахетинского, разговаривая о недавно созванной Государственной думе, спросили кофе. Доктор вынул старый серебряный портсигар, предложил мне свою асмоловскую “пушку” и, закуривая, сказал:

– Да, все Дума да Дума… Не выпить ли нам коньяку? Грустно что-то.

In Aplin’s version:

We had dinner together, knocking back a fair amount of vodka and Kakhetian wine and talking about the recently convened State Duma, then asked for coffee. The doctor took out an old silver cigarette case, offered me his Asmolov “cannon”* and, lighting up, said:

“Yes, it’s the Duma this, the Duma that… Shall we have some brandy? I’m feeling a bit sad.”

(The mention of “the recently convened State Duma” suggests we are in 1906 or 1907.) The footnote says:

Asmolov “cannon”: Asmolov and Co. were manufacturers of tobacco products and accessories.

Which is all well and good, but Asmolov is easy to identify (Russian Wikipedia); what the hell does пушка ‘gun, cannon’ mean here? I can’t find any relevant (tobacco-related) sense in any of my references.
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A reader sent me a quote from a post at the blog Doomsday Machines investigating the origin of the phrase “will the survivors [of nuclear war] envy the dead?” It comes from a speech Khrushchev gave at a Soviet-Hungarian Friendship Meeting that was reprinted the next day in Pravda; the relevant bit goes:

I wonder if the authors of these assertions know that if all the nuclear warheads are detonated the earth’s atmosphere will be so contaminated that nobody can tell in what condition the survivors will be and whether they will not envy the dead. Yes, yes, comrades, that is how the question stands.

The blog post continues:

The exact, original Russian from the speech seems to be: “в каком состоянии будут оставшиеся в живых люди — не будут ли они завидовать мёртвым?” — literally, “of the conditions of the surviving people — won’t they envy the dead?” […]

Did Khrushchev get the phrase from [Herman Kahn’s 1960 book On Thermonuclear War]? I have no idea. I have seen it speculated that the Russian version of the phrase is more directly traced to a particular translation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, but tracing Russian origins of a phrase go beyond my ken.

My correspondent said “Naturally the last sentence triggered the thought, this is a perfect question for Language Hat.” He came to the right place, because although there are a number of Russian translations of Treasure Island, which was wildly popular in Europe as soon as it appeared (the first Russian version came out in 1886), I figured the place to look would be in the most popular Soviet translation, the 1935 one by Nikolai Chukovsky, Kornei’s son (he appears as a five-year-old in this LH post about his dad’s diary), and sure enough, I hit pay dirt — at the end of chapter 20 we find (bold added):

— Вы для меня вот как этот плевок! — крикнул он. — Через час я подогрею ваш старый блокгауз, как бочку рома. Смейтесь, разрази вас гром, смейтесь! Через час вы будете смеяться по-иному. А те из вас, кто останется в живых, позавидуют мертвым!

Stevenson’s original:

“There!” he cried. “That’s what I think of ye. Before an hour’s out, I’ll stove in your old block house like a rum puncheon. Laugh, by thunder, laugh! Before an hour’s out, ye’ll laugh upon the other side. Them that die’ll be the lucky ones.”

A very satisfying rummage through literary-quote history; thanks, Duncan!

I’m reading Agatha Christie’s Five Little Pigs (called a masterpiece by Geoffrey O’Brien; see this post) and I was struck by the final phrase in this paragraph:

Here, in a small cubic space, existed Miss Cecilia Williams, in a room that was bedroom, sitting room, dining room and, by judicious use of the gas ring, kitchen – a kind of cubbyhole attached to it contained a quarter-length bath and the usual offices.

I deduced what those offices must be, but I was unfamiliar with that use of the word; the OED (entry revised 2004) enlightened me:

7.a. In plural (formerly also occasionally in singular). The parts of a house, or buildings attached to a house, specially devoted to household work or service, or to storage, etc.; esp. the kitchen and rooms connected with it, as pantry, scullery, cellars, laundry, etc.; (also) the stables, outhouses, barns, and cowsheds of a farm.
[…]

7.b. In singular or plural. A privy, a lavatory. In later use frequently as usual offices. Cf. ease n. III.11b. Now somewhat archaic or euphemistic.

1727 The Grand Mystery..proposals for erecting 500 Publick Offices of Ease in London and Westminster.
(title)

1871 The forty-five big and little lodgers in the house were provided with a single office in the corner of the yard.
E. Jenkins, Ginx’s Baby (1879) i. 9

1890 The boys’ offices should be provided with doors.
in P. Horn, Village Educ. in 19th Century Oxfordshire (1979) 153

1909 Three reception, four bedrooms, kitchen, and usual offices.
Daily Graphic 26 July 16/1 (advertisement)

1948 Mildred had been too shy when Adam, indicating a door, had said, ‘“The usual offices”..,’ to open the door and look in.
J. Cannan, Little I Understood ix. 124

1951 I went to the usual office at the end of the passage.
N. Marsh, Opening Night ix. 220

1957 The bathroom’s to the right and the usual offices next to it.
J. Braine, Room at Top i. 13

1980 Aft of the lobby..is the dining saloon for the passengers with the offices of necessity on either side of it.
W. Golding, Rites of Passage i. 6

Even if it’s now “somewhat archaic or euphemistic,” I’m surprised I hadn’t run into it (of course it’s possible I’ve simply forgotten, as I had forgotten that Latin officium is a contraction of opificium); are you familiar with this quaint expression?