languagehat.com

Nelson Goering continues to work on Old English (see this LH post), and in a recent Facebook post he reported the publication of his open-access paper “A sound change that never was: h-loss and vowel lengthening in Old English” (English Language and Linguistics, doi:10.1017/S1360674325000164), which looked interesting enough to post about here; the abstract:

In the 1880s, Sievers proposed that in Old English words such as *feorhes, the loss of the post-consonantal *h caused compensatory lengthening of the vowel: fēores. Since there are no unambiguous traces of this sound change in later English, widespread analogical restitution of the short vowels was assumed (e.g. from feorh). The evidence for this lengthening is largely metrical. I argue that while Sievers is correct that words like <feores> often need to scan with a heavy initial syllable, this need not be explained by a general lengthening in the language at large. Indeed, the distribution of where heavy scansions are required in verse is typical for metrical archaisms: late prehistoric metrical values of words preserved for poetic convenience. Just as wundor ‘marvel’ can continue to be scanned as monosyllabic *wundr, or contracted hēan can scan as disyllabic *hēahan, so can light-syllabled feores continue to scan as heavy *feorhes. The same sets of poems that prefer non-epenthesized or non-contracted forms also prefer the heavy scansions of feores-type words. If heavy scansions of feores-words are seen as a matter of poetic convention, then the hypothesis of compensatory lengthening in the language generally is left without evidence and should be rejected.

In the FB comments, Haukur Þorgeirsson quoted a passage and followed it with his own thoughts:
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My wife and I always enjoy Bill Danielson’s weekly nature columns in our local paper, the Hampshire Gazette; he usually writes about birds, but this week it was an oddly specialized topic and an unusual word I didn’t remember encountering before:

The word was “exuvia” and those of us that heard it were overcome with a mixture of surprise, confusion and skepticism. The person who dished up this scientific morsel was Brian Adams, professor emeritus of environmental science at Greenfield Community College. The setting for such an utterance was a radio studio at WHMP in Northampton, where I was sitting for an interview with Brian, Bill Newman and Buz Eisenberg on their wonderful “Talk-the-Talk” program on July 23.

Our conversation was centered around a photograph in last week’s paper that featured a fragrant water lily with a spreadwing damselfly clinging to one of the petals on the left-hand side of the photo. I then called everyone’s attention to a yellow “smudge” on the inside surface of the very same petal that was supporting the damselfly. This, I explained, was the shed skin of a damselfly nymph that had crawled out of the water, freed itself from its shell and abandoned it in order to start its adult life. Everyone was looking at the photo and then we heard “exuvia” in our earphones. It was Brian who had offered up the term out of nowhere.

As luck would have it, we were right at the point in our segment where it was time for a commercial break. The microphones went dead and every cellphone and computer in the studio was immediately activated for our combined mission to fact-check this spontaneous utterance. Was Brian a genius, or a complete lunatic? In seconds, the answer to our question was settled: Genius! Bill Newman read the search results and the studio (and the first moments of the second half of our segment) erupted with exuberant, triumphant and congratulatory laughter.

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Back in 2014 I posted about Scots Yiddish, saying of David Daiches’ autobiographical Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood “I actually own a copy of Two Worlds, and now I’m even more eager to read it”; over a decade later, I’m finally reading it, and the very first sentence gave me post material. Although the author’s name in itself is good material — Wikipedia says:

His brother was the prominent Edinburgh QC Lionel Henry Daiches. Although Lionel retained the older, traditional pronunciation of their surname as ‘dyke-iz’ /ˈdaɪ χ (or k) ɪz/, David returned from the US with the Americanized ‘day-ches’, /ˈdeɪ tʃɪz/.

Interesting! Does anyone know the origin of the surname?

And that first sentence reads:

A windy Spring day in Edinburgh, with bits of paper blown down the street and two small boys from Sciennes School kicking an empty tin can along the gutter.

Naturally I wanted to know how to say Sciennes, and Wikipedia obliged: it’s /ˈʃiːnz/ (SHEENZ). Which is an odd spelling/pronunciation match, made odder by the etymology: “The name is a corruption of Sienna in Italy, and comes from the Dominican Convent of St Catherine of Scienna.” I can see turning Sienna into Scienna (more impressive-looking), but how did they end up with that pronunciation?

Sarah Gilbert, Eleanor Parmenter, and James Freeman write about “hundreds of medieval medical manuscripts now accessible” (the MetaFilter post where I found the link calls it a “beautifully designed website”; I find it a bit annoying, but I am a creature of text and prefer it laid out simply and legibly):

Over the course of the last three years, and thanks to the generous support of the Wellcome Trust, the Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries project has been enhancing the discoverability of medieval medical recipes in historic library collections across the University of Cambridge. […]

In total, 190 manuscripts have been conserved, catalogued and digitised. More than 7,000 pages of medieval medical recipes are now freely displayed on the Cambridge Digital Library. The contents of these valuable sources are now available for historians of medicine and health around the world.

To enhance their discoverability, some of these recipes have been transcribed and translated for the first time, bringing to life for modern audiences the voices and ideas of medieval practitioners.

The Medieval Medical Recipes page has clearly laid out links to the manuscripts themselves. If you want to know how to use “dove faeces, fox lungs, salted owl or eel grease,” this is your vade mecum.

Anthony Grafton, that nonpareil historian of the spread of reading and its associated technologies, reviews two books on Renaissance libraries for the LRB (Vol. 47 No. 13 · 24 July 2025; archived); here are a few tasty (and in one case cheesy) excerpts to whet your appetite:

Humanists knew that they were imitating the ancients when they sat and talked in libraries. But they knew little about what these lost collections looked like or included. After all, as Andrew Hui points out, even library terminology was slippery. Bibliotheca could refer to anything from a single compendious book, such as the Scriptures, to a single cabinet or a whole collection. Monasteries had large, sunny scriptoria (‘writing rooms’) where the monks created splendid codices. But the books themselves were generally stored rather than displayed. Monks borrowed them for use in their cells. […]

In 1289, the Sorbonne officially founded a library that already possessed 1017 books; half a century later it had 1722. Size mattered, but not as much as organisation. The collection was divided into two rooms, a larger one for books of general importance and a smaller one for specialised texts. The librarians chained the general books to desks, which made it possible for students as well as lecturers to consult them. It was a working collection, designed for use, and many of its books were secular. They attracted readers and disruption. Richard de Bury, an English bibliophile who knew the Sorbonne collection well, warned librarians to keep students away from their books, since they ate cheese while they read and dribbled fragments onto the page. Yet despite such menaces – as well as the worse ones of fire, damp and vermin – innovative libraries rapidly took root. They developed into two distinct forms, one private and one public.

The modern private library or study, as Hui tells it, was devised by a single person: Petrarch. True, Christian hermits and monks had read in their cells for centuries, seeking above all to form themselves as spiritual beings and fighting the distraction that always threatened. As Jamie Kreiner showed in The Wandering Mind (2023), though the manuscripts of religious texts were often laid out with helpful marginal notes and signs to promote meditative reading, even pious readers often found it difficult to concentrate on their contents. Petrarch experienced this traditional form of reading and knew its pitfalls. In one of his dialogues, the Secretum, Augustine berates Petrarch for his failure to internalise the lessons of his books. When Petrarch explains that he must struggle against distraction, Augustine recommends that he make notes in the margin.

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Somewhere I ran across a reference to olonkho, the Yakut epic tradition; I’ve been interested in such traditions ever since (as a wet-behind-the-ears college student) I learned of the existence of the South Slavic epics as described by Milman Parry and Albert Lord (and later of equivalents from Africa and elsewhere), to parallel the Homer I loved, so I did a little investigating. The Wikipedia article says:

Olonkho (Yakut: олоҥхо, romanized: oloñxo, Yakut pronunciation: [oloŋχo]; Dolgan: олоӈко, romanized: oloñko; Russian: Олонхо́) is a series of Yakut and Dolgan heroic epics. The term Olonkho is used to refer to the entire Yakut epic tradition as well as individual epic poems. An ancient oral tradition, it is thought that many of the poems predate the northwards migration of Yakuts in the 14th century, making Olonkho among the oldest epic arts of any Turkic peoples. There are over one hundred recorded Olonkhos, varying in length from a few thousand to tens of thousands of verses, with the most well-known poem Nyurgun Bootur the Swift containing over 36,000 verses. […]

The term olonkho is believed to be related to the Old Turkic word ölön that also means ‘saga’, (cognate of Uzbek o‘lan) and has been argued to be related to the Turkish copula ol- (olmak ‘to be).[citation needed] The Buryat epic ontkno is related to olonkho.

There is much more detail in Robin Harris, Storytelling in Siberia: The Olonkho Epic in a Changing World (University of Illinois Press, 2017); I’ll quote her useful section on defining “epic” (pp. 13-14):
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Lauren Collins is a good writer (which is why the New Yorker pays her), but also a supremely irritating one: her articles are frequently random riffs on some subject she feels like writing about, mingling personal experiences with what appear to be the results of a cursory Google search and with little concern for accuracy — they would never have gotten past the transom in the old New Yorker, with its famously picky editors and fact-checkers. I see from a site search that I was complaining about her as far back as 2008 (when she became a staff writer): “But some things are too much to be borne.”

In “The Case for Lunch” (archived), she opens with a section about the remarkable Roxane Debuisson, who would have been worth an article on her own (but apparently is not worth a Wikipedia page); she had “an exceptional collection of Paris ephemera”:

“The collection began out of my love for Paris and my love of the street,” Debuisson later said. For decades, she conducted a one-woman salvage operation, scooping up rating plates, bench marks, pieces of bridges, tree corsets, street signs, fountains, gallows, Métro seats, mailboxes, and some seventy thousand commercial invoices. A 1970 photograph by her friend Robert Doisneau shows her in a coat and kerchief, crouching on the pavement to examine a dilapidated bust of Molière, rescued from a bakery near the Pont Neuf.

(I don’t know what a “tree corset” is — Google gives me only actual corsets made of bark.) But she was also a devout restaurant-goer:
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A reader wrote me:

My friend came across the following song while doing some background research for his dissertation, and there’s a word that escapes us in the lyrics: in https://youtu.be/qm8vgld7QOs it’s audible around 0:36 (“less than sixty percent go for a ???”) My suspicion is that it’s a contemporary-to-Ms.-Raye term I’m simply not familiar with, but perhaps you or others in the Hattery know the word?

(We’re also left uncertain about the force of being from the sticks here – a whiff of provinciality about the straight-and-narrow? – but that is beyond the scope, I think, of the Hattery.)

The mysterious word was evident to me as soon as I lent an ear, but since it escaped even the geniuses at Genius.com (“Now I find that less than sixty percent go for a [?]”) and it’s probably unknown to most denizens of the twenty-first century who didn’t fritter away their youth on pulp fiction of the mid-twentieth, I figure it’s worth a post. Ms. Raye is complaining that men don’t go for a frail, which is, to quote Green’s Dictionary of Slang, “(orig. US, also phrail) a girl, a woman.” I hadn’t seen the “phrail” version (which only shows up in the 1929 citation); I had also not been aware that it derives from an earlier sense ‘a prostitute, a mistress,’ which goes back to the eighteenth century. The citations for the more recent/general sense start in 1900 ([US] A.H. Lewis ‘Mulberry Mary’ in Sandburrs 11: She d’ soonest frail that ever walks in d’ Bend) and are most common in the period 1920-60; they’re all pretty lively, and I recommend visiting the link.

I’m disappointed in the OED (entry revised 2023), which lumps both senses together:

2. Chiefly U.S. Usually disparaging. A sexually promiscuous woman; (also) a prostitute; a mistress. Later also: a girl or woman, esp. considered sexually. Now chiefly historical and likely to be regarded as offensive.

In early use often in fair frail.

1782 Scorning to enter the dwelling of her seducer, he traced her to the opera… Early on Sunday morning he put the fair frail into a chaise, and set off for their native town.
Pennsylvania Packet 23 May

1790 From his general acquaintance with the fair frail—people began to consider him as—a buck.
Pennsylvania Packet 7 April
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1908 Aw, the frails is all the same… A guy comes along and shoots that old con about how he’s the grandest thing on earth, an’ the wisest of ’em fall.
H. Green, Maison de Shine 50

1924 Those frails down at the Falls that earn their leeving every night with a deeferent lumberjack—those women are better than you.
E. Robinson in Cosmopolitan June 166/3
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As for “the sticks,” it goes without saying that nothing is beyond the scope of the Hattery.

My wife was muttering that the mail consisted mostly of bills when I wondered where that sense of bill came from, and a visit to the OED (entry revised 2024!) showed me that it’s complicated. The original sense was “A formal document containing a petition to a person in authority; a written petition” (1384 “A bille sholde be put vp be the comunes conseyl, to aske of the forseyde Sir John the mone that he had borwed in tyme of hys mairalte”); it quickly came to mean “A proposed law presented to a legislative body for enactment” (1411 “Lord the Roos, at the last parlement of oure sayd liege lord..compleyneth hym by a bille”) and other sorts of documents, legal and otherwise, in particular:

5.a. A printed or written statement listing goods or services supplied and the amount of money owed; an invoice.

Not common in North American use in the context of restaurants or bars, where check is the usual term.

Though often used interchangeably with invoice, bill is more commonly used for retail goods or services requiring immediate payment, whereas invoice often denotes a more detailed statement used especially in trade contexts for transactions having longer payment terms.

See also electricity bill, gas bill n. (b), tax bill n., telephone bill n., water bill n. (b), etc.

I like the careful semantic disentanglement; the first citation is:

1420 I will þat William Tropmell, taillour,..and Hunt, brouderere, be paied of their billes for makyng off a liuerey.
in F. J. Furnivall, Fifty Earliest English Wills (1882) 53

But it’s the messy etymology I especially want to share:
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Uniomachia: a digital edition is a splendid scholarly presentation of a text so obscure it doesn’t have its own Wikipedia page (as yet). I’ll quote the introduction (the right-hand column at the linked webpage):

Uniomachia was composed in 1833 as a response to a schism in the history of the Oxford Union Society, Oxford University’s famous affiliated debating society and members’ club. In protest at the election of a Liberal Standing Committee, the Society’s executive body, several Tory ex-committee members formed a new debating club which they named the Ramblers. Concerned that the latter was drawing away Union members, the incumbent committee motioned to expel all Ramblers from the Oxford Union in an acrimonious debate.

Concerned that this schism would tear both the Society and their friendships apart, two undergraduates of St Mary Hall, Thomas Jackson and William Sinclair, decided that the best way to heal the rift would be to immortalise the debate in poetry. The resulting work, Uniomachia or ‘Battle at the Union’ is a pastiche of Homeric epic, composed in Homeric hexameters and an absurd macaronic Anglo-Greek; the poem’s name recalls discrete battle episodes or -machies in early Greek hexameter poetry (such as the ‘Theomachy’ of Iliad Book 20 or the ‘Titanomachy’ of Hesiod’s Theogony 664-728) as well as ancient satires of the Homeric poems such as the Classical Batrakhomyomakhia or ‘Battle of the Frogs and Mice’. The text quotes liberally from Homer’s Iliad, equates its protagonists – various Union committee members – with Homeric heroes, and satirises Homeric style and narrative features for comic effect to turn what must have been a fairly unpleasant and petty argument into an honour-dispute between mighty warriors. The result lionises and legitimises both sides of the schism while exposing the fundamental triviality of the disagreement by contrast with the real tragedy and pathos of the Homeric original.

Upon its publication Uniomachia was an instant hit, with several improved editions published in the same year and a Popean translation following thereafter, which has been published on Taylor Editions by Dr Laura Johnson. Indeed, the poem as a whole owes much to Pope’s Dunciad (1728-43). Posing as a scholarly edition of an antiquissimum poema or ‘most ancient poem’, the Greek text is supplemented by a line-by-line translation into dog-Latin prose and a set of critical notes in which Jackson and Sinclair, as ‘editors’ under the pseudonyms Habbakukius Dunderheadius and Heavysternius respectively, puzzle over aspects of their text; this fourth and most complete edition was supplemented by a set of additional notes produced by Robert Scott (of the later Liddle and Scott Greek Lexicon) under the pseudonym Slawkenbergius. Intended partly to satirise contemporary textual and literary-historical scholarship, the notes provided by Jackson, Sinclair and Scott give the impression of a pretentious faux-erudition, with recondite Latin vocabulary, strong personal opinions unsupported by evidence, frequent insults directed at the intelligence of editorial ‘predecessors’, and shoehorned references to Classical sources.

There are obvious barriers to reading and enjoying the humour of Uniomachia. It is written in two ancient languages, and many of the jokes contained within it depend either on a knowledge of Classical philology or of the Oxford Union and city of Oxford in the 1830s. This edition attempts to surmount these barriers by offering a critical transcription of the text alongside a translation into modern English prose, both of which have been encoded with a high level of functionality to allow access by classicists and non-classicists alike.

I note with displeasure the misspelling of Liddell as “Liddle” (which is, of course, how it’s pronounced), but otherwise I am impressed. The first line is “ἩΥΤΕ τομκάττων κλαγγὴ περὶ γάρρετα σούνδει,” translated as “As around the garret sounds the screeching of tomcats,” which should give you an idea of the epic silliness of the thing. If only all our controversies could be resolved by Homeric hexameters and absurd macaronic Anglo-Greek!