Entries are invited for the Fool For Poetry International Chapbook Competition. (Ireland) First prize: €1000, chapbook publication, and 50 free copies. Winning poets also offered a reading at the 2017 Cork International Poetry Festival (includes three nights’ accommodation). At least one of the prizewinners guaranteed to be a debutante publication. Entry fee: €25. Deadline: May 31, 2016.
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By: Alice,
on 10/8/2014
Continued from “Bimonthly etymology gleanings for August and September 2014. Part 1″…
A correspondent cited a few tentative etymologies of English words.
I am sorry to disappoint our correspondent, but such haphazard comparisons should be abandoned. To discover the origin of old words, one has to compare their most ancient attested forms. For example, kauen always had a diphthong, while cow has its late diphthong from a long monophthong that once sounded like Modern Engl. oo (compare German Kuh). And so it goes. On the more intuitive level, one should realize that, if a word has baffled professional scholars for centuries, the most tempting solutions have probably been offered and rejected. By the way, the Dutch compound for “bride and bridegroom” is bruidspaar, not brudespaar; the word has nothing to do with brooding.
Another correspondent wrote that the Russian word for “kiss” also means “to aim.” Whoever suggested this connection seems to have confused the Russian words tsel “whole” (discussed in the post on kissing) and tsel’ “aim.” The sign l’ stands for palatalized (or “soft”) l; where the transliteration has an apostrophe Russian has a special letter (the so-called miagkii znak). Tsel is an old word, while tsel’ is a borrowing of German Ziel “aim” (more precisely, Middle High German), via Polish.
Still another correspondent wonders whether the noun chapbook and the verb tucker (out) “to tire, to weary” can be of Hindi origin. I think chapbook has such a transparent English derivation that it does not merit further discussion. Tucker is probably a frequentative of tuck, like very many verbs of this structure. There is no denying the fact that our correspondent cited Hindi words that have both the form and the meaning closely corresponding to chapbook and tucker. But, as I have written many times while answering similar questions, the fact of borrowing can be ascertained only if we succeed in showing how a foreign word reached English (compare the history of thug, which is indeed from Hindi, or other examples cited in the great book Hobson-Jobson). Was tucker used mainly by Hindi speakers? Do we have any proof that this verb spread from their community? Only a detailed investigation along such lines can sound convincing. Otherwise, we will stay with kauen ~ cow and their likes.
Wise restraint. An old colleague of mine wrote in connection with my post on roil.
“Honoré de Balzac published in 1842 a novel called La Rabouilleuse. The title name is explained as being a word local to the Berry region of France where a young girl is employed to stir up the mud in a stream, thus clouding the water and permitting a fisherman to more readily catch crayfish (crawfish?). One can easily see the way the word is formed: the verb bouillir “boil” plus a reduplicating prefix ra- and a feminine agent suffix. Now the verb rabouillir or some variant of it might fit in with roil both with some phonemes and the meaning.”
The author of the letter did not suggest any solution, and I think he was right to do so. The coincidence looks like being due to chance.
Every now and then I run into publications that would have come in most useful in my earlier posts and comments. But it is never too late to pick up even the oldest chestnuts. For instance, I have challenged the supporters of they ~ them in sentences like when a student comes, I never make them wait to give examples that are really old. Almost nothing has turned up. But here are two more phenomena that have aroused some interest among our readers.
Split infinitive. It would seem that passionate, as opposed to rational, splitting set in several decades ago, and the construction I called to be or to not be conquered the ugly day. Roswitha Fischer’s article on the split infinitive appeared in 2007; however, I read it only this summer. Among many other examples, she quoted Wycliffe: “It is good for to not ete fleisch and for to not drynke wyn” (ca. 1382). I do not follow Wycliffe’s recommendation but in defense of his grammar should say that with for to he had nowhere else to put the negation. I am sure everybody will remember: “Simple Simon went a-fishing, / For to catch a whale.” Nowadays, for to, an analog of German um zu, is dead, except in some dialects.
One… his. We have been taught to say one…one’s. But people keep correlating one with his (now probably their; see above). In The Nation for 1921 I found a letter to the editor from Steven T. Byington (Ballard Vale, Massachusetts) with the funny title Four Centuries of Onehese. The writer quoted five sentences with one—his. I’ll reproduce only the relevant part of them:
Among other things, the letter discusses the utterance: “One oughtn’t never take nothing that ain’t theirn.” I suspect that in the great books on English grammar by Jespersen, Poutsma, and Curme many more examples of the one… his type will be found. A certain Markman, a friend of James Steerforth’s, “always spoke of himself indefinitely as a ‘man’, and seldom or never in the first person singular” (David Copperfield, Chapter 24 “My First Dissipation”). This way of speaking may help those who have trouble with one.
Also in The Nation, this time for 1922, I found a more than enthusiastic review by Clement Wood of Carl Sandburg’s fourth book of poetry Slabs of the Sunburnt West. In the opening paragraph, Wood expressed his delight about Sandburg’s use of slang. I ran the list by my undergraduate students. Here it is: humdinger, flooey, *phizzogs, fixers, frame-up, *four-flushers, rakeoff, getaway, junk, *fliv, fake, come clean, gabby mouth, *hoosegow, *teameo, *work plug, lovey, slew him in, bull, jazz, scab, booze, stiffs, hanky-pank, hokum, bum, and buddy.
The words that no one recognized are given above with an asterisk. I knew more. However, some of them I knew by chance. For instance, long ago, a bookstore near our main campus closed its doors. It began to sell its stock at a small discount, but every two days the prices went down. The only books that no one wanted to take even when they were free were those by American poets. I grabbed the entire batch and read everything. In this rather dubious treasure trove, I discovered Sandburg, read his poem called Phizzogs, and looked up the word. It has never occurred in my reading since that day. In my work, I have dealt with synonyms for “prison,” so that hoosegow was quite familiar to me. I also knew fliv, but the word is forgotten. This is what I expected, for once I tried the same experiment with jitney and drew blank, while people of my age recognized it immediately. If I had run into a poker player, such a person would have had no trouble identifying four-flushers. Fixers, bull, work plug, slew him in, and stiffs look transparent, but without the context it is impossible to decide their exact meaning. We of course guessed that hanky-pank is a back formation on hanky-panky.
My students say that, when they watch movies of the fifties, they do not understand the slang used there, while their parents are in the dark when it comes to the slang of their children. On the other hand, the words given in bold in my list are today so familiar that no one would have referred to them as particularly striking. One should take into consideration that, to know one’s language, one has to read the literature written in it. It is curious to follow the modern annotations of Oliver Twist and Vanity Fair. Both Dickens and Thackeray used slang quite generously, and the commentators assume that no one understands it today. Perhaps they are right.
I still have some questions unanswered and will take care of them at the end of October.
Image credits: (1) Photograph of Carl Sandburg, 1947. Library of Congress. (2) Sandburg book cover via Booklikes.
The post Bimonthly etymology gleanings for August and September 2014. Part 2 appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Cate Gardner,
on 10/3/2009
By: Catherine J Gardner,
on 5/16/2009
gritLIT (ON) seeks "interesting poetry that shows the way." First prize: $200; other prizes available. Twenty free copies of the chapbook to each prize winner. Submit up to 350 lines of poetry, in any form, on any subject. May be a single poem or multiple poems. Deadline: June 1, 2009. Entry Fee: $20. More details...
Add a CommentRubicon Press (AB) produces unique chapbooks of poetry from writers around the world. Seeks work that resonates, moves, inspires and affects. More details...
Add a CommentToronto Small Press Group seeks submissions for their Book Fair Anthology. Submit any genre of prose or poetry, or laundry list or manifesto. Approximately 50 entries will be used. Payment: free chapbook. Deadline: May 31, 2008. More details...
Add a CommentThe Writers' Circle of Durham Region (WCDR) invites entries for their 2008 Poetry Chapbook Challenge. Prizes (3): $100. Enter one poetry chapbook (48 pages max.; min. run 20) published between January 1st, 2007 and May 30th 2008. Entry fee $10. Deadline: May 30, 2008. More details...
Add a CommentSeven Kitchens Press (US) invites entries from LGBT poets for the Robin Becker Chapbook Prize. Prize: US$100 plus 25 copies. Submit a 16-24 page unpublished poetry manuscript in English. Fee: US$12, includes copy of winning chapbook. Deadline: May 15, 2008. More details...
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By: Aline Pereira,
on 8/22/2007
Multicultural adoptions have become so prevalent that an entire genre has emerged, for kids and parents alike. “One of the most frequent requests we have,” says Nicole Harvey of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, “is by adoptive parents of Asian kids looking for ways to orient their children to their birth culture.” She likes especially the complex and popular Cooper’s Lesson by Sun Ying Shin.
On our own PaperTigers, the genre is explored in a review of Three Names of Me and an interview with Cynthia Kadohata, Newbery award winner and an adoptive parent herself. Franki at A Year of Reading, also an adoptive parent, reviews Caroline Marsden’s When Heaven Fell. Scroll down for her interview with Rose Kent, author of Kimchi and Calamari, additionally reviewed and interviewed at PaperTigers. Cynthia Letich Smith’s blog Cynsations has a great list of books on multicultural adoption.
You don’t have to be an adoptee or adoptive parent to appreciate these books, of course. As our world becomes smaller and families more diverse, we all need inspiration and information from this vital field of children’s literature.
Thanks for the heads up.
Yes, much appreciated. I'll keep an eye out for more of Kurt's work.
I'll race you both for his next chapbook. ;)
That's a nice cover, too. Congrats to him for the "sold out" notice, although it's a disappointment to the rest of us. :)
Kurt writes some nice tales...and with black butterflies, too.
Thoughts as butterflies? Delightful : )