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Martin Langeveld (“Old newspaper guy”), a longtime friend of the Hattery, sent me a link to Elizabeth Bromstein’s NiemanLab article about her search for the origin of the “statistic” that 75% of your emotions are generated by smell, which turned out to be…

I recently ran once more into the tangle drasvi recorded here; litmus is: From Middle English litmose, lytmose, litemose, from Old Norse litmosi (“moss used for dyeing”), from lita (“to dye, stain”), from litr (“colour, dye, blee”), from Proto-Germanic *w…

Bloggers Karamazov has posted an interview about what sounds like a very interesting book: Today Robin Feuer Miller sat down with Barbara Henry to discuss her book, Tales from the Netherworld: The Katabasis in Russian Literature, which came out with North…

Gill Partington’s LRB review (8 October 2026; archived) of After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960-2025 by Steve Clay and M.C.

A friend who found the word dido in a crossword puzzle fell into a rabbit hole, as she put it, and came out with this Stack Exchange thread that starts with a question about the odd phrase “conniption dido” (apparently used only by the questioner’s great-…

James Folta writes at Literary Hub about what is alleged to be an unfair business practice: Translator and writer Lin King released a statement on Instagram on Tuesday laying out her claim of copyright infringement of her Booker-Prize-winning English tran…

I recently had the chance to see Nizhalkuthu (നിഴൽക്കുത്ത്, Shadow Kill); I think it’s my first movie in Malayalam, so I kept my linguist hat on as I watched, and one repeated word was സ്നേഹം (snēhaṁ) ‘love.’

I just discovered that the prinsessor-loving Des’s long-running blog Desbladet has vanished from the internet, and if you turn to the Internet Archive you get the dreaded “Sorry.

Alena Belova sent me a link to her essay The Word for Beautiful Was the Word for Moon and I thought it was interesting enough to post: Say ya qamar to someone in Arabic — you moon — and, at least in my experience of hearing it, it still lands, even as it…

Joel of Far Outliers is posting passages from Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta, and I found this one interesting as an example of a phenomenon that has more than once struck me in my readings of history: we tend to assume great national deci…

Tamlin Magee (last seen here in 2024) has a piece in BBC Future about the Russian cant language called fenya: When would you hide in a raspberry?

I occasionally post about a movie that prominently features language, and today’s installment is To the Ends of the Earth.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus (who has made appearances here before, e.g. in 2014) has a most interesting New Yorker piece “How Test Engineers Decide What Counts as Good Enough” (archived) that starts with bears used as product testers for bear-resistant containers…

I know I’ve posted about polyglots a lot, but Matthew Erickson’s NY Times piece (Oct. 6, 2026; archived) takes an unusual (and unusually thoughtful) approach, and won my heart right off the bat by referencing one of my favorite novels: A few months ago, I…

Rae Greiner has the kind of deep dive into word history that I love, in this case “1909: The Introduction of the Word ‘Empathy’ into English.”

Jonathon Green takes justifiable pride in his accomplishments: Green’s Dictionary of Slang (GDoS) was launched online on 12 October 2016.

Frequent correspondent Patrick Wang wrote to ask if I knew Ksenia Nekrasova’s poetry, including a link to his recent post on her.

I found this site via Facebook ; it’s based on research by James Burridge (seen here in 2022) and Bert Vaux (at LH in 2017), and the intro is as follows: [blockquote deleted] The site is so spiffy and designed-to-the-hilt that I’m a little afraid of it, b…

Ben Yagoda wrote at Facebook: The discovery of the day comes from the indefatigable quote investigator Garson O’Toole, acting on a tip from Nigel Rees and Peter Cogman.

Another tidbit from the (excellent) Peter Hessler New Yorker piece (archived) I quoted yesterday in connection with “Ouray”: It had started snowing the previous day, and it was still coming down softly.

In a recent comment, Y wrote: Recently announced: Gallicagram, an ngram site for French sources and much more.

My current reading is Han Kang’s much-lauded novel Greek Lessons; I’m finding the protagonist irritatingly self-absorbed (as is the case with so many novels in these self-absorbed times), but (as might be predicted) there’s quite a bit of linguistically i…

A couple of terms new to me, with OED definitions and citations: 1) well-set-up (entry revised 2014) Now somewhat archaic.

Louis Menand’s NYkr review essay “The Curious Power of Punctuation” (archived) deals with what sound like stupid books and has some stupid things to say about them and the subject of language in general (compare Menand on the Dictionary), and I don’t feel…

I treated myself to a CD of Kenny Garrett’s 2003 album Standard of Language, having been seduced by the Penguin Guide to Jazz calling it “unmissable” (and indeed I was not disappointed); the eighth track is called “Gendai,” and of course I had to look that

Susan Pedersen’s LRB review (24 September 2026; archived) of Twilight of the Dons: British Intellectuals from World War Two to Thatcherism by Colin Kidd combines snarkiness with imperturbability in a way that is pleasing to me; it doesn’t hurt that I agree

The Log has a guest post by Jean Charconnet about the use of analogy in discourse; here’s the beginning: Thirty years ago I defended a doctoral thesis on analogy, later published as « Analogie et logique naturelle » (Peter Lang, 2003), with a preface by G…

The Russian Review has posted a list, with descriptions, of what looks like a great set of articles from past issues: Since its founding in 1941 by scholars critical of the Soviet Union, The Russian Review has seen emigre editors and authors play an impor…

Ben Yagoda posted on FB: Pronunciation question: How do you say the word “housing”: A, “howzing” or B, “house-ing”?

Before we started on The Brothers Karamazov, my wife and I were reading Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet (see this post), and I had meant to write about one of the most remarkable Anglo-Indian words I learned from it, which occurs in the sentence “Then something…

Peter Brooks is always worth reading, and his NYRB review article “In Search of His Vocation” (March 21, 2024 issue; archived) has interesting things to say about Proust, but what grabbed me was the final section, much of which I will reproduce here: Read…

Another good NY Times language column (archived) by Nitsuh Abebe; after a DFW-centered opening, he continues: The way a broad population of people speaks is a dialect, and the way a particular individual speaks is known as an idiolect, and somewhere in be…

Laudator Temporis Acti presents a quote from Plautus beginning: virtus praemium est optumum; virtus omnibus rebus anteit profecto The translation (by Paul Nixon) begins “Courage is the very best gift of all; courage stands before everything, it does, it d…

Another Far Outliers excerpt from Philip Bowring’s Empire of the Winds (see Hindu and Buddhist Texts in Nusantaria): As elsewhere in the maritime zone, Chinese and Europeans alike were surprised at the prominent economic role of women, particularly in tra…

Taleen Mardirossian’s The Mother Tongue of All Secrets (The Sunday Long Read, September 12, 2026) is well worth your while; I’ll post a few excerpts so you can see why I wanted to share it: In the last months of her life, my grandmother started mentioning…

Two rural words, one common and one not, both with interesting etymologies I hadn’t known. 1) brock ‘(male) badger’: From Middle English brok, from Old English broc (“badger”), related to Danish brok (“badger”); both probably originally from a Celtic sour…

The Oxford Traherne reports on their new digital collator: The Oxford Traherne in collaboration with the Visual Geometry Group, University of Oxford, has developed a new digital collator designed for the needs of textual scholars and scholarly editors.

The tale of classicist Erich Segal’s popular rise and professional fall in relation to the wild success of Love Story was very well known back in the day, half a century ago, but I suspect it’s been forgotten by now; at any rate, it’s well told by Beth Bl…

In yesterday’s thread, Rodger C wrote: Surely unrelated, but I can’t resist mentioning it here, is Mozeemlek, a people of western North America mentioned by Lahontan in the early 18th century.

I often skip the fiction in the New Yorker — so much to read, so little time — but I read the first few sentences of Hisham Matar’s “New Shoes” (archived) and was hooked; by the time I finished I was thinking of Proust (it even features memories of Venice…

It’s time for one of those “look at all these new words making it into the dictionary” news cycles, and here’s Michael Levenson in the NYT with “Merriam-Webster Dictionary Is Wordsmaxxing With 1,400 New Definitions” (archived): Merriam-Webster, the venera…

Robert Booth, UK technology editor for the Grauniad, tells us breathlessly about AI models chatting in ‘surreal’ dialect mixing poetic language and tech bro jargon: AI models have begun communicating in a strange new version of English that reads like a c…

BBC News presents a nice confluence of language, history, and biology in Lost oyster beds rediscovered thanks to Gaelic and Scots language: Long lost oyster beds on the West Coast of Scotland have been rediscovered thanks to Gaelic and Scots language.

John McIntyre reposted A newsroom taxonomy, and even though I never worked in a newsroom I definitely worked in editorial departments enough to be familiar with most of these types.

A pendant to yesterday’s thread, in which both Min/Hokkien and Xiamen/Amoy were discussed; first, the beginning of the preface to Carstairs Douglas’s Chinese-English Dictionary of the Vernacular Or Spoken Language of Amoy: With the Principal Variations of…

Having loved A City of Sadness (see this post), I decided to read Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan’s Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895–1945 by Seiji Shirane and now that I’ve finished it, I’m impressed enough to recommend it to…

We hereby fulfill the hat portion of our mandate with this passage from Zachary Fine’s “Matisse’s Ugliest Painting” (New Yorker, August 31, 2026; archived): Matisse was no stranger to hats.

I discovered that the Godard movie Bande à part/Band of Outsiders, normally untranslated in Spanish, was marketed in Mexico as Iban por lana, ‘They went for wool,’ which confused me, so I did some digging and discovered this was an allusion to a saying “ir

Danny Hieber, “a Ph.D. in linguistics who works with indigenous communities to help them document and revitalize their languages,” has a long post called Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek.

From this Facebook post by Sarah Thomason I learned the word hoghenhine; OED (entry revised 2010): Law. historical.