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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 *wlitiz, *wlituz (“appearance, blee”), from Proto-Indo-European *wel- (“to see”) + mosi (“moss”). Cognate with Old English wlite (“appearance, form, brightness, countenance”).

And Dutch lakmoes is:

From Middle Dutch lecmoes (1252), Middle Dutch lijcmoes (1459), early modern Dutch leeckmoes (1514), modern Dutch lackmoes (ca. 1620 and 1679).[1][2][3] Equivalent to lekken +‎ moes, the first element was later adapted by folk etymology to lak. Likely related to Old Norse litmosi, but the details of how they are related remain unclear.

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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 Northern Illinois University Press this month.
[…]

RFM: I have to confess! I needed to look up the word “katabasis.” Possibly others might too, so could you give a quick, handy definition of it before we go further in our conversation?

BH: Strictly speaking, a katabasis is a descent, understood in the literary sense as a descent to the underworld, a key stop on the heroic journey. But almost as soon as you define it, questions arise. Is Odysseus’s visiting Hades a katabasis if he actually sails over Ocean and makes blood offerings at Hades’ entrance? Isn’t that a nekyia, a summoning of ghosts? Is Gilgamesh’s journey really a katabasis if he doesn’t make a descent, and there don’t seem to be any, well, dead people, in the place he visits? There’s no normative model of a katabasis, even in the literary works that supposedly codified it. I define it as a journey in which the protagonist meets death in its own kingdom. Which might be underground, or in the forest, or even in your own head. Or mine. Definitely mine.

RFM: I already alluded to the unusually wide-ranging aspect of your book, whether through time, genre, or space. At the same time, you had to make difficult choices, for example, in the first two chapters on the magic tale and the memorate, how did you choose one version of a tale or memorate over another? What was something you had to leave out that you wished you could include?

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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. Kinniburgh is chock-full of interesting tidbits; it starts off with sheets of typescript stuffed under Ohio windshield wipers in 1975 and continues:

These baffling bits of ephemera were the first two issues of the Lost and Found Times, produced by the poet John M. Bennett and the painter D.C. Landies. Having sent some copies through the post as a ‘mail art stunt’, they developed the alternative (and cheaper) distribution method of putting flyers on cars in a shopping centre parking lot. Landies died in the late 1970s but the Lost and Found Times continued for another thirty years, sometimes with variant titles (Exploding Horse and Dog Cake Hat). Bennett would print things people sent him, sometimes text, sometimes images, but always ‘unclassifiable materials … that no one else would publish’. Richard Kostelanetz, elder statesman of the American avant-garde, called it ‘the most persistently experimental literary magazine to survive for more than a decade in America’. To bemused Ohians peeling it off their windscreens, this description might have been surprising. Is it literature? For that matter, is it even a magazine?

These questions are prompted by many of the artefacts in Steve Clay and M.C. Kinniburgh’s After Words. Published in parallel with an exhibition last year at New York’s Grolier Club, it’s a generously illustrated guide to a sprawling field, which over time has generated its own tangle of niche subcategories: concrete poetry, mail art, sound poetry, found poetry, asemic writing, performance poetry, cut-ups and erasure. There is no shortage of labels, but like Lost and Found Times, much of this is material more easily defined by what it’s not, and sometimes it doesn’t much resemble poetry. In The Desert (2008), Jen Bervin reworks an existing prose book, using a needle and thread to obscure most of the text. Cecilia Vicuña’s Chanccani Quipu (2012) consists of long strands of unspun wool with letters stencilled on them, a reimagining of the ancient Inca writing system of knotted cords. These are experiments in pushing poetry to the boundaries of legibility, into new forms, and even off the page entirely.

Arranged in loose thematic chapters, After Words is a compendium and catalogue rather than a chronological account. But the start date of 1960 is significant, giving all this activity a point of origin: the explosion of independent, underground publishing known as the ‘mimeo revolution’. The mimeograph machine (sometimes known as the Gestetner) was a simple stencil duplicator, forerunner to the office photocopier. By the early 1960s these devices were inexpensive and portable enough for home use and, co-opted by the emergent counterculture, they generated a deluge of pamphlets, manifestos and magazines. No special skills or training were needed. You simply needed to type – or even draw – onto the stencil paper, wrap it around the ink drum and then crank the handle. As the drum rotated, ink squeezed through the holes in the stencil onto the waiting stack of blank sheets. As Clay put it in an earlier book, ‘for the price of a few reams of paper and a handful of stencils, a poet could produce, by mimeograph, a magazine or booklet in a small edition over the course of a few days.’ The ethos was not just ‘do-it-yourself’ but, in Ed Sanders’s words, ‘do-it-now’.

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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-grandmother) but quickly turns into an examination of the second word, partly focused on the unlikely but apparently irresistible “connection between the term dido and Dido of the Aeneid.” There are a great many piquant responses, of which I’ll reproduce two:

**Cutting didos is an antique expression. Comedian Fred Allen in his 1950 book “Much Ado About Me” mentions sitting in the parlor with his grandmother in 1915 and “cutting didos” (clowning around to kill time apparently–this was before smart phones and you had to do SOMETHING with your time. You could also “walk in the woods like Beethoven”!! What a fun, archaic phrase!! **

  answered Nov 8, 2015 at 3:28
  Tony Rizzi

My grandmother’s memoirs quote her father (1930s, Oklahoma) talking about his 1860s Kentucky childhood. A hen had hatched some duck eggs, and the new ducklings had jumped in a pond.

“Daddy, who had followed to watch, said the hen was absolutely beside herself trying to get those babies out of that water…stalking back and forth, and clucking and cackling at them while the little ducks completely ignored her. Daddy said she did ‘flip-flops and die-does[sp]’.”

The phrase in our family meant someone who was completely freaking out or acting out.

  answered Nov 10, 2023 at 19:40
  Nom DaGruyere

The OED (entry from 1895) says “Origin uncertain” and has this as its first citation:

1807 A jolly Irishman, who cut as many didos as I could for the life of me.
J. R. Shaw, Life ix. 140

Thanks, Brooke!

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 translation of Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-Zǐ, originally written in Mandarin and titled Táiwān Màn Yóu Lù (《臺灣漫遊錄》).

King discovered that a European publisher was “planning to release a translation of the book that was translated from my English text,” known as a “relay translation” where a book is translated into a third language from a previous translation. King sent “repeated warnings” to this publisher that this new translation wasn’t legal.

“As I am the sole copyright owner of the English Taiwan Travelogue,” she writes, “an unauthorized third-language translation violates my copyright.” King has begun legal proceedings against this unnamed European publisher.

King’s defense of translation as an art form are the most moving parts of her statement. […]

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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.’ Once the movie was over I looked it up, and was astonished to learn that its source, Sanskrit स्नेह॑ (snéha) ‘oil, grease, fat; smoothness, glossiness; moisture; tenderness, love’ is from Proto-Indo-European *snóygʷʰos ‘snow’! That’s one of the more unusual semantic transitions I’m aware of, and I thought I’d pass it along.

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. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.” If you go to the site itself you get: “After a long period of inactivity, this diary was moved into long-term storage. Its archived entries were not deleted.” But they charge you $19 to begin “the restore,” and who knows what you get for that — one post? An emoji?

WTF? In the early years of LH I linked to it approximately one zillion times, and now all those links are dead without recourse? I begged him to get off Diaryland, but no, he liked it there. And now look. I’m pissed.

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 starts to sound a little old-fashioned. Not like the moon. The moon. A whole face, a whole person, folded into the roundest, brightest thing in the night. The compliment is worn enough that it can be reached for the way an English speaker says gorgeous — automatically, barely hearing the picture inside the word. There is a full moon rising over the Corniche and a child is being told she is one.

The word for moon, of course, is not the word for beautiful. Qamar means moon and only moon; the beauty is something a thousand years of poets loaded onto it. But that loading is the whole story, and it is worth stopping the reflex, because the picture inside the word is stranger than the compliment lets on.

We think we know what this metaphor means. Moon, woman, beauty, romance — the modern chain feels obvious, almost too obvious, the stuff of song lyrics and baby names. But the chain is younger than it looks, and at least two of its links were forged late. The moon in classical Arabic verse was not always a woman, and not always even a compliment. Read enough of the poems and one recurring logic becomes hard to miss: what the image tends to measure is less femininity, or even beauty in the abstract, than a specific physical event — a bright, round face surfacing out of darkness, the way the full moon surfaces out of a black sky. (That reading is mine, a pattern drawn from the examples, not a doctrine the poets signed.) Much of the rest — the gender, the sweetness, the sense that calling a woman a moon is the natural thing to do — got written onto the image later, by people who made the old shape mean their own thing. Which is the pattern this whole series keeps finding: the sign is usually older than the story we tell about it.

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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 decisions are made by top leaders after conferring with their top aides/ministers/experts, but in fact they’re often driven by people much farther down the totem pole, like the ones described here. But this paragraph is also of interest from a linguistic point of view:

This sort of painstaking institutional groundwork was carried out by middle-ranking military planners, most of whom did not even attend the liaison meetings of the top leaders. They were aptly called bakuryo, which literally means “officers behind the curtains.” In the olden days, the word baku (curtains) had a double meaning in explaining concentration of power. One was political, synonymous with the government, as in bakufu (shogunate), meaning “a regime behind the curtains.” The other was strategic, alluding to the makeshift curtains used in encampments during field combat to identify the headquarters, where strategies were secretly debated among the select few. In prewar Japan, bakuryo had come to assume both the political task of negotiating and liaising with different sources of power and the more practical task of planning strategies. Because of the pivotal role bakuryo would come to assume in directing Japan’s policy after July, the term evoked the image of war planners furtively creating bellicose policies in the name of assisting and advising their superiors.

When I read this, I immediately thought of the pieces of cloth draped around the area where the military leaders are relaxing at the beginning of Kurosawa’s Ran (his version of King Lear, and highly recommended), which could well be described as “makeshift curtains used in encampments”; you can see them briefly at the ten-second mark in this trailer. And the translation “curtain” seems too limited; Wiktionary defines 幕 as “curtain; screen; tent,” which would appear to fit what you see in the movie quite well. I am curious to know what the Japanophones among us have to say.

The OED has bakufu (entry from 2020) cited first in 1869 (“After the Shimabara revolt, in 1637, the Bakufu ordered the country to be closed”); the etymology reads:

< Japanese bakufu (13th cent. with reference to the government and its chief; 11th cent. denoting the camp itself, earliest with reference to China) < a Middle Chinese expression with the literal sense ‘tent government’ (compare Chinese mùfǔ office of a commanding general in ancient China), so called with reference to the command headquarters during military campaigns.

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? Why don’t you want to be a sixer? And what does it mean to go to the akademiya? Russian often takes slang to complex levels, such as through Mat, its linguistic system for obscenities. But even a “matershchinnik” (a well-practiced master of swearing) might find the above phrases nonsensical – unless, of course, they are familiar with Fenya, the language of Russia’s colossal prison system.

This language of criminals has been deployed by underworld figures for centuries to puzzle and evade. But during the 20th Century, its curious mixture of double entendre and loan words ballooned in Soviet prisons.

With German, Greek and Yiddish influences, Fenya is brimming with confusing hidden meanings. In Russian, “babki” literally means “grandmas”, but in Fenya, it also means “money”. “Varezhka” means a “mitten” but also a “mouth, while “khalyava”, derived from the Hebrew for “milk”, is a “freebie” or “giveaway”.

A single word in Fenya can contain hidden codes known only to speakers of the slang. And just as it once bewildered prison camp guards, its language tricks are now being being used online, obscuring the intent of cyber-criminals and confusing authorities.

There’s much that’s familiar to any Russophone — everybody knows мусор [musor] ‘trash’ refers to cops — but it’s a useful rundown of the history involved:
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