#X02026

Peter Phillips’ LRB review (Vol. 48 No. 8 · 7 May 2026; archived) of Composers in the Middle Ages, edited by Anne-Zoé Rillon-Marne and Gaël Saint-Cricq, is very enlightening to me, since I’d forgotten what little I once knew about medieval music; I’m…

Russian лунатик [lunátik] and English lunatic are the faux-est of faux amis: the English word means only ‘madman’ and the Russian one only ‘sleepwalker’; I should really have called the post Veltman’s Sleepwalker, but that would have sounded weird to me,…

Back in 2020 I posted about the etymology of pedant; now I offer a very interesting review by Clare Bucknell (NYRB, May 14, 2026; archived) of On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All by Arnoud S. Q. Visser.…

Steven Mithen (/maɪðən/), a British archaeologist seen in these parts a couple of years ago, published a book called The Language Puzzle: How we Talked Our Way Out of the Stone Age that was recently reviewed in the LRB by Francis Gooding (Vol. 48 No.…

Shaun Brady’s NY Times story “She’s Blazing a Trail for a Traditional Korean Zither in Jazz” (archived), about “Seoul-born gayageum player DoYeon Kim,” of course interested me as a jazz fan, but I was also (more Hattically) intrigued by the word gayageum.…

Another Japanese question! My Mizoguchi retrospective reached 1954 and Sansho the Bailiff, which I’d somehow managed never to see, and I was as impressed as I’d expected to be — Kinuyo Tanaka is as resplendent as ever, and the ending is powerfully moving.…

I just watched the film Ugetsu for the first time in many years, as part of my Mizoguchi retrospective, and found it just as great as I remembered (starring both Machiko Kyō and Kinuyo Tanaka — the only such film, as far as I know, although Tanaka later…

From the misty depths of my youth I remember the expression parler français comme une vache espagnole (literally ‘to speak French like a Spanish cow’), meaning to speak the language badly.…

I happened on this translation by Clare Cavanagh and Michał Rusinek of a Miron Białoszewski poem in the NYRB:

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s Guardian piece is one of those news stories that leave me filled with rage and wanting to smash things:

Tom Johnson’s LRB review (Vol. 48 No. 6 · 2 April 2026; archived) of The Experience of Work in Early Modern England by Jane Whittle, Mark Hailwood, Hannah Robb, and Taylor Aucoin opens with a passage containing a goodly selection of little-known…

Stephen Fried’s fond reminiscence of Jim Quinn (Philadelphia magazine, 10/19/2020) came out over five years ago, but I just discovered it, and since Quinn is one of my language heroes (first touted just a few weeks into the existence of LH, reinforced in…

I’ve long been a fan of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (see this 2011 post), and I like Corey Robin’s take on it:

I recently ran across a very odd word (odd, that is, to those who don’t work in the relevant industries); I quote the OED entry (revised 2016):

Time for another episode of Ask the Hatters! I was reading Jill Lepore’s New Yorker piece “Does A.I. Need a Constitution?” (March 23, 2026; archived) when I found myself flummoxed by the quote at the end of this passage: