And spacy puts the attachment a bit further to the left (though still not in the right place), but still gets the parse wrong, construing "jailed" rather than "found" as the main verb:
Dep tree Token Dep type Lemma POS
──────────────────── ───────── ──────── ─────── ──────────
┌─► Police compound police NOUN
┌─►└── officer nsubj officer NOUN
┌┬┬───────────┴───── jailed ROOT jail VERB
││└─►┌────────────── for prep for ADP
││ └─►┌─────────── attacking pcomp attack VERB
││ └─►┌──────── members dobj member NOUN
││ └─►┌───── of prep of ADP
││ │ ┌─► the det the DET
││ └─►└── public pobj public NOUN
│└──────────────►┌── found advcl find VERB
│ └─► dead oprd dead ADJ
└──────────────────► . punct . PUNCT
“Good afternoon, my son. Would you enjoy a beverage?”
“Yes Mother I will wet deeply into myself.”
“We have, son, beverages three: coffee, which hot; milk, which cold; and, finally, the substrate of all beverage, itself also a genuine first-class beveroge when taken simpliciter.”
עושה רושם שקהילת דוברי העברית במדינת ישראל החליטה מתישהו בחודשים האחרונים, או בשנה האחרונה, לעבור מהמודל הלא-אנגלי של הגיית שנים כאילו הן מספר מונה (אלפיים [ו]תשע-עשרה) אל המודל הכן-אנגלי של פיצולן לשני מספרים בני שתי ספרות (עשרים עשרים ואחת). התיעוד שלי הוא אנקדוטלי, כי וואלה אף אחד.ת לא כותב.ת את שמה של השנה כהגייתה. בשביל זה יש לנו ספרוֹת.
לא שיש פה בעיה, כן? שתי הצורות מובנות וחד-משמעיות. אנחנו רגילים לחלוקות מוזרות במספרי מיקוד (תשעים מאתיים ועשר) וטלפון (מגדילים לעשות גלגלצ עם "תשעת אלפים ואז שתיים"), שבהם שרירותיות המספר גבוהה מאוד, ולא יהיה מופרך לטעון שמרגע שהתקבענו על מאה גם הספרות הראשונות של השנה הן די חסרות שימוש כיצורים מתמטיים.
ובכל זאת, מה גרר שינוי כה משמעותי בקטגוריה כה מהותית בשפה? זה לא שקודם לא היינו חשופים לניינטין-ניינטי-ניין, וזה לא שיש פתאום איזה יתרון הגייתי שלא היה קודם (ב"עשרים" יש הברה פחות מב"אלפיים" בספירה נדיבה, פחות חסכוני מ"תשע-עשרה" לעומת "אלף תשע-מאות"). הנחת העבודה שלי כרגע, ואשמח לשמוע תיאוריות מוצלחות יותר, היא שהמעבר לשנת אלפיים טרף את הקלפים (כולל באנגלית) עם עשור ראשון מאוד נטול סטנדרט (אנחנו עדיין לא סגורים.ות על איך לקרוא לעשור הארור ההוא, אם כי אני אישית מחבב את אפסטיז של עידוק), ואחרי ששקע קצת האבק, ועם בוסט קטן מאולימפיאדת טוקיו (היה שם איזה קטע חוקי לגבי השנה בשם, ומשם קצרה הדרך להאחדת-יתר), נכנענו כאומה לפורמט האנגלי (סוגריים). אני גם די בטוח שעוד לא יצא לי לשמוע הגייה של שנה שקדמה ל-2000 (או אפילו ל-2020?) בצורה הזאת, כך שיש כאן איזה איבון לקסיקלי, שכבה גיאולוגית מקובעת, ולא רפורמה רטרואקטיבית.
Today, on #LinguisticsWithSlava
The Russian word for a sports fan is "bolel'shchik." I'll explain in a minute. But first, did you know that for a long time Americans had no word for it?
Sports fans appeared in the US in the 1850s, but the word didn't come about until early XX c..
Slava Malamud goes on to explain the Russian relationship between fandom and pain:
The word "bolel'shchik" tells you all you need to know about the Russian approach. We did adopt the English word (in the form of "fanaty"), but it describes soccer hooligans exclusively.
"Bolel'shchik" is ours. Oh so very, very ours.
The root word is "bol", which means "pain"
"Bolet" is a verb derived from it. Its meaning is "to be ill." Therefore, "bolel'shchik" is someone who feels constant pain and/or is very sick. However, the word applies exclusively to sports supporters. A regular ill person is "bol'noi."
How Dostoyevskian is this shit?
The prevailing emotion of a Russian football fan (and this is where the word originated) is, of course, pain. Constant, unyielding feelings of sickness and discomfort that can only be understood if you ever sat on a wooden bench to watch a 0-0 slog in half-frozen mud in Saratov.
To support a sports team, in Russian culture, primarily means to experience pain, to be emotionally unwell, to subject one's mental health to voluntary mistreatment. To be unhealthily addicted to something bad.
Don't ever ask me why I root for the Buffalo Bills and Sabres again.
The OED glosses (the relevant sense of) fan as "A fanatic; in modern English (originally U.S.): a keen and regular spectator of a (professional) sport, originally of baseball; a regular supporter of a (professional) sports team; (hence) a keen follower of a specified hobby or amusement, and (gen.) an enthusiast for a particular person or thing", with citations back to 1682:
1682 ‘T. Rationalis’ New News from Bedlam 13 The Loyal Phans to abuse. 1682 ‘T. Rationalis’ New News from Bedlam 40 To be here Nurs'd up, Loyal Fanns to defame, And damn all Dissenters on purpose for gain. 1890 Omaha (Nebraska) Sunday Bee 2 Feb. ii. There has not been much enthusiasm shown among the baseball fans of the city. 1896 G. Ade Artie xvii. 158 I'm goin' to be the worst fan in the whole bunch. 1901Dial. Notes 2 139 Fan, a base ball enthusiast; common among reporters.
The 17th-century quotes (about which more later) refer to politico-religious zealots rather than to sports-team supporters, and the OED's etymology notes that this "Abbreviation of fanatic adj. and n." was "Re-formed in 19th cent."
Wiktionary's etymology also suggests that this sense of fan , though derived from fanatic, was also "Possibly influenced by fancy (“group of sport or hobby enthusiasts”), fancyboy (“fan”), &c.", and the entry for fancy has senses:
7. Any sport or hobby pursued by a group.
Synonyms: hobby; see also Thesaurus:hobby Trainspotting is the fancy of a special lot.
8. The enthusiasts of such a pursuit. He fell out of favor with the boxing fancy after the incident.
As for fanatic, it comes from Latin fānāticus, which in turn is formed from fānum "temple".
Lewis & Short glosses fānāticus as "Inspired by a divinity, enthusiastic." Clearly this is the older sense of enthusiastic, which the OED glosses as "Designating a person who claims (falsely or erroneously) to receive divine communication or inspiration; […] also in wider sense: relating to, of the nature of, or characterized by mystical, fanatical, or radical religious delusion. "
57. Sed, quod caput est, cur isto modo iam oracla Delphis non eduntur non modo nostra aetate, sed iam diu, ut modo nihil possit esse contemptius? hoc loco cum urguentur, ' evanuisse,' aiunt, ' vetustate vim loci eius, unde anhelitus ille terrae fieret, quo Pythia mente incitata oracla ederet.' De vino aut salsamento putes loqui, quae evanescunt vetustate. De vi loci agitur, neque solum naturali, sed etiam divina; quae quo tandem modo evanuit? 'Vetustate,' inquies. quae 'vetustas' est quae vim divinam conficere possit? quid tam divinum autem quam afflatus e terra mentem ita movens, ut eam providam rerum futurarum efficiat, ut ea non modo cernat multo ante, sed etiam numero versuque pronuntiet? quando ista vis autem evanuit? an postquam homines minus creduli esse coeperunt?
Demosthenes quidem, qui abhinc annos prope trecentos fuit, iam tum φιλιππίζειν Pythiam dicebat, id est quasi cum Philippo facere. hoc autem eo spectabat, ut eam a Philippo corruptam diceret. quo licet existimare in aliis quoque oraculis Delphicis aliquid non sinceri fuisse. sed nescio quo modo isti philosophi superstitiosi et paene fanatici quidvis malle videntur quam se non ineptos. evanuisse mavultis et extinctum esse id quod si umquam fuisset, certe aeternum esset, quam ea quae non sunt credenda non credere.
57. However, the main question is this: Why are Delphic oracles (of which I have just given you examples) not uttered at the present time and have not been for a long time? And why are they regarded with the utmost contempt? When pressed at this point their apologists affirm that 'the long flight of time has gradually dissipated the virtue of the place whence came those subterranean exhalations which inspired the Pythian priestess to utter oracles.' One might think that they are talking about wine or brine which do evaporate. But the question is about the virtue of a place—a virtue which you call not only 'natural' but even 'divine,'—pray how did it evaporate? 'By length of time,' you say. But what length of time could destroy a divine power? And what is as divine as a subterranean exhalation that inspires the soul with power to foresee the future—a power such that it not only sees things a long time before they happen, but actually foretells them in rhythmic verse? When did the virtue disappear? Was it after men began to be less credulous?
By the way, Demosthenes, who lived nearly three hundred years ago, used to say even then that the Pythian priestess 'philippized', in other words, that she was Philip's ally. By this expression he meant to infer that she had been bribed by Philip. Hence we may conclude that in other instances the Delphic oracles were not entirely free of guile. But, for some inexplicable cause, those superstitious and half-cracked philosophers of yours would rather appear absurd than anything else in the world. You Stoics, instead of rejecting these incredible tales, prefer to believe that a power had gradually faded into nothingness, whereas if it ever had existed it certainly would be eternal. [source]
And this leads us to the 17th-century examples (diversely spelled, by the same author, as "Phans" and "Fanns"), which come from a political screed with a spectacularly exuberant 151-word title:
New News from BEDLAM:
OR More Work for Towzer and his Brother Ravenscroft. ALIAS Hocus Pocuus Whipt and Stript:
OR a Ra-ree New Fashion CUPPING-GLASS Most humbly represented to the Observator Wherein the various Shapes , and present Legerdemain Postures, Principles and Practices of the bold and most Insolent Factors for the infallible Chair (both in Church and State) are yet more and more unvailed and discovered.
As it was lately Represented in a plain honest Country Dialogue, (viz. both Serious, Comical, Satyrical, Tragical and Theological) to a True Loyal Protestant-Association of Master and Scholars, to be Acted by them at the next Breaking up of their Grammar-School, and then, and there, it is shrewdly suspected (by a Vote of Nemine Contradicente) 'twill be Resolved, That a Second Impression of the said Dialogue, with Appurtenances, shall be forthwith promoted and Published for the present Satisfaction and farther Information of the People.
By Theophilus Rationalis, one of Heraclitus Ridens, Nat Thompson's, and the most profound Observator's Wise Men of Gotham, although a most Sincere, and True Lover of King and Country.
Post Tenebras Splendet, surgit post Nubila Phoebus.
Theophilus Rationalis was apparently a pseudonym for Henry Duke, about whom I haven't been able to learn anything more.
You can look through the book yourself to find the contexts of Phans and Fanns.
“Yup, three. You might think of your old man as just a tired old crooner, but I still got some new hits in me. I invented three new things in the lab today. They're out in the garage, if you wanna go look.”
“Uh huh. What are they.”
“Okay, sure, I can just tell you, sure. Okay, the first invention. Now, have you ever gotten tired of how when you microwave food it sometimes pops? Well I invented something for that. Anti-pop food warming box.”
“Alright. Sounds useful. Box. What else.”
“I invented a new kind of tire. A lot like the old kind, but it's spray-painted red.”
“Got it. Third?”
“I invented a child who isn't perpetually ungrateful. Ha ha, just kidding, that doesn't exist. I invented a new kind of toaster that screams when the toast is done.”
This is pretty juvenile, but hey, we all have an inner twelve-year-old hidden within our mature selves, and I figure others might enjoy it as much as I did, so without further ado, from David A. Cox’s reminiscence of his fellow mathematician Steven Zucker (“‘Steve’ to everyone who knew him”; from here):
I met Steve in the fall of 1970 when we were entering graduate students at Princeton. We both studied algebraic geometry, though I was more algebraic (à la Grothendieck) while Steve was more transcendental (à la Griffiths). This made for some lively conversations. A few weeks after we met, we realized that we had to write a joint paper because the combination of our last names, in the usual alphabetical order, is remarkably obscene.
Less than a week into the existence of this blog, I posted about the workings of coincidence (see also Apophenia, from 2005); now I’ve got another splendid example. For over a month now I’ve been hacking away at Sokolov’s Между собакой и волком (see this post) with the invaluable help of (inter alia) Boguslawski’s valiant translation Between Dog and Wolf; I quote the following from his introduction (p. xxi):
The best example of a recurrent visual image is the ekphrastic description of Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, which provides a detailed portrayal of the setting of the novel in chapter 2 and is skillfully repeated in Note XVII. It becomes a source of many reappearing images in the novel (birds, boats, skaters, a frozen river and ponds, hunters and hunting dogs, a tavern) and, in addition, provides a connection to the theme of the seasons, since Bruegel created the famous painting as a part of the series called Months and depicted in it activities common in December and January.
Well, Barnes & Noble is having a 50% off sale on all Criterion Blu-rays and DVDs through August 1, and being an aficionado of Criterion’s superb editions I put together an order that included one of my favorite movies, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Зеркало (Mirror), and the last movie by another of my favorite directors, Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames. I knew nothing about the latter, but Criterion describes it enticingly:
Setting out to reconstruct the moments immediately before and after a photograph is taken, Kiarostami selected twenty-four still images—most of them stark landscapes inhabited only by foraging birds and other wildlife—and digitally animated each one into its own subtly evolving four-and-a-half-minute vignette, creating a series of poignant studies in movement, perception, and time. A sustained meditation on the process of image making, 24 Frames is a graceful and elegiac farewell from one of the giants of world cinema.
So I was excited to get the package today, and I tore off the plastic coverings and checked out the beautifully illustrated booklets they tuck into each box. The one for Mirror reminded me of an element I’d forgotten: “Alexei’s anecdotal recollection of a snowy day during the war prompts a visual echo of the composition of Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow.” Huh, I thought. Then I turned to the Kiarostami and found in Bilge Ebiri’s essay:
The first frame begins with Dutch master Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s immortal sixteenth-century painting Hunters in the Snow, a winter scene of a group of men and dogs looking over a small village beside a frozen lake. Slowly, Kiarostami’s digital embellishments emerge. Smoke rises from a chimney. A bird flits among the branches of a tree. A dog starts sniffing around. A herd of cows lumbers along in the distance. But amid all this movement, the figures of the original painting stand motionless. The hunters carry the same poses they did in 1565. Some birds may hop among the trees, but one remains frozen in the sky, captured midflight by Brueghel 450 years ago, its wings spread out forever.
I’m not saying it Means anything, but tell me that isn’t weird.
Another break from Sokolov, another great Bunin story (see this post): his 1916 “Петлистые уши” [Loopy Ears] (published in 1917, in Slovo 7) is far more interesting than it is made to sound in the usual summary (“man murders prostitute”). Yes, in the last sentence we learn that a prostitute has been murdered, but that’s just the donnée on which the story is based (apparently it was sparked by Bunin’s having read a newspaper account of such a killing). Bunin was polemicizing with his least favorite writer, Dostoevsky (one of the things he and Nabokov had in common), replacing the loquacious and tormented Raskolnikov with the sullen Adam Sokolovich, a former sailor who spends his time wandering around Petrograd, looking into shop windows, and hanging out in dives. At the start of the story we see him in such a dive, in the down-at-heels neighborhood near Five Corners (Пять углов, associated with Dostoevsky), haranguing a couple of sailors about the depravity of mankind (I quote the translation in Thomas Gaiton Marullo, “Crime without Punishment: Ivan Bunin’s ‘Loopy Ears’,” Slavic Review 40.4 [Winter 1981]: 614-624 [JSTOR]):
It is time to abandon the fairy tale concerning pangs of conscience, those moments which supposedly haunt the murderer. People have lied enough as it is — as if they shudder from the sight of blood. Enough of writing novels about crimes with their punishments; it is time to write about crimes without any punishments at all. The outlook of the criminal depends on his view of the murder — whether he can expect from his crime the gallows, reward, or praise. In truth, are they tormented, are they horrified, those who accept ancestral revenge, duels, war, revolution, and executions?
He goes on to mention the famous (in his day) French executioner Louis Deibler (who chopped off “exactly five hundred heads”), the violence in popular literature (including James Fenimore Cooper and the Bible), and the horrors of World War I (Bunin was writing two years into the war): the mass murder of Armenians by the Turks, the poisoning of wells by the Germans, and the bombing of Nazareth (I can find no reference to this — maybe a war rumor in 1916?). He concludes that it was only Raskolnikov who was ever tormented by murder, and only because his spiteful creator insisted on sticking Christ into all his trashy novels (“по воле своего злобного автора, совавшего Христа во все свои бульварные романы”). By the time he leaves his indifferent companions and heads out into nighttime Petrograd, oppressed by a wintry fog, half the story has gone by, and since Bunin does not waste sentences, we obviously need to give due weight to that conversation.
At this point we get a wonderful travelogue (Mark Aldanov quotes it at the start of his 1933 “Об искусстве Бунина” [On the art of Bunin] and says “I don’t know any description in Russian literature equal to it,” concluding his detailed analysis of the story by calling it the best of Bunin’s short works): Sokolovich walks down Nevsky Prospect, seeing a fallen horse by the famous Palkin restaurant (at #47 since 1874), crossing the Anichkov Bridge over the Fontanka, seeing the reddish gleam of the clock on the City Duma, reaching the Kazan Cathedral and entering the Dominique Cafe (that translation of the article in the Encyclopaedia of St. Petersburg for some reason uses the spelling “Dominic,” though they correctly give the name of the Swiss founder as Dominique Ritz Aport; the 1914 Baedecker calls it Dominique), where he sits in a dark corner, orders a black coffee, and fends off an undercover cop. These pages are clearly meant to compete with similar descriptions of the city in Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Bely, and they do so brilliantly. At 1 AM the restaurant closes and he goes back out onto the frigid street:
At night in the fog Nevsky is terrifying. It is deserted, dead, the haze that befogs it seems a part of that Arctic haze that comes from the end of the world, that place where something incomprehensible to human reason is hidden and that is called the pole.
Ночью в туман Невский страшен. Он безлюден, мертв, мгла, туманящая его, кажется частью той самой арктической мглы, что идет оттуда, где конец мира, где скрывается нечто непостижимое человеческим разумом и называется Полюсом.
(I thought “в туман” must be a typo for “в тумане,” but all editions seem to have it.) That’s one of the many passages I marked in the margin as worthy of repeating aloud and enjoying repeatedly, and I quote it here as a sample — the story is full of such writing, and for anyone who loves good prose it’s worth learning Russian just to read Bunin.
At this point he sees the prostitute, Korolkova, calls a cab, takes her to a cheap hotel in the outskirts (“в таинственную глушь ночных столичных окраин”), snaps at the sleepy номерной (valet/concierge/boots), orders champagne and grapes, and leaves early in the morning (upon which the valet enters the room and sees the body). It’s a grim description of dehumanized humans and efficiently produces the effect Bunin wanted, but it’s not what the story is “about.” It is not, as Victor Terras once called it, “a chilling study of sadism” — or rather, that’s merely one of the many things it is, and one of the least interesting. The story is about the story, all of it; like a poem, it’s a machine made of words.
I should mention the title, which gives almost as much trouble as Bad Grass. The first word, петлистый, is a perfectly normal (though uncommon) adjective derived from петля ‘loop; noose’; Nabokov — who was uncommonly fond of it, using it in his story Возвращение Чорба [“The Return of Chorb”: петлистые тени листьев], in the novels Камера обскура [Laughter in the Dark: петлистое шоссе] and Дар [The Gift: с петлистыми «рцы» и «покоями»], in the memoir Другие берега [eventually transmogrified into Speak, Memory: в петлистых тенях дышащей в такт аллеи], and several times in his translation of Lolita [любимые, петлистые, детские каракули; воспользоваться петлистым, ленивым шоссе Зед; пошел сквозь петлистый огонь солнца] — rendered it in English as “loopy,” and that’s probably the best translation here (though it can also be Englished as “twisting,” “winding,” “meandering,” and the like). The problem is that the title comes from Sokolovich’s tavern conversation, where he calls himself a degenerate (выродок) and says that you can recognize degenerates, geniuses, vagrants, and murderers by their loopy ears, which resemble the loop/noose with which they’re hanged: “У выродков, у гениев, у бродяг и убийц уши петлистые, то есть похожие на петлю, вот на ту самую, которой и давят их.” And since the Russian plays on the resemblance to the word for the hangman’s noose, Robert Bowie, who translated it for the collection Night of Denial: Stories and Novellas, felt impelled to render the title “Noosiform Ears.” Come on, dude. For that matter, he’s not good on names in general: he calls Deibler “Deblair” and Dominique “Dominick.” But it doesn’t look like a bad translation, and since there are so few English versions of Bunin out there, I recommend it.
Oh, and one last thing. Marullo quotes a Soviet critic as follows:
L. Nikulin writes that Bunin was one of the few Russian writers of the age who did not subscribe to militaristic tones in his writings. Nor did he see the war as providing the potential for the spiritual rebirth of mankind (see L. Nikulin, “Ivan Bunin,” in Ivan Bunin, Sobranie sochinenii, 5 vols. [Moscow, 1956]…).
שלום! אנחנו "דגש קל", בלוג העוסק בענייני שפה. מאז ינואר 2020 לא יצא לנו לפרסם רשומה, ומאז מרס 2020 *מחווה בנפנופי ידיים סביב*, אך עתה בשלה העת והגיע השיימינג העצמי עד נפש, לכן אוריד מעל לבי את שהיה לי לכתוב כבר בראשית תקופת המגפה ואולי ייפרץ הסכר להמשך פוסטיאדה כימינו כקדם.
התופעה הסוג-של-לשונית הראשונה שהטרידה אותי ברמת פוסט-לדגש היתה קלישאה שהחלה לפשות, מעין סנובון או תבנית או אלוהים יודע מה, מהצורה X בימי קורונה. בא לי להגיד שהמופעים הראשונים השמו במקום המשתנה את המילה "אהבה", כי זו הווריאציה הברורה ביותר על הספר "אהבה בימי כולרה" למארקס, אבל קשה לבדוק דבר כזה.
אני כן יודע שהתבנית התפשטה בקצב מסחרר: כבר באפריל 2020 הסתובב סרט בזה השם. מאידך גיסא, נראה שהיא נמאסה די מהר. לפי התרשים להלן, הנוגע לגרסה העברית שלה, העם בציון התעשת תוך כחודשיים.
גוגל טרנדז של הדו-תמנית "בימי קורונה"
מעניין אותי לדעת אם החצי-קירבה הפונטית של המילה קורונה לכולרה שיחקה פה תפקיד. האם היינו חוטפים גל של "הוראה בימי סארס"? "השקעות בימי אבולה"? "וולנס בימי צהבת נגיפית"? יש דרך מדעית אמינה לבדוק, אבל בואו נוותר עליה בשלב זה.
הערה מנהלתית: אם עוד יש לנו קוראים, אפשר להגיב עם הצעת נושאים לפוסטים בימי פוסט-קורונה, לשלוח בהמייל, להתנדב לרשומת אורח, וככל הימינו-כקדמים כקדם.
