#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…

I learned a couple of new words from this fascinating “interactive” NY Times article by Abraham Z. Cooper, a pulmonary and critical care physician and associate professor of medicine (archived versions don’t seem to work, because of the interactivity, but…

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,…

Ah, in my younger days how I would have lusted for the Gold Medal of Philology! To get up on a stage before a glittering international crowd and give a carefully prepared speech humbly acknowledging that my ground-breaking work on the Indo-European…

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.…

I offer you a 25-second clip of a man telling a story. (I used TinyURL because the original URL would provide too much of a hint.) This is from an old LH post, so if you’ve been here longer than two decades you might have encountered it before!…

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…

This week’s NYT T Magazine has a surprisingly interesting How to Be Cultured section that has personal picks in various categories like film, art, food, and so on.…

Decades ago I got a copy of the old Penguin edition of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by Danilo Kiš for $2.95, probably at the Strand (the currently available edition is selling for $61.54 at Amazon); the other day my eye lit on it and, in the mysterious way…

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:

This is about as niche as niche gets, but I’m always up for an obsessive investigation into some terminally obscure phenomenon, especially when it involves type, and I figure I’m not the only one, so I hereby present Jonathan Chan’s search for the origin…

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…