Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

un retour à le raisin

Ray Davis over at Pseudopodium has posted an entry of great and perfect bloggitude. It’s about a book I’d never heard of being touted on a blog I’d never read.

Laughing at nonsense, mourning dullness, protesting insularity, mocking arrogant sycophants, and resisting a bullying mob all remain worthwhile exercises. But the extent to which such pleasures are initiated by the Franco-American brand—as opposed to pseudo-free-market one-party-system-backed economics, religious orthodoxies, identity allegiances which reinforce the injustices that shaped them, the Great Books gated community, pop evolutionary psychology, or tin Stalins, for example—seems strictly a local matter. As proven by some publications of our beloved ALSC, “Theory” is not a necessary condition for worthless blather. And, as proven by some “Theorists”, humans sometimes find it possible to take ethical action even against group pressure. [...]

For that matter closest to my heart, some of my favorite books of the 1970s and 1980s came from writers later to be classified as canonical Theorists. And if their books’ quality declined inversely to number of disciples and citations, well, couldn’t as little be said of Goethe? And if the ones who didn’t decline simply disappeared (Alice Jardine, where art thou?), hasn’t that happened to other dedicated academics?

Please, gentle reader, go and read it. If, for anything, Mr Davis should be remembered for his delightful encomium of orange bitters. La!

alltägliches böse

Via Unfogged, pornish pages full of absurdist dittoheads displaying G’t’mo Pride sartorially. I guess I should get out more often. I’m the first to admit that the fat, greasy Limpopo has dropped off my radar, but I’d assumed he was dead, just another drug casuality, rather than a latter-day, born-again Malcolm McClaren pushing a t-shirt agendum.

army-navy zhargon

I’ve been meaning to scan the following image for a while now, but just haven’t got around to it, but finally Languagehat’s entry on a New York Times article on the SIL Ethnologue which mentioned Max Weinreich’s famous linguistic maxim (a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot) pushed me over the edge. Click on the image below to see the full paragraph for a better context.

[Max Weinreich. “der yivo un di problemen fun undzer tsayt”, pp 3–18 in yivo bletter yanuar-yuni 1945 (nyu-york), p. 13.]

kniesbüggel

My friend Ralf is here from Bonn, and that always means that I’m learning new bits and pieces of my favorite German dialect, Kölsch. The word for today was: Mömmesfresser (skin-flint, miser), about which Prof Dr Wrede has to say:

Mömmesfresser m.: der seinen eigenen Nasendreck ißt, sich aus lauter Geiz kein richtiges Essen gönnt; Geizhals.

“Oh,” I said, “a Kniesbüggel,” (pinch-purse) using the term I’d learned two decades ago.

Mömmes m., -e: dem vornehmlich im köln. ripuar. Gebiet verbreiten u. geläufigen Wort liegt mom zugrunde, mnl., ndl. mom (masker), mommen (een mom of masker andoen), afries. (um 1400) mom(m)e; altköln. (16, Jh.) mommen gaen u. um 1400 sich vermummen, eigentlich sich dicht, dick einhüllen, einwickeln. 1. a. eingehüllter, eingewikkelter, übertragen verschlossener, einsilbiger, mürischer, unangenehmer Mensch. Su ne Mömmes, dä Mömmes. RA: eine zom Mömmesje halde, zum Narren, vgl. auch zom Tömmesje h. b. blinge Mömmesje spille, Blindekuh spielen, s. bling, blind. 2. getrockneter Nasenschleim, in dieser Bedeutung Eingewickeltes, Eingerolltes zu verstehen.

quatsch

Yesterday’s entry about French galimatias ‘nonsense’ reminded me this morning of a German word I heard oftentimes in Kölsch Fisimatentche ‘humbug, excuses’. There was even a folk etymology that went along with the word, from the French visite ma tente applied in earnest by Napoleonic soldiers occupying Cologne and seeking a little comfort in the arms of some Rhenish maidens. When I finally looked it up in Wrede’s neuer kölnischer Sprachschatz (z. B., Maach nit lang Fisimatentcher un eß, gesagt, wenn ein Gast sich beim Essen ziert), I was pleased to learn that it’s a standard High German word, and a quick trip to Kluge revealed an even stranger Latin etymology:

Fisimatenten Plur. ‘Flausen, Umständlichkeiten, Ausflüchte’. Visae patentes (literae) ‘ordnungsgemäß verdientes Patent’, im 16. Jh. als visepatentes reichlich belegt, wird durch spöttische Auffassung des Bürokratischen ‘überflüssige Schwierigkeit’. Unter Einfluß von visament ‘Zierat’ tritt m and die Stelle des p, so schon 1499 „it is ein viserunge und ein visimatent‟. Alle Nachweise bei Spitzer, Teuthonista 1, 319 und Schoppe, Mitt. d. schles. Ges. f. Volkskde. 29, 298.

galimafrée

An entry posted over on Language Hat caught my eye. So, here’s what Ernst Gamillscheg, in his etymologisches Wörterbuch der französischen Sprache, had to say on the origin of gallimaufr(e)y:

galimafrée „geröstete Fleischreste‟, „unappetitliches Essen‟. 14 Jhdt. calimafree, Guernesey galifrée „Leckerbissen‟, norm. gallifre „Eßgierieg‟, galigâs „wüster Genuß‟, angev. galimache „Mund‟ u. ä.; es kreuzen sich in dem Wort wohl mehrere Stämme, so bâfrer, gueule u.ä. vielleicht auch afrz. gale „Vergnügen‟, „Lust‟ so daß etwa ein afrz. *gale-bafrer „nach Herzenslust essen‟ die ursprünglichste Form sein könnte.

After rereading LH’s entry, I noticed that Dallas mentioned galimatias which is the next entry in Gamillscheg’s dictionary:

galimatias „verworrenses Zeug‟ 16. Jhdt. aus neulat. (gallimathia), d. i. gelehrte Zusammensetzung von (galli), der Bezeichnung der Disputaten bei den Doktordissertationen der Pariser Universität im 16. Jhdt., und gr. (-μαθεια) in Wörtern wie χρηστομαθεια, s. chréstomathie, bezeichnet also ursprünglich „Wissen eines Gallus‟; dieses wohl zu lat. (gallus) „Hahn‟, vielleicht in Weiterbildung von ergoter „disputieren‟, das volketymologisch mit ergot „Hahnensporn‟ zusammengebracht wurde. A. Nelson, Gallimatias, in Strena phil. Upsaliensis, Festskrift Per Person 1922, vgl. ZRP 42, 731 f.

galimatias verballhornt aus garrimantia bei Albertus Magnus, dieses scherzhafte Bildung nach lat. garrire „schwatzen‟ und μαντεια „Weissagung‟, Eitrem. ZRP 38, 357, ist historisch zu wenig gestützt; zu grammatica Schuchardt ZRP 31, 658; Salverda de Grave, Neoph. 2, 146, ist lautlich unverständlich; desgleichen zu ballematia, das in Glossen als „obszöne Lieder, Spiel‟ bezeugt ist, FEW 222; zu bearnisch Galimatié „Name eines unbekannten Landes‟ und dieses zu gavots, s. d. Sain. ZRP 31, 265 ist beides lautlich und unbegrifflich unverständlich; zu gr. χαλιμαζειν „die Herrschaft über sich selbst verlieren‟, über χαλιμαζεις „Unsinn!‟ in der Anrede, Justesen, Banjœwangi 1926 (lithografiert), müßte historisch für Byzanz begalubigt werden.

gog magog

Iman Jacob Wilkens, a Dutch economist, has a website (and a book) that shows how ancient Troy was not located in Hisarlik, Turkey, as Schliemann surmised, but outside Cambridge on the Gog Magog Hills.

The Greeks did not know that the Trojans who once lived in that area were migrants, as the collective memory of this fact was lost during the Dark Ages (1200-750 BC).

From 1180 to 1100 Hissarlik was indeed inhabited by a non-local people. They were the survivors of the greatest war of prehistory, when Troy on the Gog Magog Hills in Cambridgeshire, England, was destroyed. Here, countless bronze weapons and other remains of a major war in the late Bronze Age have been found.

The great migrations of the second millennium BC brought also Achaeans, Troy’s enemies, from regions along the Atlantic coast of the Continent to the Mediterranean where they caused the collapse of many civilisations.

The name Achaeans means Watermen or Sea People (the Gothic acha for water or stream is cognate with Latin aqua). The Greek historian Herodotus (fifth century BC) confirms that Pelasgians (Sea Peoples) had settled in Greece long before his time. They founded Athens, renamed places, merged with the local population and adopted their language.

There’s also a lecture online that Mr Wilkens gave before the Herodoteans (a Cantabrigian Classics student society) in 1992.

sclavick jauffrey

I recently read an article in the English Wikipedia about an alleged ancient pagan text called the Book of Veles. Transcribed from wooden planks found during the Russian Civil War, it was later transported to Beograd, where the planks disappeared into the furnace the Second World War. The manuscript finally surfaced in the ’50s in San Francisco in an emigré Russian newspaper. The writing system used is a curious mixture of Greek, Cyrillic, and Devanagri (!). And for adherents of the Luvians at Troy theory, there is a Trojan War episode thhat nicely ties in with my Monmutensic entry title. There are two Russian and one Ukrainian translations online. On one site, it is referred to as the Slavic Vedas. A. Asov has a site dedicated to it, and it seems to form the sacred writings of Slavic Neopagans. It can be seen as an East Slavic answer to the Slovene-Venetic correspondence (see pro and con) which has also flourished on the Web.