My friend, Philip Gelb, (shakuhachi player and teacher and vegetarian chef) sent me an email saying how he is looking for some stinky tofu (臭豆腐 chòu dòufǔ). This fired off some memories. I’ve had stinky tofu a couple of times, once as a condiment with a since forgotten dish and another time as an ingredient. I requested the latter at my friend Stephen Hung’s restaurant, Super Wok, asking for garlic sauteed water spinach (空心菜 kōngxīncài Ipomoea aquatica) with stinky tofu. He was incredulous, but picked up the ingredients and had Jack the chef whip up a batch for me. Then everybody watched to see me try to eat it. I enjoyed it and finished off the dish. The smell reminds me of a good strong cheese, the texture is creamy, and the taste strong and delicious. I know that Phil also likes nattō (納豆 fermented bean curd), which is Japanese and also an acquired taste. If I ever get to Taiwan, I must go to Dai’s House of Stinky Tofu (獨臭之家) for dinner.
A new, Victorian, prescriptivist English grammar has arrived from a bookseller in Canada:
The severe Roman bestowed upon the language of his country the appellation of patrius sermo, the paternal or national speech; but we, deriving from the domesticity of Saxon life a truer and tenderer appreciation of the best and purest source of linguistic instruction, more happily name our home-born English the mother-tongue. The tones of the native language are the medium through which the affections and intellect are first addressed, and they are to the heart and head of infancy what the nutriment drawn from the maternal breast is to the physical frame. “Speech,” in the words of Heyse, “is the earliest organic act of free self-consciousness, and the sense of our personality is first developed in the exercise of the family of speech.” Without entering upon the speculations of the Nominalists and the Realists, we must admit that, in the process of ratiocination properly called thought, the mind acts only by words. “Cogito, ergo sum, I think, therefore I am,” said Descartes. Whether this is a logical conclusion or not, we habitially, if not necessarily, connect words, thought, and self-recognizing existence, as conditions each of both the others, and hence it is that we have little or no recollection of that portion of our life which proceeded our acquaintance with language.
[...]
In reasoning from the past to the present, we are apt to forget that Protestant Christianity and the invention of printing have entirely changed the outward conditions of at least Gothic, not to say civilized, humanity, and so distinguished this new phase of Indo-European life from that old world which lies behind us, that, though all which was true of individual man in the days of Plato and of Seneca and of Abelard is true now, yet most which was then conceived to be true of man as a created and dependent, or as a social being, is at this day recognized as either false or abnormal. The reciprocal relations between the means and the ends of human life are reversed, and the conscious, deliberate aims and voluntary processes and instrumentalities of intellectual action are completely revolutionized. Hence, we are constantly in danger of error, when, in the economy of social man, we apply ancient theories to modern facts, and deduce present effect or predict future consequences from causes which, in remote ages, have produced results analogous to recent or expected phenomena.
[George P. Marsh. 1859. Lectures on the English Language, pp.1f. & 3.]
Alfred Ayres, The Verbalist, 1895, p.109:
Jeopardize. This is a modern word which we could easily do without, as it is neither more nor less than its venerable progenitor to jeopard, which is greatly preferred by all careful writers.
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994, pp.570f.:
jeopardize. Richard Grant White called jeopardize “a foolish and intolerable word” in 1879, and he was not the only one who thought so. A popular view among American critics in the 19th century was that the proper verb was jeopard, an older word which, according to the OED, had fallen into disuse by the end of the 1600s. The first record of jeopardize is from 1646, but there is no further evidence of its use until it turns up in Noah Webster’s American Dictionary in 1828 with the note, “This is a modern word used by respectable writers in America, but synonymous with jeopard, and therefore useless.” Useless or not, jeopardize became increasingly common, both in America and in Great Britain, as a ttempts to ressurect jeopard met with predictable failure. The voices of protest against jeopardize, all of which have been American, began to die down by about 1900, and it was not long before this minor controversy was entirely forgotten. It has now been many decades since anyone found anything wrong with jeopardize.
Thanks to reader ACW for pointing me at a discussion of the progressive passive in the OED. The entry for be, III.15:
15. With the present participle, forming continuous varieties of the tenses. a. With active signification. In OE only wæs was so used, forming a kind of imperfect; the present was in use by the 13th c. In later times this was confused iwth a formation upon the vbl. sb. of which see examples under A prep.
1 13. The OE he wæs feohtende, and ME ‘he was a-fighting’ meet in the modern ‘he was fighting.’b. With passive signification: in such expressions as ‘the ark was building,’ the last word was originally the gerund or verbal substantive, and the full expression was ‘the ark was a-building or in building’ of which see instances under prep.
1 13.c. The ambiguity of the construction ‘is building’ in the two preceding senses has led in modern Eng. to the use in the latter sense of ‘is being built,’ formed upon the present pple. passive ‘being built.’
Otto Jespersen also discusses this in A Modern English Grammar, volume V:
9.2.2. Like other nexus-substantives gerunds were originally indifferent to the distinction between active and passive meaning; accordingly in some contexts they are still understood passively. [...]
9.2.3. A passive sense is particularly frequent after the verbs need, want, require, deserve, bear, which are combined with an infinitive in the active sense [...] Di M 480 That needs no accounting for [...]
To avoid ambiguity, however, a new passive gerund developed from about 1600, and now we distinguish “they are fond of teasing” and “they are not fond of being teased” [...] Sid. Arc. 1.11 for fear of being mistaken [...]
9.2.6. This passive is now of everyday usage.
So, those Victorian grammarians had it wrong. The progressive passive hits literary English during Elizabethan times. As for the preposition a: “Action: with a verbal sb. taken actively. With be: engaged in. arch. or dial. In literary Eng. the a is omitted, and the verbal sb. treated as a particple agreeing with the subject, and governing its case, to be fishing, fighting, making anything. But most of the southern dialects, and the vulgar speech both in England and America retain the earlier usage.”
I recently bought a copy of Alfred Ayres’ The Verbalist, a 19th-century Strunk & White kind of prescriptive grammar in smallish octavo pocketbook size. It’s structured pretty straightforwardly as an alphabetized list of short entries, except that halfway through, there comes a huge 10 to 20 page section on the progressive passive construction. It’s called is being built, and evidently its subject was a huge concern of Victorian grammar mavens. The entry starts with huge undigested quotations from other mid-19th-century grammarians (e.g., Bullions, Grant White, et al.). I’m embarassed to admit that I had never run across this 150-year-old controversy. It seems that starting in the late 18th century, the older passive construction the house is building began to be replaced by the one we have now (uncontroversially) the house is being built. About the only remnant of the older construction that I still have in my linguistic ragbag is Time she is a-wasting. (And I’ve always wondered what that reduced vowel represented.) This degradation of the Anglic tongue seems to have dropped entirely off the radar screen of the John Simonses of the world. How sad.
There is properly no passive form, in English corresponding to the progressive form in the active voice, except where it is made by the participle ing, in a passive sense; thus, ‘The house is building’; ‘The garments are making’; ‘Wheat is selling,’ etc. An attempt has been made by some grammarians, of late, to banish such expressions from the language, thought they have been used in all time past by the best writers, and to justify and defend a clumsy solecism, which has been recently introduced chiefly through the newspaper press, but which has gained such currency, and is becoming so familiar to the ear, that it seems likely to prevail, with all its uncouthness and deformity. I refer to such expressions as ‘The house is being built’; ‘The letter is being written’; ‘The mine is being worked’; ‘The news is being telegraphed,’ etc., etc.