stoutfellow

Why is there no convenient word for the opposite of "fault"? (Bad thing happens - "It's his fault!" Good thing happens - "It's his ???!") (No, "doing" doesn't cut it - that can be bad or good.)

Any options?

A current article in Atlantic contains the following: "[T]he FSB has built an empire in the same way, making minigarchs out of rank-and-file FSB officers whose salaries don’t square with the posh lifestyles they lead." I draw your attention to the coinage "minigarch", presumably a portmanteau of "mini" and "oligarch".

Of course, that's a bastardization reanalysis of "oligarch"; an oligarchy is a state in which there are many few [1] ("oligo") powerful people ("archon"). [I am no doubt messing up the precise Greek, but the roots are common enough...] Evidently the "g" has been reinterpreted as being part of the second morpheme rather than the first. (Compare, in English, "a nadder" > "an adder", or "helicopter", originally "helico-pter" ("helix-wing"), being interpreted as "heli-copter" > "copter".)

Just an oddity....

[1] Thanks to ndrosen for catching my error on this one.

Seen on Twitter:

My therapist told me "Write letters to the people you hate, and then burn them." Did that, but now I don't know what to do with the letters.

How did I reach this age without having learned that "bowler" and "derby" are two names for the same kind of hat?

I've known what a derby looked like since childhood, thanks to Casper the Ghost's friend Spooky and his "doiby". I've also had a good image of a bowler, courtesy of John Steed of The Avengers. It finally occurred to me this morning to ask what the difference was. I googled both terms and got a set of images, which looked identical; reference to the actual Wikipedia articles revealed that this was not a coincidence.

I feel kind of dumb, just now. (Don't worry; it will pass.)

Yesterday, being for some reason bored, I took a trip up the Great River and ordered some books.

In electronic form: Martha Wells, The Wizard Hunters (one of her Ile-Rien books; I read and enjoyed The Death of the Necromancer, so decided to dig further into the milieu); Harry Connolly, The Way into Chaos; and Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning. (The latter two have been recommended on File 770 and/or Making Light. F770 has been entirely too enthusiastic about getting books onto my to-get list lately....)

In paper: Bill Willingham, Wolves (the eighth book of "Fables"; I mostly buy F/SF in bit form lately, but graphic novels need more space); Eric Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (I've gotten bits and snatches of info about that particular Dark Age, but this book's been recommended for pulling it all together); Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe 900-1900 AD (which just sounded interesting when I heard of it); and Viveka Velupillai, Pidgins, Creoles and Mixed Languages (creoles have been an interest of mine since a clash with Paula Sanch on the LMB list some years back; this is a more recent study than anything I already have).

The e-books are on my Kindle, though they'll have to wait their turn; the paper are scheduled to arrive next weekend or so. We shall see.

(This burst of activity is just about the only thing I've done in the last few days. Much lethargy; I don't even feel like playing Skyrim.)

(I have, however, come up with a single equation which partially answers a geometric question I'd been fussed about for a couple of months. So there's that, at least.)

The word "Arctic" is ultimately derived from the Greek word arktos, "bear"; it's a reference to the Greater and Lesser Bears, and thus to the Pole Star.

One wag at Making Light pointed out that the polar circles are thus "Bear Circle" and "The Circle Away From Bears".

Almost exactly nine years ago, I complained about some of the Leader names in Civilization IV. In particular, I was bugged by the name given to one of the Chinese Leaders: Qin Shi Huang. I asserted that it should have been Qin Shi Huangdi or just Shi Huangdi.

I am currently reading The Dark Forest, by Cixin Liu; it's the sequel to his The Three Body Problem, which won the Hugo for Best Novel last year. Liu himself is a native speaker of Mandarin, and the book I'm reading is a translation from that language. Part of the book involves people who have taken various historical figures as their on-line avatars. One of these is identified as... "Qin Shi Huang".

Is there something I'm missing here? Is the Qin emperor often referred to in China by that name?

Edit: It seems so. I guess I owe the Sid Meiers team an apology.

I just read an interesting post from Linguist List, a review of a book by Joseph E. Emonds and Jan Terje Faarlund with the above title.

As background: in the century or so before the Norman Conquest, there were two Germanic languages spoken widely in what is now England, the West Germanic language called Old English, and the North Germanic Old Norse. The latter had been introduced by Danish invaders; the Danish kings Canute and Hardicanute even ruled all of England, a generation or two before the Conquest. After 1066, Norman French rolled over the island, and both languages pretty much disappeared from the written record. Afterward, a new Germanic language resurfaced - Middle English. As the name suggests, the standard assumption has been that it was a descendant, much modified, of Old English, but with significant Old Norse influences. (Among other things, IIRC, the third-person plural pronouns "they/them/their" are of Norse origin - and the borrowing of pronouns is a very rare phenomenon!)

The authors of the book under review propose, largely on syntactic grounds, that Middle English (and, perforce, Modern English) is best understood as a descendant of Old Norse, rather than Old English. I've read a fair bit about the development of English, but am in no way qualified to judge; still, it's quite intriguing. (There's a third contender, the theory that Middle English was a creole developed from the collision of the two older languages, but the books on creoles that I've read seem to be dubious about that one.)

The review is here:
http://www.linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?SubID=36048357

The Taos Toolbox 2015 entry on File 770 today includes various quips from a writing workshop (at Taos, natch). One of them caught my eye:

“You can’t start with an ‘Interlude’ because it’s not between anything — it’s just a ‘Lude’.”

Without reading that, I might never have realized that "interlude" is related to "prelude" and "postlude". Obvious once you notice it, but I never had.

[I also just got a one-handed grip on the mixed classes, in my research. It's slippery, and I need to get my other hand on it. Still, that's another justification for the mood-indicator on this post.]

Does the common image of a small child saying "I'm helping!" have an identifiable origin? I've seen it several times, in very different settings.