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A friend who found the word dido in a crossword puzzle fell into a rabbit hole, as she put it, and came out with this Stack Exchange thread that starts with a question about the odd phrase “conniption dido” (apparently used only by the questioner’s great-grandmother) but quickly turns into an examination of the second word, partly focused on the unlikely but apparently irresistible “connection between the term dido and Dido of the Aeneid.” There are a great many piquant responses, of which I’ll reproduce two:

**Cutting didos is an antique expression. Comedian Fred Allen in his 1950 book “Much Ado About Me” mentions sitting in the parlor with his grandmother in 1915 and “cutting didos” (clowning around to kill time apparently–this was before smart phones and you had to do SOMETHING with your time. You could also “walk in the woods like Beethoven”!! What a fun, archaic phrase!! **

  answered Nov 8, 2015 at 3:28
  Tony Rizzi

My grandmother’s memoirs quote her father (1930s, Oklahoma) talking about his 1860s Kentucky childhood. A hen had hatched some duck eggs, and the new ducklings had jumped in a pond.

“Daddy, who had followed to watch, said the hen was absolutely beside herself trying to get those babies out of that water…stalking back and forth, and clucking and cackling at them while the little ducks completely ignored her. Daddy said she did ‘flip-flops and die-does[sp]’.”

The phrase in our family meant someone who was completely freaking out or acting out.

  answered Nov 10, 2023 at 19:40
  Nom DaGruyere

The OED (entry from 1895) says “Origin uncertain” and has this as its first citation:

1807 A jolly Irishman, who cut as many didos as I could for the life of me.
J. R. Shaw, Life ix. 140

Thanks, Brooke!

James Folta writes at Literary Hub about what is alleged to be an unfair business practice:

Translator and writer Lin King released a statement on Instagram on Tuesday laying out her claim of copyright infringement of her Booker-Prize-winning English translation of Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-Zǐ, originally written in Mandarin and titled Táiwān Màn Yóu Lù (《臺灣漫遊錄》).

King discovered that a European publisher was “planning to release a translation of the book that was translated from my English text,” known as a “relay translation” where a book is translated into a third language from a previous translation. King sent “repeated warnings” to this publisher that this new translation wasn’t legal.

“As I am the sole copyright owner of the English Taiwan Travelogue,” she writes, “an unauthorized third-language translation violates my copyright.” King has begun legal proceedings against this unnamed European publisher.

King’s defense of translation as an art form are the most moving parts of her statement. […]

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I recently had the chance to see Nizhalkuthu (നിഴൽക്കുത്ത്, Shadow Kill); I think it’s my first movie in Malayalam, so I kept my linguist hat on as I watched, and one repeated word was സ്നേഹം (snēhaṁ) ‘love.’ Once the movie was over I looked it up, and was astonished to learn that its source, Sanskrit स्नेह॑ (snéha) ‘oil, grease, fat; smoothness, glossiness; moisture; tenderness, love’ is from Proto-Indo-European *snóygʷʰos ‘snow’! That’s one of the more unusual semantic transitions I’m aware of, and I thought I’d pass it along.

I just discovered that the prinsessor-loving Des’s long-running blog Desbladet has vanished from the internet, and if you turn to the Internet Archive you get the dreaded “Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.” If you go to the site itself you get: “After a long period of inactivity, this diary was moved into long-term storage. Its archived entries were not deleted.” But they charge you $19 to begin “the restore,” and who knows what you get for that — one post? An emoji?

WTF? In the early years of LH I linked to it approximately one zillion times, and now all those links are dead without recourse? I begged him to get off Diaryland, but no, he liked it there. And now look. I’m pissed.

Alena Belova sent me a link to her essay The Word for Beautiful Was the Word for Moon and I thought it was interesting enough to post:

Say ya qamar to someone in Arabic — you moon — and, at least in my experience of hearing it, it still lands, even as it starts to sound a little old-fashioned. Not like the moon. The moon. A whole face, a whole person, folded into the roundest, brightest thing in the night. The compliment is worn enough that it can be reached for the way an English speaker says gorgeous — automatically, barely hearing the picture inside the word. There is a full moon rising over the Corniche and a child is being told she is one.

The word for moon, of course, is not the word for beautiful. Qamar means moon and only moon; the beauty is something a thousand years of poets loaded onto it. But that loading is the whole story, and it is worth stopping the reflex, because the picture inside the word is stranger than the compliment lets on.

We think we know what this metaphor means. Moon, woman, beauty, romance — the modern chain feels obvious, almost too obvious, the stuff of song lyrics and baby names. But the chain is younger than it looks, and at least two of its links were forged late. The moon in classical Arabic verse was not always a woman, and not always even a compliment. Read enough of the poems and one recurring logic becomes hard to miss: what the image tends to measure is less femininity, or even beauty in the abstract, than a specific physical event — a bright, round face surfacing out of darkness, the way the full moon surfaces out of a black sky. (That reading is mine, a pattern drawn from the examples, not a doctrine the poets signed.) Much of the rest — the gender, the sweetness, the sense that calling a woman a moon is the natural thing to do — got written onto the image later, by people who made the old shape mean their own thing. Which is the pattern this whole series keeps finding: the sign is usually older than the story we tell about it.

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Joel of Far Outliers is posting passages from Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta, and I found this one interesting as an example of a phenomenon that has more than once struck me in my readings of history: we tend to assume great national decisions are made by top leaders after conferring with their top aides/ministers/experts, but in fact they’re often driven by people much farther down the totem pole, like the ones described here. But this paragraph is also of interest from a linguistic point of view:

This sort of painstaking institutional groundwork was carried out by middle-ranking military planners, most of whom did not even attend the liaison meetings of the top leaders. They were aptly called bakuryo, which literally means “officers behind the curtains.” In the olden days, the word baku (curtains) had a double meaning in explaining concentration of power. One was political, synonymous with the government, as in bakufu (shogunate), meaning “a regime behind the curtains.” The other was strategic, alluding to the makeshift curtains used in encampments during field combat to identify the headquarters, where strategies were secretly debated among the select few. In prewar Japan, bakuryo had come to assume both the political task of negotiating and liaising with different sources of power and the more practical task of planning strategies. Because of the pivotal role bakuryo would come to assume in directing Japan’s policy after July, the term evoked the image of war planners furtively creating bellicose policies in the name of assisting and advising their superiors.

When I read this, I immediately thought of the pieces of cloth draped around the area where the military leaders are relaxing at the beginning of Kurosawa’s Ran (his version of King Lear, and highly recommended), which could well be described as “makeshift curtains used in encampments”; you can see them briefly at the ten-second mark in this trailer. And the translation “curtain” seems too limited; Wiktionary defines 幕 as “curtain; screen; tent,” which would appear to fit what you see in the movie quite well. I am curious to know what the Japanophones among us have to say.

The OED has bakufu (entry from 2020) cited first in 1869 (“After the Shimabara revolt, in 1637, the Bakufu ordered the country to be closed”); the etymology reads:

< Japanese bakufu (13th cent. with reference to the government and its chief; 11th cent. denoting the camp itself, earliest with reference to China) < a Middle Chinese expression with the literal sense ‘tent government’ (compare Chinese mùfǔ office of a commanding general in ancient China), so called with reference to the command headquarters during military campaigns.

Tamlin Magee (last seen here in 2024) has a piece in BBC Future about the Russian cant language called fenya:

When would you hide in a raspberry? Why don’t you want to be a sixer? And what does it mean to go to the akademiya? Russian often takes slang to complex levels, such as through Mat, its linguistic system for obscenities. But even a “matershchinnik” (a well-practiced master of swearing) might find the above phrases nonsensical – unless, of course, they are familiar with Fenya, the language of Russia’s colossal prison system.

This language of criminals has been deployed by underworld figures for centuries to puzzle and evade. But during the 20th Century, its curious mixture of double entendre and loan words ballooned in Soviet prisons.

With German, Greek and Yiddish influences, Fenya is brimming with confusing hidden meanings. In Russian, “babki” literally means “grandmas”, but in Fenya, it also means “money”. “Varezhka” means a “mitten” but also a “mouth, while “khalyava”, derived from the Hebrew for “milk”, is a “freebie” or “giveaway”.

A single word in Fenya can contain hidden codes known only to speakers of the slang. And just as it once bewildered prison camp guards, its language tricks are now being being used online, obscuring the intent of cyber-criminals and confusing authorities.

There’s much that’s familiar to any Russophone — everybody knows мусор [musor] ‘trash’ refers to cops — but it’s a useful rundown of the history involved:
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I occasionally post about a movie that prominently features language, and today’s installment is To the Ends of the Earth. Criterion Channel is currently featuring a dozen Kiyoshi Kurosawa films, and having worked my way up to 2019 I gave this one a try. (My favorite is still his first big hit, 1997’s Cure, but I like his style so much I don’t mind watching even the less successful ones.) It’s about a reporter for a Japanese travel program who visits Uzbekistan with her crew and has various experiences, alternately annoying (go back up in the scary and doubtless unsafe amusement ride so we can get another B-roll take!) and frightening (getting lost and wandering in dark alleys in an unknown city); the Hattically interesting part is that she (obviously) doesn’t speak any Uzbek and the locals (equally obviously) don’t speak any Japanese, except for one translator/fixer who fell in love with Japan and its culture so much that he learned the language fluently, so there’s a lot of onscreen interpretation (and untranslated chatter in Uzbek, which is fun if you know even a little of any Turkic language and can recognize the occasional word like baliq ‘fish’). When she gets lost and thus separated from her fixer, she tries to communicate in her very minimal English, with unsatisfactory results; of course she doesn’t know Russian, which would have worked better. The scenery and cinematography are gorgeous (there are loving views of the Registan in Samarkand and the Navoi Theater in Tashkent, inter alia); if you get a chance to see it, I’d say it’s worth your while (and if you try an introductory membership at Criterion Channel you can see it and any of their thousands of other movies for free before your seven days are up and you have to bail out or shell out).

Addendum. Ken Foster has a thoughtful review of the movie.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus (who has made appearances here before, e.g. in 2014) has a most interesting New Yorker piece “How Test Engineers Decide What Counts as Good Enough” (archived) that starts with bears used as product testers for bear-resistant containers and goes in all sorts of directions. Here’s the passage that brings it to LH:

For as long as humans have flown, humans have flown into birds. Wilbur Wright survived the first avian strike; another early pilot, who might have thought it would be funny to surprise a flock of seagulls, did not. Few people are eager to rehearse an engine failure in midair. Presumably the same goes for the birds. The “bird ingestion test” is a classic example of a situation in which testers must operate under facsimile conditions. They rig up a hangar with a specialized cannon that shoots thawed bird carcasses into the blender of a spooled-up engine. The protocol has been formalized with great care. It begins with a single four-pound chicken, moves on to a fusillade of eight members of a smaller bird species, and concludes with sixteen tiny feather balls. The risk is deemed acceptable if an engine retains at least three-quarters of its power.

The statistical reasoning is sound, even if the ingestion test’s verisimilitude is a little hand-wavy. Bird populations change; migratory patterns, or what experts call “waves of biomass,” are fickle. In almost half of the bird-strike incidents investigated by the Federal Aviation Administration, the turbine’s charnel house is so messy that the culprit’s species remains anybody’s guess. (Davies, who has a wonderful ear for niche jargon, is pleased to report that bird slurry is called “snarge.”) We can be fairly certain that no snarge can be traced to chickens, which do not fly. From 1990 to 2019, Davies writes, “the FAA recorded more bearded seal strikes (one) than chicken-on-plane encounters (zero).” Testers resort to chicken artillery in the absence of a robust supply chain for osprey.

As soon as I hit “snarge” I knew I had to post it. What a great word! (Wiktionary says “Blend of snot +‎ garbage,” but I’m not sure I believe that; I’d rather believe the word fell from the heavens like blue ice.)
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I know I’ve posted about polyglots a lot, but Matthew Erickson’s NY Times piece (Oct. 6, 2026; archived) takes an unusual (and unusually thoughtful) approach, and won my heart right off the bat by referencing one of my favorite novels:

A few months ago, I finally read Helen DeWitt’s 2000 novel, “The Last Samurai,” in which the autodidact child protagonist, Ludo, teaches himself a vast spread of languages before turning 11: ancient Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, French, Arabic, Old Norse and Inuit, among others. Around the same time, my algorithm started pushing clips from Yuji Beleza, a 28-year-old Japanese Irish content creator with 7.6 million followers on Instagram and 11.1 million on TikTok. In his videos, Beleza wanders the streets of a city, susses out who might be a visitor or an expat and hits them with a variation of “Where are you from? I think I can speak your language.” Each subject, at first wary of this filmed intrusion, inevitably warms to Beleza as he eagerly starts a basic conversation in, say, Creole, Azerbaijani, Welsh or one of seemingly dozens of other languages or dialects.

While much of Ludo’s education in “The Last Samurai” is solitary, Beleza’s is seemingly always on display, wide out in the open, camera on. In the first video I watched, which has over 127.3 million views on TikTok, Beleza and three African basketball players slip between English, Japanese, Lingala, Yoruba and Bambara on a neon-lit Shibuya street. And though he might be one of the most viral online polyglots — Qatar Airways and Boss have collaborated with him — Beleza is hardly alone. Polyglot content creators are now churning out a flood of videos across social media. Some recite front-facing monologues through numerous languages, a niche community that most likely started with the #polyglotcheck hashtag during the pandemic. Some follow Beleza’s impromptu “man on the street” mode. Others offer composed interviews with regular-seeming people who just happen to speak, as in one clip, Danish, Spanish, English, Arabic, Portuguese, Swedish, French and Bahasa Indonesia, all with relative ease. A few test out polyglot comedy. This summer, when Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted promotional videos of himself speaking Mandarin, Bengali, Spanish and English, they made similarly viral waves. (The consensus among native Chinese speakers: The mayor’s tones are actually fairly solid.) […]

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