The interstellar etymology of ‘mazel tov’

Mazal tov or mazel tov /’maz(ə)l toːv, tɒf/ is a Hebrew and Yiddish expression analogous to ‘congratulations’ or ‘good wishes’, though its literal meaning is closer to ‘good luck’.

Grammatically it functions mainly as an interjection (‘Mazel tov!’), and sometimes as a noun (‘a chorus of mazel tovs’). I see it in both forms online, and occasionally in films and books, but it’s not part of my idiolect or culture, so corrections or clarifications are welcome.

Popular on celebratory occasions such as weddings and Bat and Bar Mitzvahs, the phrase derives from modern Hebrew mazzāl ṭôb. Mazal (Hebrew) or mazel (Yiddish) refers to a star, constellation, luck or fortune; ṭôb means ‘good’, from ṭyb ‘to be(come) good’.

Mazel tov hats at a Bat Mitzvah

The American Heritage Dictionary says mazel tov comes from Mishnaic Hebrew and ultimately from Akkadian, one of the earliest written languages: manzaltu, mazzaztum meant ‘position of a star’, from izuzzu ‘to stand’. The related words Mazzaroth and mazalot have to do with astronomical constellations or the zodiac in Kabbalistic astrology.

Israeli linguist Guy Deutscher, author of Through the Language Glass, touches briefly on these connections in The Unfolding of Language, his 2005 book on how language evolves. The following passage is from its short introduction to Semitic languages and their cultural history:

Their political star may have waxed and waned, but for a good part of 2,000 years, Mesopotamian emperors, from Sargon in the third millennium BC to Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar in the first, would lay claim to the title ‘King of the Universe’, ruling over ‘the four corners (of the earth)’. More stable than the power of the sword, however, was the cultural hegemony of Mesopotamia over the whole region. The Akkadian language shaped the dominant canon for much of the Near East in religion, the arts, science and law, and was used as a lingua franca, the means of diplomatic correspondence. Petty governors of provincial Canaanite outposts, mighty Anatolian kinds, and even Egyptian Pharaohs wrote to one another in Akkadian. Language across the Near East also borrowed many scientific and cultural terms from Akkadian, a few of which may even be recognized by English speakers today. The Jewish expression mazel tov ‘good luck’, for example, is based on the Hebrew word mazal ‘luck’, which was borrowed from the Akkadian astrological term mazzaltu ‘position (of a star)’.

Although I have little interest in horoscopes, I like how mazel tov preserves a reminder of celestial bodies’ significance in traditional conceptions of human fate and fortune. English retains a similar link in written in the stars, thank your lucky stars, and star-crossed (‘ill-fated’).

The last of which brings us nicely to schlimazel, from Yiddish shlimazl ‘someone prone to bad luck’ – hence Schlimazeltov!, a short documentary about the concept of luck in London’s Jewish community.

Schlimazel may have somehow developed into shemozzle/schemozzle ‘muddle, melee, brawl’, but the etymology is uncertain. WordReference says shemozzle is “suggested by late Hebrew šel-lō’-mazzāl ‘of no luck’.”

[image adapted from Wikimedia Commons]

Notes on standard English and “bad grammar”

The particular English dialect that began to be adopted as standard more than half a millennium ago came from the UK, mostly the region encompassing London, Oxford, and Cambridge.

This part of the country was the hub of society, politics and education at the time, serving also as a bridge between northern and southern modes of expression. In Our Language, Simeon Potter writes that the East Midland dialect “had assumed an acknowledged ascendancy”.

According to David Crystal‘s The English Language, the clinching factor was William Caxton, who established his printing press in Westminster in 1476 and used the speech of the London area “as the basis for his translations and spelling”. By the end of the 15th century,

the distinction between ‘central’ and ‘provincial’ life was firmly established. It was reflected in the distinction between ‘standard’ and ‘regional’ speech — the former thought of as correct, proper, and educated, the latter as incorrect, careless, and inferior — which is still with us today.

From then on, standard English gradually secured its status as a prestige dialect in the English-speaking world. It was taught by educators guided by grammar books and dictionaries, to spread and sustain a (more or less) common set of norms in spelling, grammar and usage; the process continues today, overseen by editors and other authorities.

In ‘The Rise of Prescriptivism in English’ (PDF), Shadyah A. N. Cole says that before 1650, “tolerance with variation in language abounded”. Subsequently it was felt that the use of the language should be “regularized, standardized, codified, and unified”. Eventually:

As a result of the slowing of changes in pronunciation and other linguistic changes, the influence of the printing press, and spelling reformers, written English now had a form that varies only a little from what is current today.

Today, many people use standard English when circumstances demand, and default to other registers the rest of the time. Or rather: they use a form of standard English — it’s not as uniform and definitive as the name might suggest, and there is no little variation in the standards that obtain in different countries and contexts.

Still, there’s no mistaking the non-standard quality of lines like the following, though they are fully suited to the context in which they are naturally expressed:

Your Aunt Edith seen it happen and run out and drug him in.

‘Fine view,’ I said, ‘iffi’n only that barn warn’t there…’

There’s people got so much faith they can believe what ain’t…

Somebody said as how the town ought to clean Ogilby’s statue — become plumb pigeonfied last few years.

These are from Robert Arthur’s short story ‘Obstinate Uncle Otis’, which I read last week in Alfred Hitchcock’s Ghostly Gallery anthology. As you might guess, the story’s regional language, far from diminishing my reading experience, hugely enhanced it.

Yet a practice exists of censuring non-standard words, pronunciations, and grammatical forms. The internet abounds in sneers at variant usage. Even reputable news outlets publish articles that pour scorn on particular speech patterns; readers are tacitly or explicitly invited to join in, which they enthusiastically do.

So you’d be forgiven for supposing that standard English is inherently better: more logical, consistent, robust and so on. Not so: it’s riddled with illogic and inconsistency. Kory Stamper recently said that the language is “a lovely, powerful mess”, and this is as true of standard English as any other variety.

Here is a pertinent passage from one of my favourite books on writing and language, Joseph M. Williams’s Style: Toward Clarity and Grace:

. . . we ought to rethink the widely shared notion that every feature of standard English has some kind of self-evident, naturally determined “logic” that makes it intrinsically superior to its corresponding form in nonstandard English. In educated written English intended for general circulation, ain’t is socially “wrong.” But we ought not try to convince ourselves or anyone else that ain’t — along with most other errors of its kind — is wrong because it is inherently defective and is therefore evidence of an inherently defective mind. Such errors are “wrong” because of historically accidental reasons. Until we recognize the arbitrary nature of our judgments, too many of us will take “bad” grammar as evidence of laziness, carelessness, or a low IQ. That belief is not just wrong. It is socially destructive.

In ‘Ideology, Power, and Linguistic Theory’ (PDF), Geoffrey Pullum writes:

Unjustified and perhaps unjustifiable, the rules of the prescriptive ideologues, dimly grasped and often misunderstood, nonetheless form the backbone of what the general public understands and believes about English grammar. . . .
It is a familiar pattern for people to reify an unjustifiable set of regulative rules that are supported mainly by the taste of the person making the proposal, to treat them as if they were the constitutive correctness conditions for some language that people do not speak but should, and to call that language English.

Standard English, though a minority dialect, enjoys an exalted position in the family of English dialects. But this is a matter of historical happenstance. Socially privileged it may be, linguistically superior it is not. Variation makes communication more interesting, and it can be savoured rather than disdained.

Update:

Language Hat has a good discussion of some of the issues raised in this post.

A radical awareness of language’s mutability

I recently read Henry Hitchings’s Defining the world: The extraordinary story of Dr Johnson’s dictionary, and I recommend it heartily to those of you who enjoy its principal fields of interest: words, history, literature, biography, and lexicography.

As well as recreating the history of Johnson’s Dictionary, which was first published in 1755, Hitchings’s book serves as a frank and affectionate portrait of Samuel Johnson himself, and as a vivid profile of 18th-century England. It’s an elegant and enthralling account that includes a keen analysis of Johnson’s linguistic attitudes and shows how these developed over the course of creating his mighty work.

Before beginning the Dictionary in earnest, Johnson wrote a lengthy Plan of an English Dictionary, in which he presented his ambitions for the book and his suitability for the task. It was addressed to the Earl of Chesterfield in order to win his patronage. Chesterfield, we read, was “obsessed with propriety of usage . . . and with embalming or even bettering the language”. Johnson said the dictionary’s chief intent would be “to preserve the purity, and ascertain the meaning of our English idiom”.

The order of these aspirations is no accident. Johnson’s characterisation of English as “licentious” and “inconstant” has what Hitchings refers to as “a distinctly moral cast”. But although the emphasis on stability was “consistent with [Johnson's] own political instincts”, Hitchings suggests that it was probably exaggerated for Chesterfield’s sake: years later the Dictionary’s preface would contain a sober and eloquent acknowledgement of the irresistibility of linguistic change.

From Defining the world:

Linguistic conservatives like Chesterfield were afraid that unchecked changes in general usage would cause the English of the eighteenth century to become as bewildering to its inheritors as the language of Chaucer was to them. They were correct, of course, in seeing that their language was in flux. Then and now, the engines of this change include international commerce and travel, which involve contact with other languages; shifts in political doctrine or consensus; translations, which frequently preserve the idiom of their originals; fashion (in Johnson’s age, the nascent cult of sensibility), whose adherents require a special figurative language to articulate their refined and rarefied perspectives; and advertising, which uses foreign terms to connote mystique. These transfusions are what keep a language alive, but this is a modern view. Chesterfield could not begin to see that change was a force for the good. With time, Johnson’s conservatism — the desire to ‘fix’ the language — gave way to a radical awareness of language’s mutability. But from the outset the impulse to standardize and straighten English out was in competition with the belief that one should chronicle what’s there, and not just what one would like to see.

250 years later, Johnson’s Dictionary remains “not merely readable, but vital”, Hitchings writes, its every page brimming with philological lore and choice quotation. It is not just a landmark in lexicography but a great work of literature, described by Robert Burchfield as “the only dictionary compiled by a writer of the first rank”.*

The sixth edition of the Dictionary (1785) is available in multiple formats from the Internet Archive: Volume 1 and Volume 2.

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* My Tumblr blog has a short passage by Burchfield on semantic drift.

Bauer’s Family Tree of Printing Types

In 1937, a hundred years after its founding, the Bauer Type Foundry issued Bauer’s Family Tree of Printing Types:

I know little about typeface design, still less its history, so I can’t comment on the accuracy. But I like the idea of a family tree of types, and it’s a fine presentation: the fonts are like colourful garden birds preening peaceably in the sun, each showing off its unique qualities.

For detail and supplementary text, see Steven Heller’s post at Print magazine, which brought the tree to my attention.

Gogarty’s Liffey swans

Irish writer Oliver St. John Gogarty was kidnapped at gunpoint by the IRA on a cold winter night in 1923, during the country’s Civil War. His escape is the stuff of modern romantic legend. W. B. Yeats — who thought Gogarty “one of the great lyric poets of his age” — gives the following account of events:

Oliver Gogarty was captured by his enemies, imprisoned in a deserted house on the edge of the Liffey with every prospect of death. Pleading a natural necessity he got into the garden, plunged under a shower of revolver bullets and as he swam the ice-cold December stream promised it, should it land him in safety, two swans. I was present when he fulfilled that vow.

[from the Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes]

George Moore called Gogarty “author of all the jokes that enable us to live in Dublin”. Even during the abduction his tongue was unstill: on arrival at the house, he is said to have asked his captors whether he should tip the driver. Conduct was for Gogarty “a series of larks”, in Ellmann’s phrase; little wonder there was soon a popular ballad celebrating his Liffey adventure.

But the gift of swans is what I like most about the story, the gesture showing both Gogarty’s poetic sensibility and his talent for myth-making. The Liffey was not just a means of escape but an entity to be honoured with a ceremonial offering of further life (though the swans seemingly took some persuasion to make the river their home).

Who knows, maybe they’re ancestors of the one that nibbled my hand on the other side of the Shannon some decades later.

Flouting class and flaunting mnemonics

It’s the start of a new month, which means it’s time to report on what I’ve been writing at Macmillan Dictionary Blog over the last few weeks. Five posts on words and language are linked and excerpted below, or you can go straight to my archive of articles.

Someone on Twitter reported seeing a sign that read: “Help impact a child, donate your vehicle”. This is a usage of impact that bothers a lot of people, and I can’t say I’m fond of it myself. But there’s nothing grammatically wrong with it.

So how does “impact” impact you? This post considers the word in the context of Michael Hoey’s lexical priming theory, which says that as we acquire vocabulary it becomes “loaded with the contexts (linguistic, generic and social) in which we repeatedly encounter it”. And it seems we can’t help wanting others to support our impressions:

We have a tendency to generalise from our feelings, leaping too easily from “I dislike this usage” to “This is wrong” or even “No one should ever say this anywhere.” It’s natural that we would want to universalise our preferences, but it’s not very reasonable or practical. Better to examine why we might object to a legitimate word. This can have a surprising impact. [more]

People sometimes adopt new modes of speech to advance in work or society or to dissociate from certain areas or attributes and so on. This may be part of what inspired the much-derided “Dortspeak” in and around Dublin.

I look briefly at the accent and at Received Pronunciation in RP and Dortspeak. RP, also known as BBC English and the Queen’s (or King’s) English, is not so exalted nowadays as it once was, but for a long time it had powerful social prestige:

An RP accent, even a modified one that combines it with regional qualities, has prestige because it implies a certain level of education, social status, prosperity and perhaps political power. Centuries ago it was the accent of the courts and high society in London and the home counties; people moving there to advance in life often adopted it as their own.

Later, RP became the accent of public schools and the BBC, which strengthened and stabilised its status as the “standard” form of English speech. It was (and remains) linked to class consciousness. [more]

Class consciousness was a recurring theme on Macmillan Dictionary Blog during November, which was its “class English” month and featured excellent posts by a range of regular and guest contributors.

My next article, Through the class ceiling, broadens the discussion in my previous post from accents to dialects:

Standard English is an important and useful variety of English, but its status comes from historical circumstance rather than inherent linguistic superiority. This point is sometimes missed by those who hold that there is an ideal form of English — which typically corresponds to the form they were taught or to which they aspire.

Later I quote from Jean Aitchison’s book Language Change: Progress or Decay?, in which she describes how Samuel Johnson’s great dictionary may have encouraged belief in a false hierarchy of linguistic properness:

Johnson, like many people of fairly humble origin, had an illogical reverence for his social betters. When he attempted to codify the English language in his famous dictionary he selected middle- and upper-class usage. . . . in many instances [he] pronounced against the spoken language of the lower classes [more]

Leaping forward a few centuries, High-speed tech jargon explores online lingo and its rapid turnover:

Jargon is part of a sublanguage, and is subject to forces of change just like our common vocabulary is. Technology evolves quickly and its jargon is churned out at a corresponding rate. Entire avenues of research and use are rendered obsolete by superior (or better commercialised) developments, so what were technological buzzwords one year might be unrecognisable just a few years later.

After considering (and linking to) a few recent articles on tech jargon, two of which find fault with its ubiquity or opacity, I conclude that

So long as jargon is reasonably transparent and pitched at the appropriate level, there is no cause for alarm; when communication fails because the words we use are too obscure or esoteric, people will either stop reading or let us know. [more]

Finally, Avoid flaunting your confusion is about commonly confused word pairs like flaunt vs. flout, and how we can use mnemonics and other methods to help remember which word is which.

To remember that flaunt means show off, for example, you could think of the aunt in flaunt and picture your aunt behaving ostentatiously. To make it doubly effective, address the other word in the pair, too: notice the lout in flout and think of a lout flouting the law . . . .

Mnemonics can help us only if we put them to work. First we need to be aware that there’s a difficulty, and to take responsibility for it. The tricks we devise can be personally meaningful or arbitrary and absurd, so long as they’re readily brought to mind. The more memorable they are, the more reliably they’ll do the job. [more]

Feel free to share your thoughts below or at the aforelinked posts.

Bone-houses in the Story of English

In the preface to his new book, The Story of English in 100 Words, David Crystal writes that the usual approach to telling the story of English is to offer a broad view that identifies general themes and trends (as in the same author’s Evolving English), while another method is to pick particular words and phrases and detail their idiosyncratic origins and characteristics.

The first approach, Crystal says, gives readers “a clear view of the wood” but “very few of the trees”; the second does the opposite. His aim in The Story of English in 100 Words is to unite these perspectives, so he chooses 100 words and uses them as a base from which to explore how the language emerged and developed over the last millennium and a half.

The list may appear random at first glance, but each word represents something of broader significance — a whole class of words or mode of change, for example, or a certain social or cultural idea — which allows Crystal to move from the specific to the general and thereby describe the history and character of the language in neatly self-contained 2- and 3-page nuggets.

It’s quite a short book, but I’ve had others on the go so I’ve only dipped into it so far. What I have read has been very entertaining and informative. While the book is aimed at general readers, it is likely to contain surprises even for those very familiar with the terrain: Crystal says he himself learnt something new while researching every chapter.

I learnt several new things while reading the chapter on bone-house, a “word painting” from the 10th century. Crystal says it was used by the Anglo-Saxons, who spelt it ban-hus (pronounced “bahn-hoos”). It referred not to an ossuary or building for the dead, but to a living human body. (The Danse Macabre of the Middle Ages shows a similar frankness about our common anatomy and mortality.)

Dance of Death by Michael Wolgemut, 1493

The picture created by bone-house or ban-hus, Crystal writes, was evidently an appealing one,

for the poets coined several words for the same idea. They also describe the body as a ‘bone-hall’ (bansele, pronounced ‘bahn-selluh’), a ‘bone-vessel’ (ban-fæt, ‘bahn-fat’), a ‘bone-dwelling’ (ban-cofa, ‘bahn-cohvuh’) and a ‘bone-enclosure’ (ban-loca, ‘bahn-lockuh’). The human mind, or spirit, was a ban-huses weard — ‘guardian, or ward, of the bone-house’.

Such vivid figures of speech appear throughout the poetry of the age — Beowulf is full of them — not just in English but in the early verse of other Germanic languages. Crystal continues:

These coinages are called kennings, a word adapted from the Old Icelandic language. Kenning is from the verb kenna, ‘to know’, and it captures the idea that these coinages have a meaning that is more insightful than can be expressed by a single word. Ken is still used as a verb in Scots English and in some northern dialects of England. And we still hear it as a noun in the phrase beyond our ken. . . .

Kennings don’t seem to have been much used outside of poetry, and they fell out of use after the Anglo-Saxon period. But the same poetic impulse lies behind many compound words. We hear it still when a scientist is described as an egghead, or a criminal as a lawbreaker or a boxer as a prize-fighter. But we don’t seem to take the same joy in creating vivid alternative descriptions as the Anglo-Saxons did.

This bone-house regrets that.

All 100 words are listed in the Telegraph at the end of a fascinating introduction to the book by Crystal himself, in which he writes that “words are more than just linguistic objects. They are windows into the world of those who use them.” In which case you can think of this book as a time machine with 100 portals.

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Disclosure: I received an advance copy of The Story of English in 100 Words from Profile Books — not to review, but because I helped them source a particular image of Belinda Blurb. (You’ll find me listed in the illustration credits at the back.)

I almost forgot: On Google+ I posted a very brief excerpt of Crystal’s amusing first encounter with singular y’all, for all you all y’all who might be interested.

Edit: John E. McIntyre writes: “I knew I’d heard people use y’all as a singular, had even been addressed as such myself. But no, everyone said, y’all is always a plural, and it’s only damnyankees who get it wrong.” Lots more on this at Language Log.

[image source]