Following last weeks discussion of law and its connection to the Old Norse word lag, Neil Kilby asked:
I wonder if 'lag' (as in 'prisoner, someone doing a bit of bird or porridge') is connected then? Back in the UK, you'd talk about this 'old lag' and (most) people would understand it to mean an old prisoner.
That’s a fantastic question and the short answer, Neil, is that there’s no evidence of a connection - other than the similarity between the two words.
And for a linguist, leaning on similarity alone as evidence of a connection will leave you open to becoming the butt of the only linguistic joke I know.
The joke requires some preamble if it’s to make sense. Wish me luck as I attempt that now.
For many years linguists anguished over the origin of the American slang word, hip, as in being cool and up with the play. (Ironically, hip has now become a decidedly unhip word, as most slang words tend to do.)
In the late 1960s, a theory was floated that hip came from the west African Wolof word xippi, which means “to open one’s eyes”. The basis for the theory? That xippi kind of sounds a bit like hip and sort of means something vaguely similar.
Now here’s the joke (told you it needed some explaining). Among linguists, using superficial similarities as an argument for connection between words from different languages is now called “crying Wolof”.
Now that you’ve picked yourself up off the floor, let me inform you that before they’ll entertain a theory about a word in one language migrating into another, linguists generally demand a written record showing its journey. Xippi fails that test.
At least that’s what all the major dictionaries say.
All credit to Neil for not falling into the Crying Wolof trap. Imagine spending the rest of your life trying to live that down.
Neil did get me wondering whether his lag might come from the Russian gulag, or forced labour camp, made famous during the Soviet era by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago. But it’s most unlikely. Lag (as in a prisoner) has been around since at least the 1800s, while gulags weren’t invented until the Stalin era beginning in 1928. Their name is a rough acronym of the Russian Glavnoe upravlenie ispravitel'no-trudovykh lagerei, meaning Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps.
One senses that whoever cooked up this charming name was not a poet.
“Crying Wolof” was coined (in a moment of brilliance, it must be said) by Yale Professor of Linguistics, Laurence Horn. Among his many claims to fame is his work in scalar implicature, a somewhat intimidating phrase for a curious element of language.
Let’s say I invite you to dinner and tell you I’ve invited four other people. How many other guests do you expect to see? Four of course.
But “I’ve invited four other people” doesn’t preclude the possibility I’ve invited five, six, or even 100 other guests. I’ve simply implied that I’ve invited only four, and you – not being a complete moron – have also interpreted my statement to mean that.
In saying “I’ve invited four other people”, I’ve employed scalar implicature. That is, I’m implying that the stronger (scaled up) statement, “I’ve invited four, and only four, other people” is also true.
This relates to the Maxim of Quantity, an idea floated by another linguist, Paul Grice. The principle is that we like to cooperate with one another, and one way we do that is by not overdoing the detail when providing information.
Say you ask me the time and I say “9.30”. I’ve observed the Maxim of Quantity by not saying “It’s 9.30 at night, local time, 10 October 2022”. You’re welcome.
I have to say, I think the world of linguists like Horn and Grice. Imagine spending your life in relative obscurity, studying the minutiae of a specialist subject and developing wonderful theories that only a handful of other people will ever care about.
It puts me in mind of a gorgeous line in a poem by another of my heroes, Frank O’Hara, where he dubbed happiness “the least and best of human attainments”. Surely linguistics must also be among the least of all human pursuits. And if people like Horn and Grice ever stop pursuing it, how much poorer the world will surely be.
Even if their jokes do take way too much explaining.
Bits and specious
Reader Bruce Mackenzie took issue with my claim last week that Bobby Fuller’s version of I Fought the Law is the best song ever about, well, fighting the law. “I thought the Clash version better since they represented an anti-establishment position,” says Bruce. Others to have covered the song include Green Day, Dead Kennedys, Hank Williams Jr and Sam Neely.
In 2008, British band Oystar released a song called I Fought the Lloyds to celebrate their lead singer’s successful attempt to have Lloyds TSB refund hundreds of pounds in illegal bank charges - and to encourage others to follow suit. It reached number 25 on the UK Singles Chart.
You can read the full text of the Frank O’Hara poem here.
Quote of the week
For years the Trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We practically starved to death.
Nat King Cole