Mark Twine would slap as the title of a Mark Twain inspired Twine game. Just saying.
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I haven’t read enough of Twain to do something about it 
ISGT I almost did the same mistake again…
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Ever since COVID-19 ruined my reading schedule, I’ve been trying to get back into reading by starting a new newsletter on Japanese literature and maybe some other stuff that could be fun to write about:
I read a book titled Gurenkan no Satsujin, which features a burning mansion. I love burning mansions.
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Just started with The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon.
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Still been reflecting on finishing a re-read of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. It’s a striking book. I was thinking of following it up with Beloved.
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Since September I’ve gotten 38% of the way through Moby Dick according to my e-reader and posted thoughts here.
Something unexpected I get from it is – before I read this, the only place I ever saw the insult ‘blockhead’ was in Peanuts. Where it’s used a lot. I wonder if Charles Schulz got the idea from here?
@severedhand Is it maybe a weird translation thing? What was the Russian word?
I remember someone commenting somewhere else a long time ago on something similar. They observed that Dostoevsky novels always say someone “flew at” someone else.
I don’t know whether that was a translation thing. It was a popular idiom at one time, I guess, but I don’t know whether it was Dostoevsky that used the Russian equivalent, or whether the translators turned a bunch of different Russian verbs into the same English idiom over and over.
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I checked three translations for the verb “flew”; Constance Garnett’s has 22, Oliver Ready’s has 6, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s has 15. This suggests that it’s not entirely a translator’s idiosyncrasy. On the other hand there might be some Constance Garnett influence over other translators.
I have picked a random sentence from the book, Part II — Chapter VII:
Constance Garnett
Katerina Ivanovna flew into a fury.
Oliver Ready
Katerina Ivanovna was beside herself.
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Katerina Ivanovna flew into a rage.
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I used Google Ngram to search for “flew at.”
Depending on the corpus of work surveyed, there’s not really any clear trend. However, “flew at” definitely went out of style in the 1960s for British English based on one chart.
So Garnett was working at the time and place that “flew at” was widely used (England 1900-1940). Pevear/Volokhonsky were translating in England in the 1990s on, when the phrase was not popular, so your suggestion of Garnett influence is probably correct.
Ready’s translations are really recent so it’s not really surprising that he’s using more modern language.
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I have realized I should have restricted the search to “flew at”. In that case Garnett has 5, Ready has none, and P&V has 2 matches. Another random bit from Part III — Chapter I:
Garnett
“Fetching? You said fetching?” roared Razumihin and he flew at Zossimov and seized him by the throat.
Ready
‘Delicious? Delicious, you said?’ Razumikhin roared, before suddenly hurling himself at Zosimov and seizing him by the throat.
P & V
“Ravishing? Did you say ravishing!” Razumikhin bellowed, and he suddenly flew at Zossimov and seized him by the throat.
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“Flew” has a similar trend, and it looks like there is weird stuff going on with the Google Ngram data given the sudden surge at the end anyway.
I like “hurled” more than “flew” btw.
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I have no idea. And my edition doesn’t say who translated it. But your idea may be right. So if my idea about Peanuts is right in turn, it may be the translator of my edition of Karamazov who’s responsible for Peanuts being full of ‘You blockhead!’
-Wade
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On a slight tangent, “blockhead” in English actually goes back to the 1500s, according to the OED. The earliest known use comes from Saint Thomas More:
I wolde not call it heresye, yf one wolde translate presbyteros a blok: but I wold say he were a blok hed. And as very a blokhed were he, that wold translate presbyteros an elder in stede of a preste.
(I wouldn’t call it heresy if someone translated presbyteros as “block”, but I would say he was a blockhead. And just as much of a blockhead is anyone who would translate presbyteros as “elder” instead of “priest”.)
This comes from More’s response to Tyndale, who insisted that it was valid to translate Latin senior as English “elder”, since that’s literally what it means; More responded that that was utter heresy, because Latin senior was used to translate Greek presbyteros, which means something different; Tyndale asked if he was calling the Latin Vulgate heretical; More said that using English “elder” was heresy but Latin senior wasn’t, because it had the weight of tradition behind it. Truly a gripping tale.
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Sir Thomas More: kind of a dick.
(Yes, yes, A Man for All Seasons is a lovely story, but he was happy to use state authority to execute “heretics” while he was in Henry’s favor).
You’re the linguist, but I think Tyndale has the better of this argument, no? I seem to recall (and Google seems to confirm) that there’s a presbyteros/hiereus distinction in the Greek that More mostly tries to wriggle past…
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I’m not enough of a theologian to comment on the heresy aspect of it, but linguistically, presbyteros (πρεσβύτερος) does in fact just mean “elder”, and is applied to all sorts of things other than people. More is just straight-up wrong about that. It was applied to a specific role in the early church, but the Greek word doesn’t indicate any particular ordination; you’d have to look at history rather than linguistics for that.
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I guess it took a while to catch on.
-Wade
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On a slight tangent, “blockhead” in English actually goes back to the 1500s, according to the OED. The earliest known use comes from Saint Thomas More:
So at that point was it being used as an insult, or did it get turned into an insult later?
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Closing out the year reading The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch.
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More’s definitely using it as an insult. It seems like it’s only later that it acquired any non-insulting meanings, referring to a particular type of carnival performer.
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Today I started with new book - A House with Good Bones by Ursula Vernon.
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I read the first three words of the “Plot”-section for the book on Wikipedia and I want to read it too:
Archaeoentomologist Samantha Montgomery…
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