Comments on: Beardobibliography / Бородобиблиография

By: SW Foska

SW Foska — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 15:25:13 +0000

Imberbe, your glabrous gloss gratifies me greatly. With free francophone fact-checking into the bargain! What more could I ask for? That you explain why the not unbearded character in your avatar, though named Professeur Tournesol in Herge’s original, goes in English by the name of Professor Calculus, when Tournesol doesn’t mean calculus but sunflower.

By: Imberbe

Imberbe — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 03:42:13 +0000

Dear SW Foska, thank you for the magnificent quote by Graf Kiselev. That sentence has such vigor! And the word “intriguailleurs” is absolutely awesome – and also a legitimate French word, in spite of what I initially suspected.

By: SW Foska

SW Foska — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 13:17:22 +0000

After long delay, my barbological titbit is ready for public unveiling. It concerns the Russian occupation of the Danubian Principalities in 1828-36, a significant phase in the nineteenth-century imperial expansion. The Russian army saw itself as liberating fellow Orthodox Christians from under the Turkish yoke, but at the same time a number of culture clashes occurred with the Moldavian and Wallachian boyars. Among other things, the latter still sported beards, the length and cut of which often denoted rank. Count Pavel Kiselev had great difficulty extirpating this practice, which he saw as barbaric (the Russians themselves having abandoned it over a hundred years previously, as is documented in Professor Hughes’s aforementioned article). In a moment of exasperation he described the bearded boyars as ’surely the most turbulent intriguers of all the bearded creatures thronging under the arch of heaven’. In the original (apud A.P. Zablotskii-Desyatovskii, Graf P.D. Kiselev i ego vremia. 4 vols. St Petersburg, 1882, p. 83), this reads: ‘Je suis a batailler avec les barbus moldaves, qui sont assurement les plus turbulent intrigailleurs de tous les hommes a barbe qui pullulent sous la calotte du ciel’. So now you know where to find such people.
Still haven’t found my vampire-etymology information: when i do, I will post it on the language blog, where the main discussion on that subject took place.

By: SW Foska

SW Foska — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 17:05:44 +0000

Elif, thank you for getting the full citation for the Hughes article, especially since I had indicated the wrong festschriftee. I have more data both on beards and vampire etymology but my notes are in a mess. Back later!

By: Elif

Elif — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 01:49:50 +0000

To the alarmingly knowledgeable SW Foska: many thanks on behalf of all beardophiles, scholars of the “long eighteenth century,” scholars of the “long eighteenth-century beard,” et al.---here is the citation: Lindsey Hughes, “‘A Beard is an Unnecessary Burden’: Peter I's Laws on Shaving and their Roots in Early Russia,” in Roger Bartlett and Lindsey Hughes, eds., Russian Society and Culture and the Long Eighteenth Century: Essays in Honour of Anthony G. Cross (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2004), 21–34. I think it isn't available online, but there appears to be lots of good stuff on anti-beard legislation in Hughes’s book on Peter. Dear Language Hat! You have a wonderful website! You know what my problem is, is that unlike the alarmingly knowledgeable SW Foska, I don’t read German. (I did give it a shot at one point… although somehow when I actually got to Leipzig, all the phrases left my head except for “Entschuldigen Sie Bitte! Können Sie das bitte wiederholen?”, which led to some long but I believe monotonous conversations.) Anyway, so I read that entry too fast, and assumed that Granitz somehow meant both vampire and border, thus validating the ever-burgeoning discourse on liminality and vampires. (Hey, speaking of liminal vampires, arnavut is Turkish for “Albanian”… so maybe the vampire Арнаут Павле, from the border of Ottoman-controlled Serbia, was actually Albanian Pavle?) But I guess the true explanation opens the door to a new discourse of liminality and beards. Дорогая Анна! Я очень рада узнать, что Сноб уже имеет своих международных энтузиастов! Я тоже рада Вам сообщить, что достаточно сделать один телефонный звонок (+7 (495) 544-22-00... или отправить письмо на podpiska@snob.ru), чтобы подписаться на журнал в любой точке мира (6152 руб./ год). Насчет “Сумеречного дозора”: в следующим номере, Вы можете читать о том, что этого фильма уже не будет! “‘Для меня “Особо Опасен” стал своеобразным американским дозором,’ отметил Бекмамбетов”… а чем связаны “американский дозор” и русские дозори? Прочитайте Сноб и узнаете!