Alex Reuneker

Christmas has passed and it's day six of The Evenings. Today's chapter begins not with Frits waking up, but right in the middle of the afternoon, with Frits being at the office, where the lights have to be turned on at a quarter past three, because it was already getting dark outside.

Early darkness on day six of The Evenings. Photograph by Fons Heijnsbroek on Unsplash.

Yesterday, we looked at hapax legomena, or words that appear only once in a text. So, why not look at dis legomena today? Dis legomena are words that occur exactly twice in a text, and most often, they are a lot less frequent than hapaxes. For instance, today's chapter hosts 925 hapaxes, and 'only' 255 dis legomena. One that caught my eye, was oem, of which I thought it might be part of those weird little songs Frits sometimes hums or sings. We'll look into those later, as it may be interesting to see how those are translated, but we'll stick to oem for now. The word appears twice and it actually is the name of a lady in the following little story Frits finds in Viktor's book.

He leafed on. 'Janet: the gentlemen will surely remember,' he read, 'the case of the lady Oem, whose cat had died. I can, to my great satisfaction, report that her recovery is complete. Thanks to a remarkable course of treatment which I, in this case, applied. My treatment of Miss Oem consisted of giving her a new cat.'

Another word occuring exactly twice is lipreader, which draws the attention to quite a funny bit about sitting next to a lipreader in the movie theatre. There are, according to Frits, two types. First, there are 'the extroverts, who laugh and explain things to those sitting beside them. Those are truly terrible.' But there's a worse type of lipreader, 'the ones who read the subtitles out loud. Aye-aye, Jesus Christ, what an abomination.' I find these small observations very funny, because they both ring true, and are things you could think yourself, but would not readily say out loud.

Movie theatre. Photograph by Jake Hills on Unsplash.

Have fun reading again today!

'AT NINE O’CLOCK, by full daylight, he awoke. "The second day of Christmastide has broken,"" he thought.' It's Boxing Day today. For anyone, like me, who didn't know what 'boxing' stands for in Boxing Day: apparantly it is a tradition to give away boxes of food and clothing to the poor. With that out of the way, let's look at hapaxes in today's chapter of The Evenings!

Hapax Legomena are words that occur only once in a given text. Today's chapter contains quite a lot of them, such as christmastide in the quote above. You can easily index all hapaxes using the Lexical Diversity Calculator yourself, if you whish.

Other hapaxes are daylight, alleyway, and, I'm sorry it caught my eye, fart. I took the liberty of looking into the use of this last word in the chapter – never waste a good rabbit hole when you find one.

Hapax legomena in chapter 5 of The Evenings

Fart occurs in the following snippet: '"Do you know what that reminds me of?" Frits said suddenly. "Of my grandfather, who’s dead now, the old fart. [...]"' Aha, it's not a literal use of fart! Let's see how Frits calls his grandfather in the original text, as I don't recall seeing the Dutch equivalent of fart being used this way. In the Dutch text, it reads '"Weet je waar ik aan denken moet?" zei Frits plotseling, "aan mijn grootvader, hij is nou dood, die oude hoer. [...]"' How interesting, oude hoer is translation into old fart. If you ask me, altough both the original and the translation explicitly mention oud/old, old fart does not have the idiomatic meaning of oude hoer in Dutch, which has to do with excessive talking, whining or nagging.

I couldn't help myself and went over to the Etymologiebank to check my intuitions. Sure enough, it says 'ouwehoeren komt al voor in Kamertjeszonde (1896) van Herman Heyermans. En het scheldwoord ouwehoer (zeurder) werd al teruggevonden in ‘Het Sermoen’, een geschrift in het Maastrichts uit 1729!' ('Ouwehoeren (whining) already appears in Herman Heyermans' Kamertjeszonde (1896). And the insult ouwehoer (whiner) was already found in Het Sermoen, a Maastricht dialect work from 1729!' Apparantly, reading the rest of the entry on ouwehoer(en), the verb ouwehoeren became popular among soldiers in in the former Dutch East Indies.

'Ouwehoer' in the Etymologiebank

Now, I could be mistaken, but old fart generally refers to old-fashioned persons, not overtly talkative ones. In today's chapter, the quote appears in an episode in which Frits talks to Maurits, right after the following segment: '"You had better keep your mouth shut," said Maurits, "you talk too much." "Come now," Frits said, "I know what I’m saying. Don’t worry. Besides, I have a great respect and fondness for you." Maurits grimaced.' So, we are definitely in the realm of people talking too much, and it seems the translation of oude hoer into old fart doesn't cover that aspect.

Interestingly, my wife, who is reading the Dutch original this year, told me that a couple of pages before the occurrence of oude hoer referring to Frits' grandfather, Frits refers to himself as follows: 'Ik ben niet zo'n oude hoer, om zo iets te zeggen.' Here, the English translation reads 'I’m not the kind of gasbag who would say something like that.' So, here oude hoer is translated into gasbag, which, according to the Cambridge Dictionary means 'a person who always talks too much'. I guess that translation reflects the original much better.

With that, have fun reading today's Chapter!

As I was working on a very brief piece on the Hirsch-Popescu Point (HPP) in one of the chapters of Reve's The Evenings, it occurred to me that the Lexical Diversity Calculator does calculate the Hirsch-Popescu Point, but that it didn't yet offer the option to actually look at the sorted frequency table used for determining the HPP. As that table can be very informative, I now implemented the displaying of it in Lexical Diversity Calculator. The actual HPP, so the word which has a position in the sorted frequency list that matches it frequency, is marked in bold and red for easy identification.

HPP marked in bold and red

If you'd like to use it, just head over to https://www.reuneker.nl/files/ld.