A retroformed word

This one has come up while copy-editing each of the last two months of NYRSF:

hifalutin'

The historical form of the word is either "hifalutin" or "hifaluten". While it might (as some sources suggest) have evolved from "high 'flighting'" (poss. colliding with the Yiddish "hifdufelem", "bombast, nonsense"), the word "faluting" has never been an attested part of English, and thus spelling falutin' is, I would say, quite wrong.

(Researching this, I'm amazed at the number of sources which say definitely that "hifalutin" comes from the Dutch "verlooten" and say that "verlooten" means "stilted". As near as I can tell, it doesn't; "verloten" (one "o") means "to cast lots" or "conduct a raffle". Dutch for "stilted" is, according to a couple of dictionaries I consulted, "stellend".)

(Edited to reflect a bit more research inspired by comments. Thanks, commenters! Also, while researching use of the word in 18th-century English, I came across a *lot* of OCR errors for "saluting", where the initial long-s was misread as an f and the g was dropped because of a scanner error.)

More discounts

Today (June 3), and for the next two weeks, Night Shade Books is having their annual "50% off all titles" sale.

No, really. Even forthcoming titles. The only limitation is a four-book minimum.

The Complete William Hope Hodgson. The Complete Clark Ashton Smith. The Complete Hammer's Slammers (with introductions by Gene Wolfe, David Hartwell, and Barry Malzberg). Glen Cook's Dread Empire books.

Pirates. Zombies. (There's probably Ninjas in there somewhere, but I haven't found any, so have some Greg Egan instead.)

Jeez. How can you pass this up?

And, while I'm at it, some conga-rats

To fjm for her nomination for the Mythopoeic Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies for Rhetorics of Fantasy. Yaaaaay!

Congratulations to my other friends and acquaintances among the nominees, notably Veryln Flieger and Elizabeth A. Whittingham, who, to the best of my knowledge, are not on LJ but are still quite good peoples.