Гуталин

Let's say you just watched Простоквашино (the one where Dyadya Fyodor ditches his parents at the train station) for the umpteenth time and are wondering where the word гуталин (goo-ta-LEEN, "shoe polish") came from.

Sounds German, right?

So you pop over to the Russian Wikipedia to get the lay of the land. You find out that:
A) гуталин was invented in France during the reign of Charles II (no reference)
B) гуталин was made of eggs mixed with ashes and either vinegar or beer (again no reference)
C) the word гуталин comes from the Mongol word for shoes - "gutal" (who needs references, anyway??)

Never, never put your faith in the Russian Wikipedia. The English WP has a whole lot more people inputting on the articles, and even so you can run into impressionistic articles. But the Russian Wikipedia is like a phone book put together by a deaf insane asylum patient ("Snip, snip, what fun! Cutting and pasting little bits of information from around the web into this nice template! The Mongol word for shoes! Delightful!")

Shutting the door on all the noisy RWP fun, you think of all the possible spellings for goutaline/gouthalene/guttaline and search Google books.

Guttaline returns a snippet of an article in an 1892 edition of "Electrical Engineer," where the following intriguing definition is given:

"Guttaline - A new preparation for the purpose of replacing indiarubber and guttapercha, has been brought out and protected by MM. Worms and Zwierchowski. To a quantity of Manila gum tempered with benezene is added 5 per cent. of Auvergne bitumen, also mixed with benzene..."

That reference to gutta percha caught my eye as being possibly relevant. These two guys invented a replacement for a natural material and patented it with a name that reminded people of that natural material.

Not as interesting as a medieval Mongol-French cultural exchange on the subject of shoe polish, but somehow more convincing. I am still very interested in this word and will keep digging...

Psst...what did they say his name was again?

In the Spring issue of Slavfile Liv Bliss recommends Jim Shipp's Russian English Dictionary of Surnames for tracking down names that have been transliterated into Cyrillic. That's a book I'd like to see.

Ever heard of the famous French diver Kusto? Or Franklin Roosevelt's envoy to Moscow Josef Davis?

Okay, my first example is really easy, and the second one is really easy to find out.

But what about the Лорд Ридлинг (Lord Riedling? Lord Readling?) I encountered a while back? No name and no personal context, other than the fact that he was a well-known English Jew.

The general context is May 1939, and some of the mysterious lord's contemporaries are one Лорд Винтертон ("Lord Vinterton") and a German referred to as нацистский представитель Волтхат ("the Nazi representative Voltkhat").

Cyrillic masks removed, the men were: Lord Winterton (easy), Helmuth Wohlthat and...

Sir Rufus Isaacs, 1st Marquess of Reading!

I wasted a lot of time beating my head on the Internets searching for various English spellings of Ридлинг before it dawned on me that it wasn't a very English-sounding title and might be misspelled. In another 5 minutes I found the man.