christ
This post took 3 years off my life
I’ll take “words that perfectly describe the Académie Française but which would literally kill them to hear” for 500, Alex.
finding out the word "skein" not only means a loose length of string or yarn, but also wild swans or geese in flight. having an absolutely beautiful moment.
threads through the sky 💙
Poison and potion stem from one and the same Latin word. Pairs like this are called etymological doublets. Their original meanings were 'drink; potion'. This happens to be true for the word venom as well: it stems from Latin venēnum, which meant '(love) potion', itself a derivation of Venus, the goddess of love. Here's more:
*sigh*
#there’s so much lost if you just read one translation#you know the one#translation is difficult#and it’s even more so with an ancient text#meaning is lost#and that’s just the nature of translation#but anne carson did a verse translation#and intentionally sacrificed meaning in favor of poeticism#anne carson is a sublime writer and poet#but her works should be read as poetic interpretations of the text#it’s rotten work#is beautiful in its own context#but gone is the motif of sickness#be it the madness or violence that runs through their bloodline#and that’s why it matters that pylades is orestes and elektra’s cousin#because it’s their family curse#anyway#i just wish people would read more than three lines of one translation#these all reflect the time period in which they were translated#note how the mcleish translation sounds like it’s straight out of angels in america
like 10 years ago I went to my dad’s office for the day and made this list of swears I knew (I was 7)
fast forward to now and apparently he kept it and now it’s hanging on his wall for him to always remember
Jettison is like one of the top 10 words in the english language, get that fucking thing out of here at a notable velocity
Dear Geist,
Where did the term sea change come from? In the three dictionaries I checked, it's defined as a significant and/or unexpected change, some important transformation. How does the sea get into it?
—Oksana C, Prince Rupert BC
Dear Oksana,
The term comes from Shakespeare's play The Tempest, written in about 1610. In it, Ferdinand's father's body, resting at the bottom of the sea, is found to have undergone dramatic changes. “Of his bones are coral made: / those are pearls that were his eyes,” sings Ariel. “Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.” In other words, the sea has claimed the body and altered it in ways that are almost magical. Sometime in the late nineteenth century, the term began to mean any significant change caused by any old thing. It's easy to see why people would adapt sea change to other uses—any invocation of the sea reminds us of its beauty and mystery and power superior to ours. And language is a living, changing thing. But it's okay to be sad that we've lost the original, which is in a category of its own.
—The Editors (Geist)
