the pain (french) to pain (english) pipeline, aka the plot of les mis
Anonymous asked:
could you define those words in that post about terminology, please?
afloweroutofstone answered:
“Is there a ghost kissing me right now?” is a metaphysical question, it asks about reality.
“How would I know if a ghost is kissing me right now?” is an epistemological question, it asks about how we acquire knowledge about reality.
“What does it actually mean for a ghost to kiss someone?” is an ontological question, it asks about the nature of reality.
“Is this ghost’s only purpose to kiss me?” is an teleological question, it asks for a reason for something’s existence.
Hildegard von Bingen’s 23 litterae ignotae, letters for her constructed mystical language Lingua Ignota. ca. 1200
trying to prepare for a slightly unusual social interaction while being French is like
Me: The farrier is going to come and trim Pirlouit’s hooves next week and I only saw him once before and it’s been months and I don’t remember if we said ‘tu’ ou ‘vous’
Friend: Well what did you do when you made the appointment?
Me: Uncomfortable syntactical writhing to avoid 2nd person pronouns. I was waiting for him to pick one and end my suffering and he didn’t!!
Friend: Is he older than you?
Me: A little? probably enough to call him vous and Monsieur Lastname but in this context wouldn’t it feel silly?
Friend: What context
Me: While standing next to a donkey.
Friend: I don’t understand how the donkey factors into this
Me: Well I’d use formal pronouns and call him sir if we were in… an office building…
Friend: You’d call the donkey sir?
Me: No
Friend: Just be chill and start with “hey, I don’t know if I can call you ‘tu’?” like in a breezy way
Me: Okay but I’ll need to rephrase that sentence so there’s no ‘you’ in it. Since I don’t know which one to use
Friend: That is not breezy
A random assortment of archaic/disused English words that should still be used:
- brust (bristled or bristly)
- coolth (coolness. We still have 'warmth' so why did this one disappear????)
- ambiloquent (using ambiguous language)
- downsteepy (steeply descending)
- mazeful (confusing)
- evulgate (to send out among the people, to publish or distribute)
- toploftical (haughty)
- hazardry (risk-taking)
- dizzard (a fool, jester, or stupid person)
- againster (someone who is habitually opposed to things or 'against' things)
- loselry (behavior characteristic of a losel, which is similar to a 'loser,' except the connotation encompasses "profligate" or "scoundrel")
- plaguey
- malengine (evil intent, fraud, deceit)
- beasten (of or pertaining to beasts)
- wranglesome (contentious and prone to quarreling)
- dwine (to waste away)
I always wondered why the Western Zodiac and the Chinese Zodiac were both called zodiacs if one was associated w astronomy and the other w time in general. Like what defines a zodiac that the word is only used to describe these two things? Looking up the word “zodiac” in the dictionary didnt help bc it only talked about the western one.
Well, I decided to look up the etymology for zodiac and it turns out it comes from the Greek for “circle of little animals.” I love humans
was unwilling to accept this outright so i checked etymonline and, truly:
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Thanks
I don’t know which I find funnier “fuck shit up” or “faire smashy smashy”
TO DO SMASHY SMASH
Unintentionally humorous moment in this Yiddish translation of King Lear: for "unburden'd, crawl towards death," the translator has "באַפֿרײַט פֿון לאַסט/מיר װעלן שלעפּ זיך דעם טאָיט אַנקעגן". For "crawl", the translator chose "drag myself", which is fine, except that the word in Yiddish is one you'll already know: "schlep".* "I will schlep myself toward death," said King Lear.
*granted, the word probably doesn't have the same connotation in Yiddish--it just means "to drag" and is appropriate, but to a modern reader? That's incredible.
"It's fine, I'll just schlep myself toward death, nobody ever thinks of their poor father and how hard he's worked all their lives..."
Anonymous asked:
is the new baby llama gonna get a name starting with P too? (also why the Ps? is it for pasture/pré?)
hedgehog-moss answered:
I’ve received several messages like “why all the P names” and I’m afraid the answer is because I’m French… I remember replying to someone two years ago with a simple “It was a P year when I got my animals!” and that person was still confused, and I realised that the “mandatory letter of the year” concept is apparently a French thing…? We are a bureaucratic country that really likes making random things mandatory.
I got most of my animals in 2019 and purebred animals born that year had to have a name that starts with P (I think it applies to dogs, cats, horses, donkeys, cows, and sheep, though the practice started to be abandoned for the latter two as farms got larger and used numbers instead.) It doesn’t apply to llamas (though I didn’t know it at the time) and not all my animals were born in 2019, but it’s just convenient to use the letter of the year when you get an animal since lots of lists of name ideas starting with that letter will be circulating. There’s one at my vet’s office, and like agricultural news outlets or just about every website that has to do with animals will offer a list. It makes it easy to keep track of animals’ age (you meet a cow named Octavie in 2022 and you know she’s four years-old) and I think in the pre-computer era it just made things tidier for the keeping of national pedigree registers / herdbooks.
