Sinasappelsap comes in 1.5 litre bottles?

Fragano @1:

No, but it might come in 1,5 liter ones.

Astronomers have discovered an exoplanet which originated outside the galaxy - it belongs to a group of stars known to have originated in a dwarf galaxy swallowed by the Milky Way some billions of years ago.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11775803

I've always enjoyed explaining that you can have one spring roll, two spring roll, 50 spring roll, many spring roll... but no spring rolls...

It's pie day at work.

I'm on the activity committee, and Took Advantage:

Pecan, Apple Crumb, and Chocolate Cream.

Ahhhh. Pie.

This reminds me that I've never seen 1975's French movie "Cousin, Cousine".

The French word 'peche' can mean peach, sin or fishing, depending on which accents it is adorned with.

abi #2 Ware?

No reason for your heart to get the joke,
we took the road, and followed every twist;
found villages that time seemed to have missed,
and watched the sun come out from autumn's cloak
into a world we wanted to evoke
for younger selves, but that could not exist
where light and warmth burnt off the silly mist
and foolish wishes turned into thin smoke.
Smile now at folly and give measured praise
for what must be, and grant the purpose set
that we must give a lead to urgent youth
who wish to set the turning world ablaze
as we did once before we learnt regret
and found our tiny corner of the truth.

@7

That makes more sense than probably it should.

Ah, pie. And via the magic of thread multiplexing, did you know that the original version of "Dr. Strangelove" ended in a pie fight in the War Room? That scene was shot, and then Kubrick removed it from the released cut. I don't know if copies of the scene still exist, but I'd love to see one.

Serge @ #7 thereby giving rise to a classic tale of a mistranslated word leading the translator (in an 'O' level French examination) to garble the "fishing rod" into "tin of peaches" and turn the account of a fishing trip into something very strange indeed.

Admittedly this moose was only marginally better, and once memorably turned in an essay on "the use of capital punishment in schools". (Though I note that the UK Prison Service nearly managed something similar recently.)

#7 Serge

The French word 'peche' can mean peach, sin or fishing, depending on which accents it is adorned with.

Which can cause all sorts of problems to an elementary student trying to translate the phrase that Jesus was a fisher of men...

Mmm, sun-apple sap! (Probably a "false friend", but I like it anyway.)

AKICIML:

Saw this video yesterday, and besides the appreciation of the content, I immediately had a lust-on for the helmet she's wearing. The comments seem to indicate that it's a softball helmet. If that's true, would it be a bad plan to actually wear it while biking?

Cheryl@15: I didn't know softball helmets came with chin straps. (many pictures on the web show no straps, but that could be a marketing decision and could vary from helmet to helmet.)

Rot13 to avoid Schroedinger's Viewers:V unq n zvav-Orpuqry-grfg zbzrag jngpuvat gung. Svefg znyr gb fcrnx: nobhg 25 frpbaqf va. Svefg srznyr gb fcrnx: nobhg 90 frpbaqf va. V unir na rkprcgvbanyyl fubeg nggragvba fcna gbqnl, ohg jnf V gur bayl bar guvaxvat "Vf fur tbvat gb trg nal yvarf ng nyy?

#16 Sandy B.
in re your ROT13'd comment:

Qnl 1
1fg znyr - 5 frpbaqf va
1fg srznyr - 1:37

Qnl 3
1fg znyr - 22 frpbaqf
1fg srznyr - 41 frpbaqf

Qnl 4
1fg znyr - 20 frpbaqf
1fg srznyr - 45 frpbaqf

Weird. I had not noticed that on first watch.

From 149, Bruce Cohen (Speaker to Managers), #929, I can do that with both hands, but the right hand hurts a bit -- I have the remains of a gout tophus on the bottom joint of the ring finger.

David Harmon #14: Chinese-apple-sap.

Cheryl, #15, helmets are usually designed for specific sports, so I doubt it would work as well as a bike helmet.

abi, I have a post with a lot of links stuck in the background somewhere. Let me know if I need to change it.

Thought I'd share this.
http://www.howtobearetronaut.com/2010/03/the-ghosts-of-amsterdam/

Bruce Cohen #11: I've seen stills from the pie fight scene in Dr. Strangelove (unfortunately do not have a cite for the book in which I saw them), and the reason I've seen for its removal was that Kubrick felt that all that white was overwhelming to the point that nobody could see what was going on. However, I do not know whether any actual footage of the scene has survived.

Marilee @ 18 ...
From 149, Bruce Cohen (Speaker to Managers), #929, I can do that with both hands, but the right hand hurts a bit -- I have the remains of a gout tophus on the bottom joint of the ring finger.

Sans context, that's a phrase that leads to a wide variety of entertaining imaginings about what, exactly, 'that' happens to be...

My favorite two puns from my favorite second language:

"Aquí tenemos solo dos estaciones: invierno y gasolinera."

--a badly remembered joke from a very, very cold region of Spain or perhaps Basque, told to my 7th or 8th grade Spanish class. Turns on having the same word mean "station" and "season"; thus, they only have the season of winter and gas stations.

P. "¿Que es el animal más peresozo?" ("Which is the laziest animal?")
R. "El pez." ("The fish.")
P. "Pero ¿por qué?" ("But why?")
R. "Porque, ¿qué hace? ...nada." ("Well, what does the fish do? [It swims / Nothing].")

I noticed similar things while learning Spanish, abi.

For example, we were amidst the chapter where you talk about food (to practice your past-tense verbs, and the assigned-in-that-lesson nouns). I backtracked to hobbies to say I have six apple trees in my garden. Then my seatmate and I got onto apples, and whether we liked them or not, and had to pause and hand-up to ask the prof what the words for apple-core and seeds are.

That turned out to be unexpectedly complex. :-> She said core was complicated, and we should skip it for now, then paused (she is a native speaker of Spanish) to think about it for a long moment before she opined that apple seeds are 'pepitas de manzana,' instead of being 'semillas de manzana'. Watermelon seeds, she said are squarely pepitas, and poppyseeds are clearly semillas, but apple was close enough to a boundary case that she had to think about it before answering.

This had an interesting brain-collision for me, because in my familial argot, 'pepitas' is a specific term of art for washed, toasted, salted squash seeds (after removing them from the barfy guts you scoop out of your acorn, butternut, or spaghetti squash, or alternatively your pumpkin), served as a snack.

Pumpkin seeds are definitely 'pepitas' -- I asked. :-> It's not quite as confounding for me as my hindbrain's repeated insistence that 'mañana' means 'tomorrow' instead of, as it in fact does, 'morning'. I KNOW that one, I do, really, but it keeps sneaking itself in. Kind of a "One, two, five!" "Three, sir!" "-- Three!" situation.

I was also fascinated, in the section on negation, to discover that zero is definitely grammatically singular in Spanish. In English, I can say, "None of the shirts in my closet fit me properly," but in Spanish the negating adjective precedes only a singular noun (shirt) rather than a plural the way none-of does in English.

Old Norse has singular and plural pronouns, but also dual: "we two" or "you two" or "they two." I've always thought that was very handy.

Somewhat related, Japanese can attach the pluralization suffix -tachi to things like people's names: Daiki-tachi doesn't mean "multiple people named Daiki;" it means "Daiki and the people with him."

And then, of course, there's schadenfreude, which is possibly the greatest gift German ever gave to the English language. :-)

Oh, not to mention I am alternately enchanted by and frustrated with Spanish's very different chunking with regards to the concepts English simply lumps into, respectively, 'be' and 'know'.

Depending on what you're trying to say, a sentence using some form of 'is' in English could use at least five different verbs THAT I HAVE LEARNED ALREADY, in only 1.5 semesters of Spanish. 'Know' is a little simpler, given that it's two verbs, but they're distinctly different kinds of knowing, and the boundary between the verbs, while glowingly obvious to native speakers, puzzles my classmates and I.

Elliot Mason: Well, but it does mean "tomorrow," does it not? In addition to "morning." (But it does not mean "apple." I used to get manzana and mañana confused.)

"Tomorrow morning" - "mañana por la mañana."

Arabic also has a dual number; "the two of us" has a meaning distinct from "the whole crowd of us". Ah, mostly useless bits of trivia learned in international travel many, many years ago.

The Arab who invited me to tea with him asked me to remember him kindly. Most of this last decade I have been quite ashamed of how my government has treated his race.

Nicole (29): German does the same thing: Morgen means both 'tomorrow' and 'morning'.

Hebrew also has a dual form: ...ayim for two, ...yim for plural.

Which fact gave me a great Realization when I visited Egypt in 1987. The Hebrew name (Biblical until today) for Egypt is Missrayim. The Egyptians' name for Egypt (presumably in Arabic, I have no idea about ancient Egyptian) is Misr. Clearly Missrayim is the dual form of Misr. Misr, or Meitzar in Hebrew, means "a narrow place." And when you think about it, Egyptian civilization is in a narrow place, along the Nile river, the rest being desert. And thinking a bit further, the dual form implies Upper and Lower Egypt. So, Missrayim is a dual narrow place, and is in fact the same name as the Egyptians use for their own land.

@32 So, Missrayim is a dual narrow place, and is in fact the same name as the Egyptians use for their own land.

"The Narrows," more or less?

Jon, 32: That's the coolest thing I've learned all week.

Cadbury Moose at #12:
As the worms crawled out of the can, did it become a vers libre poem?

English has dual pronouns too. Well, I guess they haven't been in use for some time, but they definitely did exist.

Waaaait . . . the Old English dual second-person pronoun was git?

(Okay, I know, different G sound. But funny all the same. "You callin' me git?" "No, I'm calling both of you git."

What most gets me about languages is gender on nouns. It was bad enough with French having male and female nouns; German complicates it with having neuter as well (with no real reason why any given noun is a given gender). My favorite examples are das Messer, die Gabel, der Löffel - the knife (neuter), the fork (feminine) and the spoon (masculine).

Every noun ending with "chen" is neuter, though...such as das Mädchen -- the girl.

Weird stuff. I'm glad English got rid of that a long time ago.

#38: In "Me Talk Pretty One Day," David Sedaris talks about his frustration in dealing with gendered nouns when learning French, while living in France. He gets around looking like an idiot in shops by buying two of everything. Plural items are neuter, apparently.

Favorite line, paraphrased: "Eventually I got to the point where I could talk like an hillbilly. For example, if I wanted calves' brains I'd walk into the butcher, point into the case, and ask, 'Are thems the thoughts of cows?'"

Francophones have no problems speaking French.
Just sayin'

Seconding Dave Weingart on gender. As a person who doesn't identify well with the available genders, I sometimes wish we could remove gender from English entirely...or perhaps more usefully add some new ones to the mix.

The decline of the dual number is visible even in Latin -- the declension of "two" is different from other nouns.

I got around the gender and declension of German nouns by mumbling. A lot. Germans seem to do this too.

In my home dialect, we have this phrase 'half again', which means "multiplied by 1.5." So 90 minutes is half again as much as 60.

Dave 38: very noun ending with "chen" is neuter, though...such as das Mädchen -- the girl.

Not so much, any more. Used to be, 30 years ago. But now a lot of people in Germany say "die Mädchen." The '-lein'/'-chen' rule is superseded by the manifest femaleness of the semantics.

Not everywhere, not all the time. But more and more.

Open Threadiness:

A little stray calico cat* has shown up in our neighborhood. Very well mannered and friendly, and absolutely adorable. No pics yet, but she has a black patch over her left eye, and looks like a little pirate kitty.

Alas, we can't adopt her. Our boy cat has already declared his jealousy while my husband was petting the calico on our front porch tonight.

If we can't find a good home for her soon, we'll probably end up taking her to the adoption center our vet runs. If anyone in the greater Cincinnati/southwest Ohio area is interested in adopting her, let me know.

I'll post more updates as they become available.

*Kitten, really. She's grown a lot since we first saw her at Halloween.

Elliott, #26: I was under the impression that the idiomatic sense of mañana was "Not now." And that this causes much confusion for people who think someone is using the literal meaning!

Xopher @ 44 : Good to know, although I haven't seen it any any study materials or in the wild (die Mädchen gets used for plural, of course, but that's different).

A few weeks ago, I saw a link to a story about how language shapes how we think. Not in the traditional (and discredited) fashion of "There is no word for [x], therefore [x] cannot be thought about," but in the fashion of what it does force you to assume.

For instance, when they study gendered languages, where nouns are masculine or feminine, they found that words tended to be described by words that fit that culture's gender stereotypes. I think they used German and Spanish, since there are many prominent nouns (such as bridge) that are the opposite genders in those two languages. So in the country where bridge was masculine, words such as strong were used to describe it, but in the country where it was feminine, graceful might be more common.

Then they brought up a fascinating language that had no sense of relative direction. They'd never say something such as "It's in front of you," or "Back up two steps." Instead, they'd say, "It's just north of you," or "Move two steps west." The sense of knowing where you are is so intrinsic to the language that it creates a different way of viewing the world. (They further pointed out that to a speaker of this language, two hotel rooms with the identical floor plan, but across the hall from one another, would get seen as entirely different, because in the one, the bathroom would be to the west, and in the other, it would be to the east...)

Neat concept. Obviously, if you know something is there, you can work around it, but I'll bet that those who come from gendered languages bring along the connotations, even if just a little.

Blech. I thought I had a poem, but not this time. (Congested kid x 2 = no sleep for mama.) I'm going to bed.

Just think on this: We are headed to the holiday stress season. Think about why the holidays are (or should be) special to you, then make time for those reasons. The rest can "go to blazes."

Elliott @28: Oh, not to mention I am alternately enchanted by and frustrated with Spanish's very different chunking with regards to the concepts English simply lumps into, respectively, 'be' and 'know'.

IIRC English used to have a verbal distinction similar to Spanish saber/conocer (and German wissen/kennen), but only a few traces remain; I don't think there's still a clear polarity between, say, "wise" (or "savvy") vs. "canny".

I think Japanese also has the distinction (shiry vs. wakaru), as well as *three* possible equivalent to the English concept of "be"-- instead of the distinction between permanent traits and temporary conditions for the Spanish ser vs. estar, the split is among animate beings, inanimate objects, and statements of grammatical equivalence, though there are also inevitable idiomatic exceptions. But basically, you'd use three different verbs to translate "The (live) fish is in the bowl", "The (dead) fish is in the bowl", and "The fish is green".

(But not "the fish is red" or a few other basic colors which act more like verbs; putting that into the past tense would be less like "the fish was red" than "the fish redded".)

Marilee @21:

I've looked in the back end—even among the spam—and can't find a held comment by you. I don't know where it's got to.

Can you re-enter it? Sorry.

,y @36:

All through the day, iċ, me, mīn, iċ, me, mīn, iċ, me, mīn.
All through the night, iċ, me, mīn, iċ, me, mīn, iċ, me, mīn.

Okay, I don't have the chops for this . . . but some of you do.

Dutch, too, has a word that means both "morning" and "tomorrow": morgen. However, one doesn't say morgenmorgen for "tomorrow morning", because there's another word one can swap in: ochtend. (Thus, morgenochtend.) I was told it was rarer when I was taught it, but I hear it in about equal distribution in speech.

It also has an interesting distinction in body parts terms between {horses and people} and {all other animals}. Animals have a leg called a poot, a head called a kop, and a mouth called a bek. Horses and people have a been, a hoofd, and a mond. So if you're trying to tell someone to STFU, you tell them Hou je bek!, which gives you the "you're an animal" insult for free.

y @36:

Hey, that finally clarifies a bit of Dutch for me! Because there's a set of second person pronouns, formal and informal, singular and plural in common use in the Netherlands today:

je/jij (singular, informal)
jullie (plural, informal)
U (singular and plural, formal)

But there's an archaic informal second person form that turns up in church and in Belgium*: gij†. Since, unlike in English, the informal second person still exists in Dutch, I've been baffled where this archaic thing floated in from.

Clearly, it's descended from ġit. It's not used in the dual any more though; it's become singular.

(Marie Brennan @37:*snrk*)

-----
* These are not the same thing, but Flemish retains more old grammar than Dutch

† Pronounced like "guy" but with a fricative g and a bit more of a smile to widen the vowel.

Tongan has duals and plurals of all the pronouns, and also has a different form of "we" depending on whether it's inclusive or exclusive of you.

So as I recall there are separate pronouns for: me, you (singular), him/her, me and you, me and him/her (but not you), you and him/her, those two people, me and you and some other person or people, me and multiple other people (but not you), you and multiple other people, and (three or more of) them. It's easier to learn and keep track of than you might think. Fortunately the language doesn't decline pronouns by gender or case.

@Julie L #50

Haha, Japanese grammar. Hoooboy.

Loosely, shiru is "know" and "wakaru" is understand. This is pretty straightforward, though, usually. I've never known a student to have trouble with it for very long (though there are a few specific situations where cultural assumptions are a little different).

"To be" is indeed startlingly difficult to translate into Japanese. The explanation Julie L gave sounded wrong to me at first. After reading through it a few times I realized it did a pretty good job of explaining what the hell is going on there, just from a point of view I'm not used to. It's a description of the construction from the outside in, rather than the inside out.

As for colors in Japanese: it's not that some colors are verbs, it's that all standard adjectives do something very like conjugation, but some colors aren't standard adjectives, and act more like nouns. In Japanese nouns can act as adjectives by making them possessive. So Tom's toy would be "Tomu no omocha," and a "dog toy" would be "inu no omocha," essentially "dog's toy." A few colors use the same construction as nouns, so you get "midori no omocha" or "green's toy."

Normal adjectives essentially have conjugations, but are not verbs. They acquire inflections, though. Anyway, standard adjectives don't need the possessive particle 'no,' and just precede nouns directly. A red toy is "akai omocha."

Then things get tricky. There are another set of adjectives that are definitely not nouns, but use a similar construction, replacing no with na. A pretty toy is "kirei na omocha." Making it even more difficult, there are a few words that can use either no or na.

Even this is a gross simplification. I'm trying to shoehorn Japanese grammar into our conventional understanding of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. I was actually taught early on that the parts of speech in Japanese are not equivalent to those in romance languages. My first text actually referred to Japanese nouns as "nominals" and adjectives as "adjectivals," in an attempt to get us to understand that they weren't directly analogous to English nouns and adjectives.

When it comes to unique grammar, I really think Japanese takes the cake. (Or, literally: brings and goes with the cake for future use). I studied Japanese while a friend of mine studied Chinese, which are (supposedly) the two most difficult languages in the world. He said that in Chinese, it's the pronunciation that gets you. In Japanese, it's the grammar.

Oh boy. Language fun!

Tom Whitmore, #42: Really ancient Latin (pre-classical) had a dual; what you mention is just its vestigial remains.

Angiportus, #41: Seconding Dave Weingart on gender. As a person who doesn't identify well with the available genders, I sometimes wish we could remove gender from English entirely...or perhaps more usefully add some new ones to the mix

English, unlike the Romance languages, insists on distinguishing between "his" and "hers." In French or Spanish or Italian, you'd have to work to make that distinction clear (yes, of course it's possible). The common possessive adjective just means something like "one's" or "self's"; it changes to match the gender of the noun it modifies, but doesn't imply anything about the gender of the person who owns it.

Elliott Mason, #26: In English, I can say, "None of the shirts in my closet fit me properly," but in Spanish the negating adjective precedes only a singular noun (shirt) rather than a plural the way none-of does in English.

Although the latter sounds perfectly good to my ear, I think it's fairly recent in English. When I was young and had not yet become a pedant, older pedants would insist to me that "none" was short for "no one" and must always be treated as singular.

My favorite confusion of number is sentences like, "What we're looking at here are acres of poppies." I see no reason why the verb, even though it's "to be," should adjust itself to the number of what follows it. This leads to absurdities such as, "The thing we're talking about here are acres of poppies."

@ Dave Weingart, #38:

There are actually quite a lot of rules for gender in German, but some are semantic (der Junge (the m. boy)) and some are formal (Mathematik, -ik=f.). For endings like -e, it is not always easy to know which type of rule takes precendence, which is why I often mumble, use the plural, stay silent...

In Dutch, if you don't know the gender of a noun, you have three safe choices:

1. Make it diminutive (add -je on the end). All diminutive nouns are neuter, and the Dutch don't just use the suffix for little things. If they're dear to them, amusing, or just neat, Dutch people will make even giant cruise ships into het bootje.

2. Make it plural. All plurals are common gender*. The problematic het schip becomes the easy to remember de schippen. And plural verbs are easier too; just use the infinitive.

3. Mumble, or speak with a marked foreign accent. This is particularly effective when the foreign accent is Engelstalig; then we all know that one is doing one's best in a situation where the alternative is for the Dutch person to be doing all the work.

Particularly for a relatively minor† language like Dutch, it's important to remember that most native speakers will be more impressed that one has done them the courtesy of learning their language than they will be offended at imperfections in so doing.

-----
* There are a very few non-personal nouns in Dutch that are feminine, but you can only tell when someone uses a pronoun to refer to them and says zij instead of hij (common‡)or het (neuter). Obviously, verkoopster (female shop assistant) is feminine, but so is lengte, length. But fewer and fewer native speakers make the distinction themselves, and non-native speakers pretty much just ignore the matter.

† Even the Dutch admit that it's not one of the dominant global languages; that's why they prioritize language learning and value polyglots.

‡ Yes, sigh, masculine as default

@#56: Oh god, you used Eleanor Harz Jorden's book, didn't you? I hated that thing. Did she really believe calling it an "adjectival" would stop us all from just thinking "adjective"? If she wanted to encourage a real split there, she should have used the native Japanese terms (keiyoushi, etc). Plus her chosen system of romanization, which is clearer on a linguistic level but not at all like the romanization you'll encounter outside the book, and really she could have avoided the entire problem by using the actual Japanese writing system . . . .

(Why, oh why, were we learning Japanese from a book that only aimed to teach us the spoken language? We had to buy two supplementary coursepacks my professor had put together, one glossing the textbook, the other teaching us kanji, just to cover the shortfall. Result: my reading skills are terrible, because I mostly only read the romanization. Surprise, surprise.)

@#60 Yep, you nailed it! That's what we used for the first two years, anyway. Our teacher did teach us hiragana, katakana, and the first two dozen kanji in our first semester, which helped. After that we were expected to write out each lesson in Japanese, and work from that. There were many serious problems with that book, but I learned several grammar tricks that my other classmates (who mostly started with Genki) never seemed to master.

We switched to a different book my junior year, when we got a new teacher, but the switch gave me some strange gaps.

The best text I ever used was the third one: "Japanese for College Students," ICU's proprietary book*. It had the perfect blend of straight Japanese, and just barely enough English to explain the grammar.

I wonder what the standard is nowadays? Japanese is so utterly different from all other languages**, so there's a lot of disagreement on how best to teach it.

*I wish I had the first two books in that series. I went there after I'd had four years in the states, and tested out of the first two courses.

**That's what my Japanese linguistics professor used to say, anyway.

@#61 -- We used Vol. 1 our first semester and Vol. 2 our second, with hiragana in the first week, katakana a couple of months later, and somewhere between 250 and 300 kanji in the first year. My class was crazy fast.

On the bright side, it meant that when I took a second year of Japanese at a different university five years later, the chunk I remembered was about on par with the end of their first-year course. The downside was that I ended up cramming the grammar into my head via the romanization, and memorized kanji just long enough to pass the quizzes, which did not lend itself to long-term retention.

(The one thing I will admit to liking from Jorden's book is the pitch markings on words and phrases. Every other instructional method I've seen leaves you to figure out the difference between "ima" (now) and "ima" (living room) by auditory osmosis.)

Dave @38:

This leads, of course, to Twain's observation that in Germany tables and chairs have sex while young ladies have none.

Having spent a lot of years learning Latin, I've made my peace with gendered nouns, but Russian broke my brain with its verbs of motion.

See, Russian doesn't actually have a verb "to go" which covers all forms of motion. Instead, you have to say that someone "walked" or "went by water" or "went by vehicle" or "drove a vehicle" or one of a half-dozen other words. And if that wasn't enough verbs of motion have a special grammatical form that no other Russian verbs have.

See, most Russian verbs have a perfective/imperfective distinction (very roughly equivalent to "I was going" vs. "I went"). But verbs of motion have an additional iterative imperfect form, which distinguishes one-way from round-trip or habitual motion. So "I am driving to California [to move there and never come back]" is a different sentence from "I am driving to California [every week to see my mother]"

And of course, if you think there's some clear, simple, regular rule for distinguishing between these two forms, well, then you don't know very much about the irregularities of most natural languages.

This why I dropped Russian in the middle of my second quarter as an undergrad and never looked back.

@abi #54 : "Gij" is certainly used in Flanders, but also very much in Holland Below the Great Rivers. People from Brabant and below use it all the time in informal speech, certainly with friends/family and also (for those living Above the Rivers) when dropping back into native speech with fellow Brabanders.

I was at a birthday party yesterday, talking to a lady form Beneden-Leeuwen (map), which is below one of the Rivers, but only just, and I noticed she used it too. I had to look up the exact position of Beneden-Leeuwen, had never realised it was below the river, but it's good to see that the river rule seems to be true.

And on the subject of "anderhalf": my partner, who is from a slightly different part of the country than I am, uses "anderhalf honderd" for 150. This drives me NUTS. One doesn't do that! But apparently, one does where he comes from.

Language, it's fun :-)

German does the same thing: Morgen means both 'tomorrow' and 'morning'.

As does Scots. "I'll see ye the morn" = I'll see you tomorrow.
And so, confusingly, "I'll see you tomorrow night" = "I'll see ye the morn's nicht."

John D. Berry @ 57:
Although the latter sounds perfectly good to my ear, I think it's fairly recent in English. When I was young and had not yet become a pedant, older pedants would insist to me that "none" was short for "no one" and must always be treated as singular.

"None" as grammatically plural (as well as singular, depending on context) has actually been around for a long time; the original form (Anglo-Saxon nan) had both singular and plural inflections. See here for a discussion by Ben Zimmer.

Leah Miller @ 61:
Japanese is so utterly different from all other languages, so there's a lot of disagreement on how best to teach it.

I've heard that Turkish is surprisingly easy for Japanese speakers to learn, because they happen to have very similar syntax; I would imagine this applies to the reverse as well (Turkish speakers trying to learn Japanese).

Nicole J. Leboeuf-Little #25:

I tried this one on an old friend of mine (and a Spanish teacher) named Horton Dolphin; he laughed uproariously:

¿En las carreras de peces cual pez siempre llega el último?

El delfin.

For those who speak no Spanish: "In the fish races, which fish always comes last?" "The one at the end (the dolphin)". It's a perfect pun in Spanish.

"Sesqui-" is nice; too bad English doesn't have it.

At Seven Score and Ten: The Civil War Sesquicentennial Day by Day:

From the New York Times, November 19, 1860:

Information has been received here that [former] Gov. AIKEN, of South Carolina, opposes secession.

Public sentiment seems to be settling down under the idea that Southern States, South Carolina included, will unite in a demand for an additional constitutional guaranty, which it is thought the Free States will cheerfully grant. A Convention of all the States can embody a new clause in the Constitution, securing the Slave States against further agitation, and fixing a geographical line — perhaps the old Missouri compromise line between Free and Slave Territory. Such is the solution of the difficulty by leading men here from all sections. In addition to this they entirely approve of the suggestion of the TIMES, that payment shall be made for slaves not surrendered under the Fugitive Slave act.

Hon. Mr. OTERO has written to New-Mexico, advising his constituents to connect their destiny with the Pacific States if the Union should be dissolved. Californians now here declare their purpose to advocate the establishment of an independent republic on the Pacific side. Q.

I've studied Mandarin. Stative verbs, oy! They can be used as we would use an adjective, or as we would use the verb "to be" + an adjective. The color words in Mandarin are stative verbs. (OTOH, Mandarin also has the handy feature that light shades of all the colors are simply described by adding the word "fen" ["powdery"]. So "hong" is red, "fen hong" is pink. Also, the pronouns are gender neutral, which is nice.)

Then there was Greek. I got along better after I decided the language made no sense at all. Attic Greek had a separate verb for "to call (someone) Daddy" (pappadzo). And the 3 voices (active, passive, middle) came as a shock.

Lila @70

I like that Greek verb. Makes me think of the French verb "tutoyer" which means "To call someone by the informal "you" instead of the formal version." That was the word that got me entranced with useful words in foreign languages that we haven't imported yet:

"barder"--to cover with rashers of bacon
"mepriser"--to hold someone in contempt

and all the glorious subtleties of insulting people in Yiddish.

Sarah S @ 71:

I have certainly seen the past tense "barded" in cookbooks to cover the use of bacon (normally in cooking game), so I think that it has been imported into English.

One thing I don't get about Poirot is how he speaks English. People with an incomplete mastery of a foreign language will sometimes fall back to the grammar and the sentence structures of their native tongue. I've never heard a francophone speak in English the way he does - although I have a friend from France who sounds like Inspecteur Clousot.

Of course, Poirot isn't French, but Belgian.

Meanwhile, it's interesting how my co-workers from India will say, not 'this morning', but 'today morning'.

"I'm not a Frenchie - I'm a Belgie!"

- James Coco as Milo Perrier, Murder By Death

Serge #73 - it could be that Christie was writing how she imagined english people would imagine a Belgian would speak English.

You want weird language features? I've heard of a language where the word for "awsome" looks and sounds almost the same as the word for "awful". Said language also has a fairly confusing array of different past tenses that seem to serve very few practical purposes.

guthrie @ 75... Quite probable, oui?

marrije @64 said: And on the subject of "anderhalf": my partner, who is from a slightly different part of the country than I am, uses "anderhalf honderd" for 150. This drives me NUTS. One doesn't do that! But apparently, one does where he comes from.

My husband has a similar mental *twang* of wrongness when he hears one of our family friends saying things like, "The grass needs mowed really soon now," which is apparently an American regionalism of a region he is not from. :-> I understand it's relatively common in various British Englishes, too.

Then there's the fact that the same friend calls kitchen cooking tongs (and salad-serving tongs, etc) 'tweezers', which is SIMPLY WRONG. :->

Lila @70 said: Then there was Greek. I got along better after I decided the language made no sense at all. Attic Greek had a separate verb for "to call (someone) Daddy" (pappadzo). And the 3 voices (active, passive, middle) came as a shock.

I took Homeric Greek, not Attic, and let me tell YOU, after one year of THAT, I never again called Classical Latin complicated. The the full (legal-size) page grids of JUST THE ENDINGS for a single conjugation? Actually, the mood (voice? I think it was a mood) that broke my head was aorist, which is exclusively used for expressing hypothetical situations which are wishes or prayers. So instead of using a helper verb to distinguish it the way Latin and English do, "May you have many sons" is a different verb-ending of have than "You have many sons" and "You will have many sons" and so on.

I got a pity C in that class, because the teacher saw how very hard I was working (and how enthusiastic I was about it in general, despite my piss-poor ability to memorize sheets of verb endings, vocab words, etc).

I am continually amazed, taking Spanish now, (a) how much of it is basically the same as parts of Latin ... duh, and (b) how much SIMPLER it is than Classical Latin and Homeric Greek! I mean, dude, the nouns don't DECLINE! The adjectives only have to match in gender and number! Whee!

However, many of my monolingual American classmates were having huge problems with stuff they didn't know English did (various conjugation things; adjective agreement in number), as well as the things Spanish does that English doesn't (noun gender, accents, different -- and much more consistent -- phonics).

marrije @64 and Elliott Mason @78, This drives me NUTS. One doesn't do that! But apparently, one does where he comes from.

When I was in graduate school in psychology, I worked as a research assistant to a professor who studied "nonconscious information processing" - those things you learn without ever being consciously aware of noticing or learning them. He was Polish, and the main thing that had sparked his interest in this line of research was the number of times, as he tried to improve his English, he would ask someone why they said things one way and not another, and they would reply, "I don't know, it just sounds right."

The regionalism of American English that I don't share that drives me nuts is to use "with" with an implied but not stated object. As in, "I'm going to the store, do you want to go with?" That's just wrong. It's either "do you want to go?" or "do you want to go with ME?" NOT "go with."

@Leah Miller #56

Just to split a hair... the "3rd group" adjectives (~な) are undeniably nouns. A sentence like, "部屋のきれいは私の自慢です" should be a clear example (in case you don't have good language support: "Heya no kirei ha watakushi no jiman desu." [and for those of you who aren't torturing yourself with the world's vaguest language: (in unnatural, but grammer preserving English) "My room's cleanness is my point of pride."]) This is not きれいな部屋は私の自慢です。-- Kirei na heya ha watakushi no jiman. -- My clean room is my point of pride.

There is no excuse for denying their noun status. But they are a syntactically distinct class of noun for which use as a modifier is so common that speakers have permission to use a different (more specific, and semantically clear) particle when they are using them as modifiers.
Treating them as "adjectives with different grammar" is a sloppy short-cut. Though, it's hard to deny the need to take short-cuts while learning Japanese!

Greek was the rock on which I almost broke my university education. I took first-year Greek three times: freaked out and dropped out as a freshman, passed it but didn't really inhabit the language as a sophomore, finally got comfortable with it on my junior year abroad.

I read some of the Odyssey in the original, which was an irreplaceable experience. But it was definitely my high-water mark in Greek, and I graduated without taking enough classes in it to have it as an official minor.

Unlike Latin, I have forgotten Greek entirely, and thus lapsed back into barbarism.

theophylact #69:

We all learned the meaning of "sesqui" in 1990.

OtterB @79:

...the number of times, as he tried to improve his English, he would ask someone why they said things one way and not another, and they would reply, "I don't know, it just sounds right."

That is my all but unvarying experience with Dutch word order. It's very rigid, and beyond the basics (conjugated verb goes second, participles to the end of the sentence, time then manner then place in increasing order of specificity, verb at the end of dependent clauses but second in independent ones), no one can explain it. It just is, or in the case of my attempts, is not.

TSA. Flight attendant with 35 years in the industry, and with a prosthesis after breast cancer.

You know exactly where this is going, right?

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/11/19/national/main7070415.shtml

John D. Berry #57

My favorite confusion of number is sentences like, "What we're looking at here are acres of poppies."
I'm not really sure, but I think what you're looking at is an annoying border case of non-semantic subjects. 'Here' and 'there' for whatever bizarre reason got drafted into filling spaces in sentences where subjects ought to be, but using a subject is even too inconvenient for an 'it' (e.g. "It's fun to play baseball at night.").
The simple case is stuff like, "There is a pencil."
At any rate, the issue is that the actual subject of the content is not the subject of the sentence. That the verb responds to the actual subject rather than the syntactic subject... is bizarre, but not really arcane or especially confusing. (Though I wouldn't want to have to teach a one-point lesson on the topic).

OtterB @ 79, "go/come with" in that usage seems to be a regional variation on "go/come along."

I suspect "go along" is the same kind of abbreviation -- "Do you want to go along [with me]?" The OED says this usage dates at least back to 1590, and it is certainly more widespread and accepted.

I found someone's dissertation on the "come with" construction. I am reading it with great interest.

The author states that "with" was used in a similar fashion in Old and Middle English: "Defende and kepe þe soule of þy...seruant... and, þy grace goyng wiþ, dyrecte hym by þe wey of pes" (a 1450 example given in the OED). He doesn't argue that the American English construction goes that far back, but just points out that the "go with" construction exists elsewhere.

"Come with" is apparently also a literal translation of a sentence construction in German, Norwegian, and Swedish. Makes sense -- in English, it tends to be used in Minnesota and Wisconsin, which had lots of immigrants who spoke those languages.

Man, this dissertation is neat.

Sarah S. @84: What I really, really don't get about the whole non-debate ("Not cool, dude! Really really not cool!" / "Well, if you don't let us do everything we want, fifty airplanes a day will blow up. Are you on the side of the terrorists??") going on about the current scan-you-or-grope-you TSA policy is this:

When did flying become so radically dangerous that what is effectively a strip-search became utterly necessary for basic security?

Because it is a strip-search, either way, it's just faster than asking people to take off all their clothes. I don't get why people don't realize how completely unreasonable it is to go from 'walk through a metal detector, x-ray your luggage, and occasionally have a chemical test for explosives' to 'strip search EVERYONE'.

What's next, cavity examinations? If there's one thing the shoe bomber and the Christmas underwear dude have proved, it's that when you're carrying that little explosive, the other passengers will notice you trying to light yourself on fire! Which is self-solving, really.

And something like 40-60% of suitcases are going into passenger-plane holds without having been X-rayed. Not to mention the whole mail-freight thing -- almost no mail-freight is ever examined in detail, and it flies in passenger holds all the time.

But no, leap straight to the strip-searches. What? Seriously? Why are more conservative, corn-belt grandparents (you know, 'Real Americans') not up in arms about this?

... sorry. I try not to politically vent all over ML; it's too valuable to me as a friendly, fun, cromulent, thinky safe-space. But I just can't help it. Everything I hear (from 'both sides', as if the two sides are covering all viewpoints) on the news lately is completely ignoring the gripping-hand of the issue: universal strip-searches are a measure far out of proportion to the nature of the problem they claim to solve.

English used to have "half-again," which covers the same territory, but it some how got shuffled aside last century.

theophylact, #69: Asimov used "sesquicentennial" in "The Bicentennial Man", and I had to figure it out from context. That does seem to be the only place where it occurs in English.

James, #72: I wonder whether that sense has any relation to "barding" as the armor on a knight's horse, or (later) any sort of ceremonial decking-out of a horse?

Serge, #73: Surely you aren't suggesting that Poirot's mastery of English would be anything short of perfect?! That would not be orderly or methodical!

Elliott, #78: The "needs mowed" thing is from somewhere in the Great Plains area, I think; not Iowa (or my father would have had it), but perhaps Nebraska. I had a friend who used it, and some of it got into my speech patterns for a while. When I moved here, my partner found it sufficiently grating that I eradicated it again.

The aspect of Japanese grammar I'm currently drilling into my neural patterns are those verbs that are stative in English but active in Japanese. That, for example, shiru means not that I know something continuously (expressing a state), but that I know it at a single moment (an action), and that to say I know something continuously, I have to use the progressive form shitte iru ("I am knowing"). Tomu o shiru will be understood not as "I know Tom," as English speakers might expect, but as "I will/intend to know Tom." And similarly with motsu ("have/hold"), and others that don't slice the verbal semantic space the way English does.

And which I am finally buckling down to (try to) memorize.

---L.

@OtterB 79: It took an eighth-grade Spanish class and the grammar lessons therein to teach me the wherefores of the English grammar I'd simply accepted as given up to then.

Lee @ 89... It'd indeed appear that Poirot's little grey cells do lapse in the area of language. C'est horrible!

@87: I wrote a long blog post (linked by my name) about why the scanners and "enhanced pat downs" are way over my line, enough to keep me from flying unless I really have to. I won't repeat it here.

I think a lot of conservative Americans are up in arms about this. Drudge has been all over it. The FlyerTalk forums, which seem to be about equal parts liberal and conservative, are all up in arms. Comments on news sites, which tend to be extremely right-wing, are pretty uniform in their anger. (Yes, someone will inevitably pop up saying "I'd rather be strip-searched than blown up," but they're also inevitably met with several people asking if they'd be okay with mandatory cavity searches, then.) Even the ACLU blog got several comments from people who identified themselves as conservatives who usually hate the ACLU, but might actually donate to them for this fight.

Frankly, the fact that the media is running with so many TSA horror stories right now shows that "middle America" is really against the new searches. The media is in the business of selling fear and outrage to get eyeballs, and there appears to be a lot of demand for this particular fear and outrage. Which in this case I consider a good thing.

Caroline @86 Fascinating history of the "come with" construction. I had no idea.

The Spanish puns above brought the following extended French pun to mind:

"Je suis ce que je suis, mais je ne suis pas ce que je suis . . . parce que si j'etais ce que je suis, je ne serais pas ce que je suis!"

(For those who have no French--the first person singular, present tense of "to be" and "to follow" are both "suis", so there are several possible translations of the above, but only one of them makes sense: "I am what I am, but I am not what I follow . . . because if I were what I follow, I would not be what I am!")

OtterB @ 94, I didn't either! Thank you for mentioning it and leading me to look it up and find cool new knowledge.

@ Xoper #44: German native speaker living in Germany here: I've never heard (or seen) "Mädchen" used with a female article. What I do see is people shifting to a female pronoun later in a sentence (or in a later sentence) when referring to a "Mädchen" who was mentioned earlier in the sentence (or in an earlier sentence). E.g. "Als das Mädchen spazieren ging, stolperte sie über einen Stein." While this is still considered ungrammatical, it does seem to be gaining currency. So maybe in a few decades it will be accepted usage. On the one hand this drives me mad, because how can the subject of the sentence change sex? Arrgh! On the other hand, using a neutral pronoun for a girl gives me some cognitive dissonance, too. So maybe it's not so bad that this is changing. Hm.

Re: anderhalf: This concept exists in German, too: "anderthalb" would be the word here.

While I was in Australia for Worldcon, I picked up a book on aboriginal Australian languages, and some of them make the masculine/feminine distinction look downright simple. Murrinh-Patha has ten classes of nouns, for example, with different articles for each:

kardu: Aboriginal people.

ku: Non-Aboriginal human beings, animals, and animal products.

kura: Fresh water, and other drinkable liquids, but not milk.

mi: Flowers, fruits, vegetable foods, shit.

thamul: Spears.

thu: Other offensive weapons, and things that strike other things, like lightning or playing cards.

thungku: Fire, things associated with fire.

da: Places, seasons, etc.

murrinh: Language and similar concepts (like "school").

nanthi: Everything else.

The class a noun belongs to can change depending on the context. For instance, if you eat an egg, it's ku, but if you throw it at someone, it's thu. A hunter is kardu, unless he's not Aboriginal, in which case he's ku. Penis is nanthi; if you use ku instead, it's a snake.

Whoops, sorry for misspelling your name. I meant "Xopher", not "Xoper", of course.

BTW, speaking of concepts that exist in languages you're learning but not in your first language: the most mindboggling thing about English to me has always been the existence of different collective nouns for all kinds of different animals. In German, there's probably less than ten of those, and nearly none, I think, that only apply to one specific kind of animal. Basically, we have the equivalents of pack, herd, school, swarm, flock, and a few more. Nothing as specific as, say, a parliament of rooks.

Likewise, the adjectives relating to animals that are used in English are amazing. In German, the equivalents of "bovine", "feline" or "canine" would only be used by zoologists. In normal spoken or written German, people would say something like "cat-like" or "dog-like" instead of using a latin-derived term. Fun fact: I have a certain passive knowledge of Latin vocabulary largely thanks to my fairly advanced English vocabulary.

All this fits in with my observation that to speak or write more than very basic English, you need a *huge* vocabulary. I'd be interested in finding out what the average vocabulary of native English speakers is versus that of native German speakers. Maybe not the real average of the entire population, but the average of people at a certain, comparable educational level. I do remember reading somewhere that the total number of words in English is much higher than in German. Something like 1 mio. vs. 600,000 or so.

Lee @ 89 -- There's also "sesquipedalian".

The regionalism of American English that I don't share that drives me nuts is to use "with" with an implied but not stated object. As in, "I'm going to the store, do you want to go with?" That's just wrong. It's either "do you want to go?" or "do you want to go with ME?" NOT "go with."

I think this one is a foreign (German) construction dragged over into English, as opposed to a native-English regionalism. "Are you coming with" and "make the light out" are both word-for-word translations from German, and I've only run into those constructions in communities where German is an important background language.

Elliot #87:

My sense of this is that almost everyone with a voice has an incentive to overstate the threat:

a. Media sources benefit from the urgency of fear and a siege mentality, so they want to amp up the fear about a terrorist attack.

b. Current politicians and appointees benefit from the tendency of most people to shut up and obey and support the leader when they're scared. Further, to the extent that deciding whom to buy those zillion-dollars-a-pop porno scanners from is a way to reward friends and punish enemies, more fear = more power to make such purchases.

c. Challenger politicians can benefit by proclaiming that the incumbents are ignoring or underemphasizing the threat. You can see this in the discussions surrounding civilian trials for detainees, for example[1].

d. The folks who are selling the porno scanners, representing the agencies buying and using them, representing the contractors selling services to those agencies, or speaking on behalf of the agency's employees, all have an incentive to amp up the fear.

Who has a corresponding incentive to decrease the fear? I think it's quite hard to run as a politician on a "stop freaking out" platform w.r.t. terrorism, though that would definitely get my vote. Airlines are the only ones I can think of with such an incentive who also have PR departments and money to spread around ensuring their voice is heard on TV. And I have to guess that airlines aren't super excited about establishing a bad relationship with TSA or DHS or either big political party.

[1] While we can't safely try KSM in a civilian court anywhere in the US, because there may be a small number of poorly-prepared followers who would attack the trial, we can safely try Mexican drug lords in civilian courts in the US. After all, it's not like their organizations have lots of well-armed goons on payroll, or have extensively infiltrated US police agencies and courts and prisons.

I think that if the dual pronouns had survived in English, they would be something like wit (= we two) and yit (= you two). Try dropping those into your conversations some time.

Classical Greek of course had the dual too--in keeping with the rule of thumb that where Latin has two of something, Greek has to have three. With that plus combinatorics, you get the full-page conjugations Elliott Mason describes. (Actually I suspect you're thinking of the optative, not the aorist, though both are weird enough.)

@Scott #80

You are, of course, totally correct about the "na nominals" (as the inimitable Harz Jorden called them) being slightly odd nouns rather than really weird adjectives. I will admit to looking at a cheat sheet online to make sure I wasn't saying anything wildly inaccurate... and I ended up being led astray. It seems to be common practice to teach the "na" nouns as adjectives now, which seems very foolish. Almost all the basic online guides, even ones that are really good about everything else, have them listed that way. (As does the commonly used "genki" textbook, if I recall correctly).

So yes, go back to #56 and replace "There are another set of adjectives that are definitely not nouns, but use a similar construction, replacing no with na." with "Many words we would consider adjectives are essentially nouns, using the same construction as the possessive above, only with na in place of no."

And now for something completely different: Charge your cellphone with a hamster!

Xopher (44): My home dialect also has 'half again'. I got some strange looks when I tried to use it here, however.

#26/29/31/41/53: (re Spanish, German, and Dutch all using the same word for 'morning' and 'tomorrow')

It occurs to me that that is also true in English, in a limited sense. If someone says "I'll do that in the morning," they don't necessarily mean "before noon on an unspecified day," they often mean something like "it's too late to do that today, I'll do it first thing tomorrow."

[posting this now, then going back and catching up with the rest of the thread...]

Just thought you'd like to know that this blog does not display properly in Firefox 3.6.12
Cheers

Chris Grealy @107:

It certainly does on my Mac; I'm using that very version right now. What's your OS, and what's wrong?

And I'm using 3.6.12 on a PC and it looks just as fine as always.

Chris @107: I'm using Firefox 3.6.12 on Windows Vista Home Premium SP2 (gack, barf) and it displays fine.

No problems here on a Mac laptop, with 3.6.12.

John D. Berry (57): When I was young and had not yet become a pedant, older pedants would insist to me that "none" was short for "no one" and must always be treated as singular.

All of my teachers insisted on that, through elementary and high school (1970s and very early 1980s). They also insisted that "everyone" is singular and can't be followed by 'their'.

Caroline (86): I'm guessing that the 'come with' construction also appears in Yiddish; it's pretty common on Long Island, too.

Lee (89): I hear the 'needs mowed' construction on Long Island as well.

I also suspect that the crew who've taken over our country would rather we didn't travel around so much, especially to other countries. Isolation makes it much easier to control people....

I'm using Firefox 3.6.12, and I can't see any of the legally mandated "U R homo LOL", "OMG STFU u sux", or "terrorist-loving liberal nanny state moonbat" comments on any of the comment threads here, so I think there must be something wrong with the HTML formatting.

(But seriously, care to explicate, Chris?)

David #113:

I suspect that's a happy side-effect rather than a goal, but yeah, I think a lot of the propaganda we're used to (of the form "America's #1 on everything") falls incredibly flat once you've spent any significant time outside the US. Indeed, even reading significant amounts from outside the US is a kind of antidote to that thinking.

@89, @100

Sesqui- is used in rather more words than sesquicentennial and sesquipedalian and their derivatives, though most belong to specialist jargons. A little digging with Google gets me to over 30 words, but if I suspect that if I dug further into chemical terminology the number could be raised considerably.

To paraphrase James Nicoll, never underestimate the rapacity of the English language.

Clifton Royston @ #114

This moose has no trouble with the formatting using Safari 5.0.2 on a Mac, nor with the appalling IE 6.whatever at Ork.

Except... OMG! I can't see the fnords...

For several years I was a conversational English language tutor. All of my students were Japanese. One thing I learned by accident is that there are some tongue twisters that translate intact. To wit, they twist tongues in English, too.

The one I remember best is:
Nama mugi nama gomei nama tamago.
or
Raw wheat, raw rice, raw eggs.

It was also of much interest to us that the elementary schools (at least the one she went to) sang the same pioneer songs my grandfather sang.

It seems appropriate to note on a thread discussing language that today is the 147th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.

I memorized it in grade school, and could indeed recite it from memory for many years. No longer -- but bits and pieces do remain.

Lizzy L @ 119...

"Four score and seven years ago..."

That reminds me it's been a long time since I watched The Music Man.

Fascinating language discussion!

Re: grammar, my problem is I've never actually been taught English, I just happen to speak it very well. Somewhere along the way I managed not to get any formal grammar education at all.

It took me weeks of high school French to understand "to be". I'd honestly never considered "I am", "We are" etc to have the same root. Yet I can speak and write perfectly grammatical English without actually really understanding formal grammar, and I'm even a pretty good amateur proofreader. Go figure.

More interesting, re regionalisms and translations dragged into English: South African English uses "right now" in the same sense that Spanish casually uses "manana", ie "sometime soon but not immediately". Give that "right now" sounds, to a native English speaker, a LOT like "right away, immediately", this has been the cause of some confusion. And tension, between my South African expat father and Canadian-raised stepmother. ;-)

Oh, and the blog looks fine on Ubuntu 9.10 (Linux!) in a couple of browsers.

- He reñido a un hostelero.
- ¿Por qué? ¿Dónde? ¿Cuándo? ¿Cómo?
- Porque donde cuando como, sirven mal, me desespero.

Wirelizard @ 121:

It took me weeks of high school French to understand "to be". I'd honestly never considered "I am", "We are" etc to have the same root.

Ironically, they mostly don't. Well, they're certainly all inflections of "to be" in Modern English, but in origin they come from what were originally several distinct words. I think the progression is something like: am/is/are came from one root, and added was/were (from a different root) as past-tense forms before or during the Anglo-Saxons period; then this conglomerate merged with "be" during the Middle English period.

Yet I can speak and write perfectly grammatical English without actually really understanding formal grammar, and I'm even a pretty good amateur proofreader. Go figure.

The first part is hardly unusual; understanding formal grammar is pretty much irrelevant to speaking (or writing) grammatically in your native language.

Caroline @86: I know I picked up "come with" from watching episodes of "Buffy" (e.g.)

Elliott @78: I've noticed that I seem to be in the process of picking up the construction "needs mowed," "needs painted," etc. I moved to the Chicago northwest suburbs from southcentral Michigan nine years ago. At the moment, I waver between "needs mowed" and "needs mowing."

Lizzy L @119:

So the Gettysburg Address was seven score and seven years ago? Nifty.

abi, #51, yes, I originally wrote it in a text file, just in case. I'll put it back on the Arrows & Bananas comments.

John D. Berry @57 and Scott @ 85

My favorite confusion of number is sentences like, "What we're looking at here are acres of poppies."

I suspect the problem isn't the word "here", actually, because I can get the same "sounds sort of OK" sense from "What we're looking at are acres of poppies." (Whereas "The thing we're talking about here are acres of poppies" sounds obviously wrong to me.) I suspect the trick may lie in the fact that a phrase like "what we're looking at [here]" doesn't seem as obviously singular as "the thing we're talking about"; this might allow the plurality of "acres" to influence the verb.

Bentley #122:

Eso me lleva a mi clase de secundaria en 1969. En aquel entonces el diálogo empezó:

- He reñido con mi hostelero.

Needs mowed, needs washed, needs fixed, etc. -- I always thought that was mostly a southwestern Pennsylvania thing, but it sounds like it might be more widespread than that. (On a totally unrelated note, why do more expensive hotel chains charge you for internet access and cheaper ones don't?)

On the browser issue, Making Light seems to display just fine on whatever it is my phone uses.

Lila@70: actually παππαζω is older than Attic Greek; it shows up in the Iliad. In general -ζω or -ιζω is a verbalizing suffix -- it's the source of our "ize" (from the infinitive form -ιζειν). The one I really liked when I stumbled on it in the dicitionary was τἰζω. "τἰ" is an interrogative pronoun, "what", so (this was apparently a nonce-word made up by a comic playwright) "τἰζω" is "to say 'what?' all the time".

Another amusing verb is κἰσσαω, which is "experience strange food cravings during pregnancy". (I came across that one while reading The Bacchae -- ivy, "κισσος", is a symbol of Dionysus, and one possible declension of κισσος is the same as one possible conjugation of κἰσσαω.)

Elliott Mason@78: That is a mood, but it's the optative mood -- aorist is a tense, really quite an easy tense whose only bizarre thing is the name; if they called it "simple past" English speakers would have no trouble with it. (At least in the indicative mood; other moods get a little more complicated, yes.)

While the grammar of Homeric Greek may be more baroque than that of Latin, the actual reading is much different, at least for me. I'm currently participating in two online groups: one doing a book of the Odyssey, and another reading some of Cicero's speeches. I can knock off a translation of 15 lines of the Odyssey in about ten minutes, but an equivalent amount of Cicero is much harder and takes much longer.

My sense (which may be unfair) of Latin is that it's much more rigid; Latin poetry has many more spondees than Greek. Greek is more wild and free. Latin is

atque in perpetuum, frāter, avē atque valē

ἦμος δ᾽ ἠριγένεια φάνη ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς

these had to happen

Hmpf 99: English vocabulary is mostly Latin-derived (at some remove; for example this counts words we got from Norman French (if they were French rather than Norse), Spanish, etc.) at this point. Also English has a larger vocabulary (total inventory of words) than any other modern language. Only Ancient Greek (Attic or Homeric, I'm not sure*) had more words in it in history.

As for the vocabulary of the average person, I have no idea. It's pretty easy to come up with a word someone else has never heard of, though.
____
*I'd think it'd be Attic, though. I mean, where else would you store all those extra words?

@ David Goldfarb #130:

Except that the lines you compare are different metrically; the Latin is the pentameter of an elegiac couplet, and the Greek is a dactylic hexameter.

I agree with you that the Odyssey is much easier going than Cicero, though--or Catullus! Once you've learned how Homeric Greek works, you can keep rolling along like a shameless rock down a hill.

Janet Brennan Croft @ 129 ...
(On a totally unrelated note, why do more expensive hotel chains charge you for internet access and cheaper ones don't?)

They assume that you can either afford it, or you're a business traveller, and your employer is affording it ...

xeger, #24, that's why the comment number is there!

Chris Grealy, #107, I just checked and I'm using 3.6.12 and it works fine here. Can you tell us the problem specifically?

Ironically, they mostly don't. Well, they're certainly all inflections of "to be" in Modern English, but in origin they come from what were originally several distinct words. I think the progression is something like: am/is/are came from one root, and added was/were (from a different root) as past-tense forms before or during the Anglo-Saxons period; then this conglomerate merged with "be" during the Middle English period.

If you're interested in looking up more about it, the process is called "suppletion". Another English example is go/went.

#122 ::: bentley @122: I''ve been meaning for a while to write some multifunctional-word-disambiguation mnemomic sentences. I know one will involve being asked what (¿Comó?) I eat (como), whose response involves being hungry for a man (tengo hambre por el hombre). Cannibalism is almost as fun as velociraptors. :->

The really fun one to compose, though, is going to be the one using at least 6 separate senses/meanings of esta/está, pronouns, verbs, and all.

Hmpf@99: The terms you list are really the only ones in common usage. All those other ones are just amusing trivia, you'll hardly ever hear anyone actually say them.

Cassandra@133: I wasn't really intending to compare those two lines directly in terms of meter or anything like that, just to give a high-level description of their feel. I have read the Aeneid, and it seemed to me that it had many more spondees and spondaic lines than Homer does, but I admit I didn't actually count them.

(I also noticed that the war scenes had rather more varied imagery* than the Iliad had, and it didn't have Homer's continuity lapses, which inclines me towards thinking that there was not one single poet named Homer...that's a whole other discussion, though.)

*Reading the Iliad caused me more than once to roll my eyes and say, "Oh yay, another lion simile." (If it wasn't lions, it was wild boar.)

David Goldfarb @ #138, you've forgotten "rosy-fingered dawn."

Every damned day, rosy-fingered dawn. Just once I'd have liked to read that it was bloody raining.

Not to mention wine-dark seas. And swift-footed ... and, etc.

Taking that class did cause me to gain a verbal tic: appending suchlike accolades to proper nouns in my conversation, like "Oh, look, here comes [classmate], hair bright-shining ... um. Sorry." or "That test was really hard. Sharp-penned [Teacher] had it in for us."

Okay, I'm wrong. "Rosy-fingered dawn" was meant to describe Eos opening the gates of heaven so Apollo could drive his chariot across the skies, or so Wikipedia tells me.

Somehow my junior year high school teacher missed that when we read The Iliad or else I'd forgotten it. I thought it was just Homer playing weatherman.

David, 138: Yes, AIUI it's widely accepted that Homer-who-was-legion cobbled together the Iliad from a bunch of prior epics. That's why the list of ships sticks out like a sore thumb; it's considerably older than the plotty bits. It was all orally composed, too; nobody wrote stuff down until much later. That's why there were so many formulae, so you could vamp while you tried to remember who got killed next.

Peter Erwin @ 122

The first part is hardly unusual; understanding formal grammar is pretty much irrelevant to speaking (or writing) grammatically in your native language.

This is widely believed by English speakers, perhaps because it is more or less true for English. And there may be other languages it is true for as well. But having watched my (francophone) daughter transition from an English-speaking to a French-speaking school a few years back, I'm not sure it's true for (written) French. I suspect the reason is that written French makes all sorts of distinctions that are not phonetically present in the spoken language, or only vestigially so, such as the silent 'ent' on 3rd person plurals.

(My wife says it tells one something about the character of the two languages that 'so-and-so writes like he speaks' is a compliment to an English speaker, but an insult to a French-speaker.)

Linkmeister @ 139: I've got a friend who reckons that ancient Greek roses were white, on the basis of a line in Sappho about the 'rosy-fingered moon'. I don't know if there's any chance he's right; but it hyas made me see that stock epithet ina different way.

Also the sea was wine-dark. I'm told that wound locations were always given in relation to the nipple, but I haven't actually read it myself.

praisegod barebones @143 said: I've got a friend who reckons that ancient Greek roses were white, on the basis of a line in Sappho about the 'rosy-fingered moon'. I don't know if there's any chance he's right; but it hyas made me see that stock epithet ina different way.

My Greek teacher explained it by saying that all the 'rosy-fingered' things weren't talking about the OBJECTS, they were talking about the personified goddesses of same -- so imagine clear-skinned alabaster visions of loveliness, whose fingers are so unused to work that they have a delicate pink flush around their edges and tips. Etc.

He also had a heck of a time explaining 'wine-dark' to some of my classmates; that led to a digression through how the Ancient Greeks apparently chunked up their colors VERY differently than we do in English.

Janet Brennan Croft... I met Connie Willis tonight and, yes, she still had that Bishop's Bird Stump you and others had made from one of the hotel's wastebaskets.

Random open thread plug:

The annual Desert Bus For Hope charity gaming marathon started a few hours ago.

During this multi-day ordeal, members of my favorite internet sketch group play the most boring video game ever created: Desert Bus. It was part of a never-released mid-90s Penn and Teller video game, "Smoke and Mirrors." Designed in response to criticism of violent games at the time, the Desert Bus portion of the project embodied the possible alternative: it was a "realistic" video game. In it, you drive a bus from Tuscon to Las Vegas in real time. The trip takes eight hours, and the bus veers randomly to the right, meaning you must monitor it constantly, steering left occasionally, or crash. If you lose control, or stop paying attention for more than a moment, the bus unspectacularly runs off the road and is towed back to your city of origin. The reward for completing the journey without crashing? A single point, and an offer to make a return trip.

Of course the game itself isn't the primary source of entertainment (though you can watch the screen on their Bus Cam). The comedians sing songs, recite poetry, play games, dance and do various wacky challenges, all in pursuit of further donations, all while at least one of them plays the game. A moment ago the driver was wearing a tower of ten funny hats. After that a man solved a rubix cube in under two minutes and then sang "I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General."

There's also a maker component. Last year fans of the group and of the charity made tons nerdy crafts and sent them in. There were embroidered video game towels, gorgeous hand-knitted lace scarves with the group's logo, paintings, sculptures, sketches and more. This year promises to have even more great crafts, all to be auctioned or raffled off during the marathon.

Proceeds go to Child's Play, a charity that buys toys, games, and activities for kids in hospitals.

It's hilarious piled on awesome combined with heartwarming. When I was twelve and my brother was seven, I got a new bike and he got my old one. He wasn't used to its speed or controls, so he flew down the hill behind our house and into a telephone pole. He damaged his spleen and had to spend the entire summer in the hospital, the NES that was wheeled from room to room on a cart was the only bright spot for him. I know how miserable kids can be in hospitals, and thinking of all the good these guys do makes me a little teary-eyed. I can't help it.

Desert Bus earns between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars each year for Child's Play, and Child's Play itself has been bringing in over a million dollars a year for the last several years. I heartily recommend you watch, donate, or bid.

Hmmm. Google Maps estimates the trip at 7 hrs 23 minutes (Tucson to Las Vegas). I'd expect it to take a little less....

I missed having an Armistice Day thread here this year. That is all.

FWIW, our German word "doch" can mean either 'certainly' or 'certainly NOT!', depending on context ;-)

Also FWIW, the whole bit about the resurrection was only put in the bible just so that the authors could show off by writing long palindromes in Hebrew. (This stupid comment box won't let me write the palindromes in Hebrew here, just you'll just have to take my word for it :-(

Hmmm. I just tried to post a moderately long, link-heavy post on another thread here, and got a rather opaque "an error occurred" message back.

albatross @151:

I'm afraid your comment is neither in the pending pen nor the spam bucket. Did you have it saved somewhere? Want to try again?

In the same vein as Avram's post cross-thread: This piece by a Nobel prizewinning economist talks about the changing meaning of "the rule of law" in the US, w.r.t. foreclosure reform.

For more in-depth detail: This series of posts explains the foreclosure documentation mess pretty nicely--it was recommended by Yves at Naked Capitalism and by the guys at The Baseline Scenario, folks that understand finance and law quite well.

This Talibbi article is more colorful and more small-picture, but also explains what's going on.

This all has consequences. If I'm on a jury, and know that prosecutors and policemen who lie on the stand or manufacture or destroy evidence will face no penalty at all, that's going to make me more skeptical, more likely to acquit someone who probably is guilty, because I'm not sure the evidence hasn't been tampered with. If I'm considering doing business with some large company, I'm likely to prefer interactions that don't rely on a fair legal and regulatory system to keep them from screwing me over (prepaid vs. contracts for cellphones, frex). If I'm convinced that all politicians are lying to me all the time, without even the consequences of having any maintream media call them on it, then I may not bother voting. If I hear a story about some elaborate government conspiracy (to hide Obama's Kenyan birth certificate, or to hide its involvement in the 9/11 attacks, or to cede sovereignty to a North American Union, or whatever), and I know that genuine conspiracies that violate law and decency are routinely ignored and pardoned when they're discovered, I may believe the rumors. When I consider investing money in some market, I'll certainly be thinking about the fact that widespread fraud and incompetence on the part of, say, rating agencies and regulators and market participants, has no consequences.

A lot of social mechanisms work because of trust, and trust comes partly from the existence of something like a trustworthy courts and public media and market mechanisms. The powers that be have, lately, found it necessary to visibly and massively corrupt those mechanisms, in order to protect themselves and their friends from consequences. This was rational for them, but disastrous for our society.

abi:

My NoScript was reporting a possible XSS attack attempt when I tried posting this on the It's Good To Be All The Kings' Men thread. I couldn't quickly untangle what was going on there, so there may be a real problem or there may not.

153
And this post shows you just how complicated mortgages can be: a specialist in (non-mortgage) securitization tries to sort out his own mortgage. The illustration on the post shows where he is after a year of investigating.

P J, that reminds me of that scary chart opponents of something during the Bush years put out. Homeland Security, maybe? It was the most convoluted thing imaginable until I saw the chart you just linked. Wow.

As a recovering organic chemist, I'm fond of sesquiterpenes. Terpenes are a class of natural products derived from two isoprene units and containing ten carbon atoms; familiar (and fragrant) members include pinene, menthol, citronellal, and carvone. Sesquiterpenes are homologous materials with 15 carbons.

An outstanding defense of the humanities from a peer-reviewed biology journal.

Tim, 158: How lovely! I hope C. Wingate reads it, if he can stop looking down his nose long enough.

TexAnne @159:

Please, let's not talk about members of the community in the third person if we can avoid it.

Abi, I shall certainly try.

TexAnne @ 161...

Dough or donut, there is no rye.
(Actually, when you posted that, I found myself hearing the genie in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.)

Serge, 162: A rye-based doughnut-esque thingy would be a bagel. Which leads me to ask--does anyone here have a favorite bagel recipe? I can't knead by hand, but I have a decent stand mixer w/dough hooks.

Open-Thready question/mild request to Our Illustrious Hosts:

If it is trivially easy, could you add a link which goes back to the front page in the indicia between the comments and the posting box? Having the link at the top means taking an extra step to go there; using the "back" button means I don't see who's posted while I've been reading. It's a very small thing, a mild convenience only; with the length of many threads on this board, it does feel as if it might be convenient for others as well as myself, but clearly not worth a great deal of effort.

Thank you in advance for considering this.

Coming a bit late to the party here, but Serge @ #7, that feels like a bit of a backhanded comparison. The letters «e», «é» and «è» really do signify different sounds in french orthography — and to just drop the accents is to mishandle the language.

A comparable quip about the English language could, for instance, point out that a word like

«bad»

connotes one of
1. the opposite of good
2. a winged mammal
3. a flat surface, for instance the landing place for a helicopter
4. a gentle flat-handed touching motion

depending on which of the two consonants you choose to voice.

Hmm. It looks like the "Privilege Denying Dude" site is down. Maybe because bad things happened to the harmless guy whose picture they used (there were implications like that on the site the other day, but I didn't read in detail). Pity. I had contributed one. Above the picture: "Marriage is for having kids, and gays don't have kids." Below: "Only married couples should be allowed to adopt."

Ole Phat Stu 150: FWIW, our German word "doch" can mean either 'certainly' or 'certainly NOT!', depending on context ;-)

I had an interesting related experience in Germany one time. Keep in mind I was a 16-year-old exchange student and didn't have the linguistic knowledge I later acquired. This was a party for the exchange students and their families. I was looking for a place to sit; there was one at a table otherwise occupied by German girls. I said, in English, "Do you mind if I sit here?" (Stupid on at least two counts.)

"Yes," said the nearest girl, smiling. I looked crushed and started to walk away, and she immediately exclaimed "Doch!"

Fortunately I knew enough German to understand what she meant. She was rather confused, but all was well.

abi 160: Please, let's not talk about members of the community in the third person if we can avoid it.

That Xopher does that all the time. It's very annoying. :-)

TexAnne 163: A rye-based doughnut-esque thingy would be a bagel.

Not if you bake it without boiling it first.

Mikael 165: Just a quick note to let you know that Serge is a native speaker of French, in case you were unaware of that. Doesn't necessarily invalidate your point, but I thought you should know.

The difference among e, é, and è seem subtler to me than between b and p or d and t, but I do not speak French and can't claim any authority on that.

re 159: I'M not an engineer!

Leah @56 et seq.: "To be" is indeed startlingly difficult to translate into Japanese. The explanation Julie L gave sounded wrong to me at first. After reading through it a few times I realized it did a pretty good job of explaining what the hell is going on there, just from a point of view I'm not used to. It's a description of the construction from the outside in, rather than the inside out.

I'd be interested in hearing the inside-out description-- I've been fitfully thwacking at the Japanese language for some time (and have been resoundingly thwacked back) from a purely recreational outside-in perspective.

WRT Japanese (non-)adjectives/verbs, my brain keeps insisting that it's all very well for adjectives to express number and gender, but once they start dabbling in mood and tense, they're out of the "adjective" box and I'm summarily declaring them mutant verbs (esp. since negating normal verbs instantly turns them into this category).

Which is completely incidental to any syntax labels that may've already been established by Real Linguists and/or within the Japanese language itself, but hey.

AFAIK the more elaborately conjugated -i adjectives usually get translated into English as appositive clauses. It would take a lot fewer Japanese words to express something like "The fish that was probably red whenever the water wasn't too cold could be blue now", though I'm not sure how to properly assemble the conditional version of tsumetasuginakatta mizu ("water that wasn't too cold"). On the other hand, it would take a lot longer in Japanese to say "My cat is grey" (Atashi no neko wa nezumi-iro desu?).

Amusing factoid: The Chinese character for "water" is only used in Japanese for *cold* water, perhaps making tsumetai mizu somewhat of a tautology. However, the Japanese word for *hot* water (including hot springs and baths etc.) is written with a character that still means "soup" in China. Hilarity ensues. ("Look, our hotel has a snack bar where we can get some noodles... hey, why is everyone naked in here?")

Dear Fluorosphere, I do not have time to learn Japanese right now. Please stop making me die of wanting to. Love, TexAnne.

The comments on Japanese lead me to ask: is there an index of declassified documents online so I can check if a confidential manual of military Japanese from 1944 is now legitimate for me to own? The Secret Grammar of the Japanese Written Language (by J. B. Hurt) has "Secret" crossed out, so I expect it's okay to own, The Restricted version of Lehmann and Faust from 1944 is also not marked as released, though....

(They look like fanzines, and not very good ones -- mimeo or ditto, no artwork except characters.)

#4, xeger
I've never heard "spring roll" as a plural - in my experience it's 1 spring roll, 2 or more spring rolls, and no spring rolls. I'm quite curious - where (geographically) are you hearing this? I'm a lifelong Australian, if it helps.

#38, Dave
Early on in learning German, I thought to avoid the neuter-gendered "Mädchen" by using instead the Bavarian dialect term "Mädel" (which lacks the neuter-demanding "-chen"). This didn't work very well, since for some reason "Mädel" is also neuter. I continued to learn German and now count myself fluent, but I never did figure out why "Mädel" is neuter. I take heart from Xopher's assurance (#44) that even "Mädchen" is becoming feminine, though.

With regard to gendered nouns in general I offer for consideration the Arapesh languages of Papua New Guinea, with up to 13 genders each. The connection between sex and linguistic gender suddenly looks surprisingly tenuous.

#53, Abi
German has much the same distinction: "Mund" vs. "Maul" for mouth and "Nase" vs. "Schnauze" for nose, and "Maul" and "Schnauze" are indeed routinely used in insults. German goes a step further, though, in distinguishing verbs also: "trinken" vs. "saufen" for drinking, and "essen" vs. "fressen" for eating. Not only are those distinctions used for insults, but "saufen" is also valid (ie. not even considered slang) for drinking alcohol excessively. Oh, and food is also distinguished: "Essen" for people-food, but "Futter" for animal-food (cf. English "fodder").

#71, Sarah
The German "duzen" is directly equivalent to the French "tutoyer", but German also has "siezen" for the converse.

#166, Xopher
In Germany on exchange at age 16, I ran into some confusion between "studieren" (study at tertiary level) and "lernen" (study at primary or secondary level). The people to whom I was speaking thought I was far older than 16, so they were half-willing to believe I meant I had studied Latin at tertiary level.
A girl on exchange with me ran into a bigger problem with "Schülerin" (female primary/secondary student) vs "Studentin" (female tertiary student). Wandering lost at her high school on the first morning, she was asked what she was doing there and replied "Ich bin Studentin". Took a little while to sort that one out ;-)

Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson @ 165... Oh, I had meant to imply that this workS only if one is reading the WORD. As for the dropping of accents being a mishandling of the language, I agree. It's something I got used to when I left the francophone world because North-American softwares (and typewriters in the prehistoric days) sure were not set up for those funny marks on top of vowels. (Dare I say I commit vowelence against the language?)

Pat H, 172: Duzen/siezen, tutoyer/vouvoyer.

Er... sorry to double-post, but I did mean to address the post itself also. Silly me.

One of the most interesting things (to me) about learning different languages is precisely the differences you're talking about here, Abi. For instance, Vietnamese has just the one word (xanh) for blue and green - traditionally, to them, that's a single colour. On the other hand, Vietnamese distinguishes between hair on top/back/sides of one's head (tóc), facial hair (râu), and body hair (can't remember).

Language really does shape thought - it's possible to think beyond what one's languages directly allow, but not easy. This is a major part of why I learn as many languages as I can - each new language helps me to think, as well as to understand people.

Hyperlocal news...

Man is thanked by visiting author Connie Willis for coming to yesterday's talk at the local SF club AND to her book signing today. Man is happy.

#174, TexAnne
Thank you. I knew tutoyer, but had never come across vouvoyer. I'm happier knowing that the verb exists. :-)

Linkmeister@139: I actually rather liked "rosy-fingered Dawn" -- in fact, that was the Greek line that I quoted earlier. In the Iliad, Dawn gets some other things to do: sometimes she has a golden throne, other times she arises from the bed of Tithonos.

Pat H.@172: And likewise French has "vousvoyer".

(I remember an anecdote I heard about Miterrand, that one of his associates, after long acquaintace, asked him, "Est-ce que nous nous tutoyons?" and he replied "Si vous voulez.")

Saw a great film today, Four Kings.

It's a British comedy, about terrorism. A very dark comedy. Tragi-satire?

It's about five British guys of Pakistani descent . . . maybe immigrants, it is not clear. They are all boobs of various sorts, ranging from a borderline mentally retarded sad-sack to a contentious sore head of a sort I could easily picture planning abortion clinic bombings or hanging out with a militia.

The authorities are depicted as boobs as well, and there's an interesting, subtle commentary on the surveillance state. (Over the closing credits, we see some of the events of the movie from the point of view of CCTV cameras.)

It is hilarious, and utterly heartbreaking.

Serge @173
(Dare I say I commit vowelence against the language?)

Don't you do that consonantly?

Rainflame @ 180... What is the sentence for crimes against grammar?

A complex one, compounded daily, Serge @181.

Serge, 181: Il faut que tu fasses amende honorable d'avoir péché en pêchant pour des pêches et des amandes.

(hrm, I'm not sure I got my prepositions right. Ma faute, ma faute, ma très grande faute.)

Serge @181
Fortunately it's not a capital crime.

Stefan Jones @179
It is hilarious, and utterly heartbreaking.

I agree completely. Recommended, if the description sounds promising to you.

abi, #51, thanks for putting it up! For those of you who, like Jacque, wondered how awful my drawing is, I have them scanned here.

Marilee, I did look at all of your beadwork pieces. They're gorgeous.

De-lurking post. I've been hiding in the shadows for several months now. Everyone here seems to be good-people and this thread has touched on something I actually know a little about.

#170 TexAnne: Good idea, Japanese should not be studied unless you have lots of time and some masochistic tendencies.(The better you want to be, the greater those masochistic tendencies should probably be.)

I love the language. But I've been living in Japan since 1997 and I still get headaches. Granted, I haven't studied like I should in the last few years.

But anyway, one word that I find fascinating in Japanese, is otsukaresama. It is supposed to translate to something like, thank you for working so hard but is used mostly just as a greeting for coworkers. At least where I'm working, it is used nearly every time you meet someone in the hall.

@Julie L, #169

I'm kind of distracted, caffeinated, and hare-brained this weekend (it's nearly 6am, I haven't slept, and I'm still watching Desert Bus), but I wanted to pop in here and give some quick thoughts on Japanese grammar. I'm sure the other Japanese students in here will correct me if I go wildly off-base.

The simple "to be" words in Japanese, aru and iru (or arimasu and imasu in their more polite forms), are easily distinguishable - aru is for inanimate things, iru for animate. They have some additional nuance*, but the distinction between them is pretty straightforward. They are both used primarily** when a thing's existence or location is the main point of a sentence. "Kono hoteru ni, denwa ga arimasu" "There is a phone located in this hotel." "Akai denwa wa arimasu" "There are red phones." (lit: red phones exist).***

Aru and iru are for when you're talking about where or whether a thing is. When you're talking about what it is, it's time to use desu. "Kono denwa wa akai desu" "This phone is red." Desu is the construction you use for "[noun] is [noun]" or "[noun] is [adjective]."

The thing that sounded wrong to me in your original post was lumping "desu" in with the other "to be" verbs. Desu is a weird thing, and grouping it in with imasu and arimasu never occurred to me. Technically, desu is a copula, but I only know that because I looked it up. Otherwise, I would have just called it a weird, verbesque****, phrase-ending word. Very technical linguistic jargon, that.

When I was first learning Japanese my understanding of the word's use was basically "start saying a thing, if you get to the end of the phrase and haven't used a verb recently, tack on a desu." I can't tell you how many times our teacher just stared intimidatingly at a student until he remembered to tack on a desu. My fellow students sometimes called formal Japanese "masu/desu form," because all polite sentences ended in a verb with the -masu ending or desu.*****

When learning Japanese, there are some times when you just have to "think like a Japanese," as our TA used to put it. My three years of karate were an immense help in this area; I had learned to do what the sensei instructed and not question it until later. There are many times in Japanese when you have to learn a set phrase and not try to understand WHY, trusting that you will reach more perfect understanding later. This is how desu worked for me: I rarely misuse it, but I'm hard pressed to explain exactly how it works without pulling out some books. I was taught the actual mechanics and grammatical evolution once (and I could look it up) but before I learned why, I used it enough that it just made sense.

*I was first taught that arimasu meant "to be located at," learning additional meanings later.

**When not modifying other verbs, or forming complex compounds, or what-have-you.

***These may be imperfect, but give a general sense of the structure. I don't object to being corrected, though!

****It's actually a contraction of the particle de and the verb gozaimasu.

*****There are exceptions to this, but it's a general pattern.******

******I need to learn the key combinations for some other footnote markers, eventually. I'm dying here.

Apocryphal anecdote:-

When the Berlin Wall Falling celebrations were made, Reagen gave a speech which his translator rendered immediately into German. Then Gorbi made a speech in Russian and Reagan's translator rendered it also simultaneously into English. Then Kohl gave a speech in German and after 2 minutes Reagan's translator still hadn't started rendering it into English. So Reagan whispered urgently, "Aren't you going to translate for me?"
The Translator, still concentrating hard, replied "Sure, but I'm still waiting for the verb" ;-)

@Julie L, #169: my personal take on Japanese grammar is that it doesn't really matter what labels you apply to things, as long as you're looking at what the different word categories actually do and not trying to think of them as necessarily working like the English categories the same labels get applied to. (If you're using vaguely the same terminology as other people it's easier to talk about grammar, though :-))

But then I learnt my initial Japanese grammar in a class taught only in Japanese and with more emphasis on sentence patterns than formal grammar. So I had an English and a Japanese label for most of these categories from the start.

I'd say that the grammar is one of the easier parts of Japanese. It's not Indo-European, but once you've got your head round that it's fairly straightforward. Modifying clauses always precede the thing modified; all but perhaps a dozen verbs are regular; all but one i-adjective is regular; nouns don't inflect; it doesn't do the thing English does where questions have to have different word order; and so on. (Yes, there is the odd bear-trap like wa-vs-ga...)

@Pat H, #175

Japanese colors are interesting, too. Akai can be anything from dark red to medium orange. Aoi can be blue or green. Japanese also has nezumi-iro for gray and murasaki for purple, but I've rarely heard anyone use them in casual conversation - they instead tend to favor English borrow words, using "gurei" or "paarupuru" instead.

@Peter Maydell, #191

If the grammar in Japanese was easy for you, what would you say is the most difficult aspect of Japanese?

For me the grammar was definitely the toughest bit (especially due to particles in general, but also due to the long, additive verb and adjective endings, etc.) I'd be very interested to hear from someone with a different experience. I found pronunciation, vocabulary, writing, and even idiom fairly easy, in comparison.

Serge #181: You're obliged to pay the syntax.

Didn't Twain also point out that in German "fish" is feminine, "wife" is masculine and "fishwife" is neuter? [Alas. Checking before posting to such a list, I find -- bless Ctrl F -- that that the fish is masculine, his scales are feminine but the fishwife is neuter. But I also found:

"Gretchen.
Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
Wilhelm.
She has gone to the kitchen.
Gretchen.
Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
Wilhelm.
It has gone to the opera."

Xopher @ 166: Not if you bake it without boiling it first.

Thank you for this! I've been quietly resenting the ubiquity of Dunkin Donuts and scarcity of true bagel shops over exactly this issue - they do, in fact, make not bagels but Bread Donuts.

@David Goldfarb, #130:

Could you toss a link to these reading groups to a poor classicist who hasn't gotten to read Latin or Greek with any regularity since getting her degree this spring? They sound fantastic.

Someone is wrong on the internet!

Okay, someone is wrong in my offline life. But it's the kind of wrong where obviously we inhabit different parts of reality. The argument is about whether/why women are paid less than men for the same jobs in the US today. He's challenged my explanation as anecdata, which some of it is and I labeled it as such, and illogical, because why wouldn't companies hire the cheapest workers?

So suddenly I'm trying to explain institutionalized sexism and that "women make X choice, resulting in lower pay" is a symptom of same, and unfortunately this is just part of my reality, and I don't have citations on most of it.

I remember reading some time ago that in the past few years, women have become primary wage earners in many families because employers are keeping the lowest-paid workers. Does anyone else remember this? I can only find speculation about it, so I may be misremembering.

I hate arguments. I really hate arguments where it's two disparate sections of reality colliding. I feel like I'm trying to convince someone that trees exist, and it has kept me discontented for about twelve hours now. So second question: how does one disengage emotionally from this kind of argument?

Diatryma:

I think the choice side of that (women tend to chose different majors in college and different jobs out of school) is hard to untangle. Is Alice choosing to take a lower-paying job than her husband Bob because they rationally expect Bob to make more money, and so they solve the two-body problem in his favor in terms of career? Is she choosing a different job because she intends to have children and figures that it will be all but impossible to make partner or keep traveling the world as a consultant while she's pregnant or nursing? Does she hope to eventually stay home with her kids? And each choice is made within a society with sexism built in, but also is made by people who think they're making the best decisions available to them. It's kind of implausible that I can do better for them from my armchair. (And really, what you want for yourself and your family is strongly linked to your society and upbringing.)

ISTR that the income differences between women and men flatten substantially, but don't go away, as you adjust for full/part time and field and years of experience.

[flipping back to my usual online handle having stuck my full name in the box accidentally last post...]

@Leah Miller, #192: The things I find hard are firstly the writing system and secondly vocabulary. I think most learners find writing a pain, just because you're dealing with nearly 2000 characters many of which have multiple readings. Kanji aren't an impossible hurdle, but they do form a significant amount of extra work to slog through which doesn't exist for languages with a more alphabetic/syllabic writing system.

The problem with vocabulary is really that because Japanese and English don't share a common ancestor, the opportunity to make good guesses about words you haven't seen before is much rarer. So you need to learn more words to be able to tackle a novel or a newspaper.

The feature in common seems to be that both these are large mountains of individually easy things. Grammar on the other hand feels to me like a much "smaller" thing, although mastering a particular grammar point can obviously be much harder than memorising a word. So I find it's less daunting.

Words for grey: hai-iro (lit. ash-colour) is the other common one, I think.

serenadingwords @ #196: I expect that David Goldfarb is referring to The Latin & Greek Study Groups. I know he subscribes to LatinStudy because I'm also on that mailing list (although I'm too busy with in-person courses to participate in any of the groups at the moment... which reminds me that I really must stop reading this and finish my Latin translation for class tomorrow).

Minnesota used "sesquicentennial" on its license plates a couple of years ago.

(Not my photo)

Wirelizard@121: That's me, too. I mostly skipped the grammar unit in 9th grade English because the teacher thought I didn't need it (and in terms of writing well, I didn't), and asked me to write a computer program to correct the multiple-choice part of the exam instead. I did go through the programmed instruction book (in a couple of hours).

One of my college roommates and I had a pretty good collaboration going. I could tell him what the right way to say something was, and he could then figure out why that was the right way. But he wasn't very good at figuring out analytically which was right, and I wasn't very good at formal explanations of the grammar.

I grew up in a household in which conversation routinely took place in complete sentences and paragraphs. The staff at the Purdue research nursery school told my mother that I had the vocabulary and sentence structures of a college freshman -- when I was 3 years old.)

Serge@173: Yep, that's certainly a big part of it. Our technology was developed in a place where "accent marks" were found in the dictionary to indicate stressed syllables. Which means Americans learned in school that they weren't really part of the word, they were meta-data used in certain scholarly situations.

Having this as thoroughly internalized knowledge doesn't work too well when you then meet French! It's not so bad in German, since the umlaut wasn't much used in the dictionaries I saw in school, it was pretty much something new I met in German.

Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson@165: To me as an American, those examples don't look comparable at all. Changing the letters is making a substantive change to the word. Just diddling with meta-data marks (accents) just doesn't feel the same. (I absolutely understand that, in French, messing with the accents IS as big a deal as changing the letters. It's just something I learned intellectually long after I'd acquired English-language fluency; it's not so basic a part of my world-view. I did get three years of French in grades 3-6, so I got some of this earlier than a lot of people.)

Pat H@175: I think English makes the same distinction about "hair". "Getting your hair cut" absolutely means the top/back/sides, and absolutely does NOT mean facial or body hair. While the stuff itself is hair, it's qualified hair -- beard hair, pubic hair, etc.

ddb @ 203: The analogy that makes sense to me is that diacritical marks function the way digraphs do in English, so that leaving them off is equivalent to leaving out the "h" in "th", or the "y" in "oy."

I have no idea if this makes linguistic sense, but I think it conveys the importance of diacritical marks fairly well.

but I never did figure out why "Mädel" is neuter.

Because -el or -le is a variant form of the diminutive. Where you use -chen in hochdeutsch and in north German, you use -el in Bavaria and Austria and -le in Hessen and Baden Württemberg.

Mind you, I think the stammwort, Mäd (maid), which is now archaic and not really encountered in anything written since the 1890s decadents, is neuter as well...actually, it turns out I thought wrong. It was feminine.

Albatross, thanks for the backup on "it's complicated". Because it is.

As far as dictionaries and stresses go, I learned that the ' comes after the stressed syllable, and then suddenly I am reading IPA* and no, it comes before, and to this day I resent that switch.

I have said before that every group of friends needs someone who knows geology and someone who knows words**. This type of conversation is why. Best part of my current friends groups is that I am not both these people all the time.

*by this I mean that I know a few of the symbols and can interpret some bits. It was really useful in voice lessons when I had to mark, as small as possible, some nuance of pronunciation.

**I have amended this to include 'someone who has an iPhone' because the internet is wonderful.

If you're reading this and trying to learn German, btw, there are good heuristics for a lot of genders, especially for derived forms.

-Schaft, -heit, -keit, and usually -ung all go feminine (die Leidenschaft = passion). Diminutives all go neuter. -ier is normally masculine (der Bankier). If you're using an infinitive as a noun (das Verhalten = behaviour, from sich verhalten, to behave), it goes neuter. Similarly, if you're nouning an adjective by sticking an e on the end, it goes neuter. frex, if you translate something into German (or anything else), you translate it "ins Deutsche" - you're using the adjective German as a noun, so it's automatically neuter.

Save memory, learn rules not instances.

@200 Carol Witt: Oh wow, that's wonderful. Thank you! It'll be great to get my Attic Greek back on.

Pat H @ 172, Sarah @ 71:

There is, in Spanish, "tutear," which means "to address someone as tú [the informal "you," as compared to "Ud."]." I'm not sure what you'd say when someone is using "tú" instead of "Ud." and needs correction.

Someone I knew as an undergrad, who was from Puerto Rico, thought it ridiculous that English had different words for fingers and toes. Apparently in Spanish they're "dedos de la mano" and "dedos del pie" ("digits of the hand" / "digits of the foot.")

I don't remember the start of the joke in Spanish, but: A man at a hotel sees a woman sitting beside a pool.
"¿Ud. no nada nada?"
"No traje traje."

(English: "You don't swim at all?" / "I didn't bring a [swim]suit.")

Sorry to double post--

The integration of social standing/respect/knowledge of a person into the form of address in Spanish is an interesting thing, too (tú means "you [of lower social standing, or whom I know well]" and Ud. means "you [of higher social standing, or whom I know only distantly or professionally]."

And tú and Ud. are both singular "you," as compared to the plural "Uds." used for both--or, in Spain, "vosotros" for plural tú and "Uds." for plural Ud.

As for the rarely used vosotros, the closest thing I can think of in English is the maligned "y'all," which I recall one linguistics professor describing as "wonderfully embracing." In any case it's certainly both plural and informal.

bunch of randomly more or less relevant remarks:

mañana: English also used to have a word that worked for both "morning" and "tomorrow:" it was "morrow." But we don't say "morrow" for morning very often any more, and when we do, we get blank looks from most people.

half again doesn't even sound exceptionally exceptional to me. A little bookish, maybe.

Czech has two plurals but unlike all the other languages I know anything about, it's not single, dual, plural: it's single, less than four or five, and more than four or five. Czech has a lot of features which are truly puzzling, and since my son has to function in it every day I hear a lot of rants about it. The most amusing thing to me, however, was reading that verbs have a transgressive form. I was so sad that it does not mean what it sounds like.

No, the verbs do not have a form that is deliberately, artistically, and pretentiously offensive, usually involving perfomrmances at small venues with clever names or coffee table books with black and white photos touched up with garish spots of color. Unfortunately, transgressive verbs only indicate that the action is taking place at the same time as something else.

ddb @ 203... One nice thing about accents is that it tells you right away what the sound is supposed to be. Meanwhile, in English, one has to remember how to pronounce that pesky asemblage of letters that 'ough' for each specific word. That being said, all languages have their idiosyncrasies. Keeps life interesting. By the way, I've long wondered how the Universal Translator works. I mean, do you hear the speaker in its/her/his native language, immediately translated by the ear bud or whatever you use? It must be interesting if you have the UT on even though you know the language. For me, it'd be like watching a French movie with English subtitles, and I often find myself thinking "That's not what he said."

For those who are being amused at the sexual implications of languages who have large numbers of noun genders: it may help to remember that the root of "gender" is a word meaning "kind, type, sort". The sexes are genders in the sense that they constitute different "types" of people. But the root meaning had no implication of a binary or trinary biological sexual distinction.

Language study, well and all, very nice, very useful, very wise.

BUT! What about that moon, hey?

And further, the local acu-weather weather changed from, "Conditions Very Good For Fishing," to "Conditions Very Good For Hunting."

Again, though -- What about that MOON!

[imagine humongous, white, globular, grinning moon icon hanging here]

Love, C

Serge@213: English spelling certainly has nothing to crow about! Between the wide range of places we stole words from, and various waves of spelling reform, things are extremely complicated. I don't believe "spelling" is a subject in school for most other languages, is it?

I believe French spelling doesn't lead all that reliably or directly to correct pronunciation (my direct study was 3 years in grade school, though). One of the nice things about German and Russian, the other two languages I've studied, is that they're pretty precisely phonetic. (I actually got pretty good in German, after 4 years in highschool; but that last year was almost 40 years ago, and my interaction with German since has been extremely minimal. If there had been the public Internet, with fairly active German mailing lists and Usenet groups back then, maybe I would have kept it up better.)

Mark 195: You're quite welcome. So many people don't really know real bagels...or knishes, for that matter, though to my mind that's a less serious problem. (Real knishes are never bright orange, no matter what you may have heard.) I've spoken before of the true nature of fresh mozzarella, but that's a matter of degree, whereas the boil-and-bake process is truly essential to the identity of the category 'bagel'.

Bagels are Viennese (yes, Austrian) in origin and were brought here as part of the Jewish diaspora. The original ones were more horseshoe shaped, I'm told. The reason they were a special treat was that they were made with white flour, a rarity at the time. (I think this makes whole-wheat bagels just a bit ironic, though not IMO all the way over into absurd or not-bagels.)

Diatryma@197: I remember reading (or hearing; a lot of my current events info comes from National Public Radio) that lower-paid workers are often preferentially retained, and that this is leaving more women the primary wage-earner in their families. I don't have an actual source to give you, though.

HLN: Incomprehensible sed error sends woman into foam-flecked rage. "We thought sure she was gonna 'splode," local guinea pig speculates.

Constance @215, that is indeed Some Moon, and I had the delight of seeing it out the plane window as we made our descent into OKC, having luckily chosen the scenic side of the plane. Makes me want to watch Moonstruck, but instead I need to get turkeys in the oven for an office potluck tomorrow.

BTW, Upstate Steampunk is shaping up to look like a nice little con with potential. They had about 250 attendees, about 70 of them walk-ins, and are booked for the same venue in Greenville SC for next year -- and it is just lovely there this time of year. I think I traveled the furthest to get there, but I knew the organizers and had my arm twisted for a paper early on. Just gettin' my plug in -- it was my first steampunk con, and there were some thought-provoking papers and discussions, among all the eye candy and temptations in the vendor room. (And yes, the papers DID talk about the socio-politico-economic issues that are getting ignored in some of the me-too, I got gears on my staff! sort of stuff we were discussing earlier.)

ddb @ 216... I believe French spelling doesn't lead all that reliably or directly to correct pronunciation

I think it does, but then again I spent the first 30 years of my life speaking French. Not every minute of it, mind you. In other words, this is all stuff I take for granted because I grew up with it. I recommend that you ask TexAnne. She's so good that, when we were shopping around the dealer's room at Montreal's worldcon, she corrected me on how to pronounce the name of a French publisher.

The moon is indeed magnificent tonight. I was able to see it on the way home from the RenFaire.

My impression from a number of French classes from elementary through high school in the US is that French spelling leads to predictable, consistent pronunciation (with some notable exceptions related to borrowed words), but that you cannot consistently derive the spelling from the pronunciation.

On the other hand, I don't think I ever really spoke French at more than a basic level, so I'm mostly hoping that someone will be able to confirm or deny this impression.

Hi, Serge. ::waves sheepishly:: The thing about French pronunciation vs. spelling is that there are few phonemes, but many ways to spell them. So IPA /e/ can be spelled ai, é(e)(s), ez, ait in some dialects, er, and no doubt a few I'll think of later.

Fragano @ 193: And so the sentence is handed down by the Adjunct.

I always wondered what the world would be like if we all still talked like Homer.

TexAnne, #187, thanks, TexAnne!

Mark, #195, you should have seen me try to explain to the nutritionist that donut-shaped bread wasn't really a bagel.

ddb, #201, we're using sesquicentennial all over around here for the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War.

Great view of the moon from here too, on the after-dinner dog walk. Just enough clouds to make a suitable frame.

Would love to see the moon tonight, but instead it's raining with a good chance of snow (in November! In Portland (OR)!). If it doesn't snow tonight, it almost certainly will tomorrow night, when the temps are predicted to get down to the low 20s. La Nina weather (cold and wet) starting early and with a vengeance this year.

In re spelling and phonetics; I was extremely impressed while studying Spanish at how regular its phonetics are -- there's very nearly a 1:1 mapping between spelled vowels and actual pronounced sounds (one of the few exceptions being that sometimes 'u' is used as a marker that the 'g' preceding it is pronounced hard and not soft, as in 'guitarra').

In fact, some verbs are irregular-on-paper to keep the spelling matching the very-regular pronunciation. Makes me wonder if someone didn't regularize things in the mid-1800s or something, or if English (my frame of reference) is just outstandingly bad enough on that score that 'normal' languages look regimentedly, spotlessly regular in contrast.

johnofjack @ 211 As for the rarely used vosotros, the closest thing I can think of in English is the maligned "y'all," which I recall one linguistics professor describing as "wonderfully embracing." In any case it's certainly both plural and informal.

On the first day of my first ancient Greek course, we were going over the basics like the alphabet, pronouns, and the concepts of number, gender, conjugation, and declension. One woman, a transplant from the University of Georgia, was baffled by the plural pronouns.

"What do you mean, 'you plural?' 'You' isn't plural!" She had no idea what planet the rest of us were from, and terribly frustrated at our bizarre insistence on such a thing.

Eventually the TA was able to come up with enough examples to turn on the light bulb for her. "Ohhh! You mean y'all! Why didn't you just say so?"

I am told that the adoption of "you" for individuals is being repeated, and once again the replacement is coming in as a new plural. As "y'all" is more and more a polite singular, "all y'all" is now appearing as a plural.

Zelda, "y'all" is *perceived* as a singular by people who don't know how it's used. If I said to you, "Would y'all like to come over Friday night?" I am not inviting you alone, but your family as well. If I wanted you alone, I would say "Would you like to come over Friday night?" "All y'all" is merely an intensifier.

Erik Nelson @226 -- we'd all say D'Oh! a lot.

TexAnne @ 224... there are few phonemes, but many ways to spell them

I knew you'd be able to explain this better than I could. That being said... Some spelling reforms would have helped declutter things, but did they pretty much stop when the printing press and cheap paper came along?

Serge, 234: There was a spelling reform recently...yes, in 1990. So the new spellings aren't second nature to me, because my grad professors were unconvinced of their necessity.

Diatryma @ 197: Just a personal anecdote on gender & salaries -- several years ago, after a shake-up above me, I ended up with a woman boss instead of a man. At my next performance review, I got a big raise, way outside what the normal merit increase guidelines were. She told me that she compared what I was making to the men doing the same job, and had no trouble getting a big increase approved. So I had definitely been short-changed for some time.
My experience as a manager is that some companies make internal equity a priority, and so people doing similar work are likely to be paid pretty much the same, though with some error due to perception bias of their work. Other companies pay whatever it takes to get somebody they want, and don't care about maintaining equity. In that second sort, people who are tougher negotiators, and more prone to changing jobs, will be higher paid. Some people would say that tends to be men, YMMV.

Heh. I read the bit about Homer and I say, in that rapid chatter you get from repetition: "But when the young dawn showed again with her rosy fingers the grey-eyed goddess Athene bound upon her feet the fair sandals that carried her across the water..."

Gee, I wonder why that stuck in my head.

And on a similar "geeky party tricks" note, one high school assignment was to memorize the first chunk of the prologue to the Canterbury Tales. We could choose to do it in the original or in modern English. I was the only person to choose Middle English, which surprised me (though it probably shouldn't have.) I can still rattle it off, probably with horrendous mispronunciation (as I had to go with my best guess for the most part.)

Anyway. Going further into English language geekery, I actually got to enact a trope once in regards to Shakespeare. We were at a (fairly good*) high school performance of Hamlet, and during the intermission, I overheard somebody saying it was "Old English." I pounced-- nicely-- and explained the differences between various flavors of English, with examples, ending with Evil Rob's assertion that Elizabethan English is basically modern English, except for the slang. It was a nice conversation, actually.

*This is a very good drama group, one that I took part in back in the day, and it was a point of pride that "good for high school" was an insult. The thing about Hamlet was that a) they had to cut rather a lot, b) there's a certain depth it's hard to get at that young**, and c) Gertrude was nervous and rushing her lines. Oh, and when Claudius had been on the stage for a bit, my mother leaned over and whispered, "He looks like a Muppet," which was unfortunately just enough true that it kind of made it hard to treat him seriously.

**They just did a documentary play, "Tower Stories", based on 9/11. The actors would have been all of five to nine when the event took place... and that actually made the play more watchable, in my opinion. It's the chasm we'd rather not see them cross, to get that desperate intensity...

@serenadingwords: Carol@200 is quite correct. There are a number of beginner groups, especially on the LatinStudy list, but there are also more advanced groups like the Cicero and Homer ones I'm participating in. (The Homer one is almost done with Odyssey 6, and we can always use new blood; come and have input into what we do next.)

Unrelated to the above discussion... how I know, really, really know, that I'm a graduate student: I've just spent pretty much my entire Sunday at the lab, in the testing dungeon[1], getting several variations of an experiment to work and then running myself in them. You would think, that after what, nine years of being a member of various labs, I would know better than to work flat-out for that long in a little dark room. Evidently, I don't know better. I was there, writing code or running in experiments from noon to 8:15pm. I call that a productive day.

Why was I doing this, rather than, say, curling up with a book and the very friendly cat in the awesome bed [2] I found at Urban Ore a week and a half ago? Because the deadline for abstract submission for Vision Sciences Society is on the 1st, and I'd kind of like to have something to submit my first year in graduate school.

At least this past week saw the cessation of a different stressor: I have submitted my NSF-GRFP application. I'm asking the National Science Foundation for three years of stipend and tuition funding - it'd be great to get it, as it would free up lots of time in years 2-4. I would continue teaching, which is good (I wouldn't be required to in order to get paid, but my adviser teaches Sensation and Perception, which is very much my end of things in a whole host of ways).

I am applying for other fellowships, but the proximate worry is the VSS deadline... that, and the need to grade eighty student essays for the class I'm TAing for this semester.

More of a tiring Sunday than a relaxing one.

[1] The lab's psychophysical testing space is in a converted electrophysiology lab in the building - in the basement, no windows and very thick cement walls, floor and ceiling. Hence the dungeon moniker.

[2] I took a few hours off on Veterans' Day to go grab some food and wander around with a couple of other first year grad students - we wound up at Urban Ore, because two of the three of us had never been... and I found a four-poster Ikea bed, with all the bits and a set of slats for $20. Bought it on the spot, got a zipcar later that day and picked it up. I even managed to sell my old Ikea bed for more than the cost of the new-to-me one and the car rental. The bed is awesome - even if everything is rather higher than it used to be. I like it, and the cat can still get up there, so everyone's happy.

TexAnne @ 235... I had been in the USA for a year by then, which would explain why I never even heard about this. On the other hand, I have kept in touch with some friends up in Quebec and they never gave any indication that this was going on. I have this feeling the whole thing never caught on. One thing is sure, the new spellings aren't second nature to me either.

#206, Alex
Thank you! I'd been wondering that for a long time. That actually makes perfect sense, particularly if Mäd is feminine. It makes sense that suffixes of diminution (-chen, -el, -le) should all historically demand neuter gender, since children are the archetypal small/cute subjects and are traditionally viewed as sexless (hence the neuter "das Kind" for child).

#212, Lucy
Vietnamese has two ways of saying "how many": "may" for small numbers (usually less than about a dozen), and "bao nhieu" otherwise. (there are accents, and they do matter, but I'm too lazy to dig them up). Interestingly, in asking the day-of-the-month the form used is "may" rather than "bao nhieu".

#216 (ddb), #221 (Serge), etc.
My native language is English, but every other language I've ever learned anything of has seemed to me to have far more predictable and sensible pronunciation. In no particular order, the ones I can think of offhand: German, French, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, (Mandarin) Chinese, Vietnamese, Croatian, Russian, Yiddish, ... all of them make pretty good sense to me as far as spelling and pronunciation go (though Vietnamese tone-marks are a bit of a pain, and I must note that when I talk about Chinese I'm talking about Pinyin (the Roman-alphabet version used for teaching). Oh, and just to be clear: I love English, and I think it's outright the single most beautiful and expressive language ever. It's just that that comes from being the ultimate mongrel tongue.

#237, B. Durbin
Middle English pronunciation is basically phonetic, once you get your head around how it works. It actually sounds quite Scottish to modern English speakers, since Scottish generally avoided the major sound shift (Great Vowel Shift) that destroyed the phonetic correspondence between spoken and written English. Er... do double-check this before using it in conversation, though, since I'm not entirely sure of myself here.

when Claudius had been on the stage for a bit, my mother leaned over and whispered, "He looks like a Muppet,"

Did the Muppets ever do Hamlet? If not, why not?

(Bunsen Honeydew as Polonius!)

Pat H @241 writes "(Mandarin) Chinese...make pretty good sense to me as far as spelling and pronunciation go...and I must note that when I talk about Chinese I'm talking about Pinyin (the Roman-alphabet version used for teaching)."

Well, it's really not that surprising that Pinyin orthography is closely aligned with pronunciation, is it? After all, Pinyin was specifically designed in the 1950s (not that long ago) to be an accurate romanization of Mandarin, and is used in China to help children learn Mandarin pronunciation.

Similarly, I understand that the Korean Hangul writing system is closely aligned phonetically with the spoken language. The language drifted some since Hangul was first developed, some 500 years ago, but was the writing system was revised several times during the early-mid 20th century to better represent the current sounds of the spoken language. [And, as a means of reclaiming the language after Korea regained independence from Japan after WWII].

It's much easier to align spelling with pronunciation when you're willing to go mucking around with the writing system as the spoken language changes.

Abi, early in the thread:

The problematic het schip becomes the easy to remember de schippen.

De schepen, one of those nouns that has an irregular plural form, just another little landmine laid into Dutch to trap the unwary. No rules for them, you just know what they are.

The same is actually true for knowing when to use "de" and when "het"; you just know, with no real rules I've found.

Speaking of "the inarticulate space between the [...] words I know", that's what usually trips me up when attempting to write an English language blog post about Dutch news, when all the sources are in Dutch as well.

Frex, why doesn't English have an expression as simple as "er vraagtekens bij zetten", putting question marks to some explenation offered to you? Or even as simple a concept as "bestuur", a nebolous group of people who administrate an organisation and where it doesn't matter who they are exactly? Or something generic like "gemeente", not quite translateable with city council or municipality or "wijk", which is not quite a neighbourhood and might be the same as a borough, though I've mostly seen that used for New York rather than as a generic term.

And why oh why is it so difficult to get an English translation of hottentottententoonstellingstentjetoegangspashoudercontroleur?

South African "I'm fixing to make'n'plan to get round to dealing with that just now" = "The universe will go cold before I do that".

David F@188 - if no-one else has yet said welcome, welcome.

ajay @ 242... Did the Muppets ever do Hamlet?

THey did have Christopher Reeve do the "To be or not to be" scene and, when he flubbed that line, the skull talked back, if I remember correctly.

And why oh why is it so difficult to get an English translation of hottentottententoonstellingstentjetoegangspashoudercontroleur?

Fritz Spiegel (I think) used to refer to a one-word German newspaper headline which read Hottentottenpotentatentantenattentat, meaning An Attempt On The Life Of A Hottentot Potentate.

Martin Wisse #244: I'd translate "bestuur" as "administration" or "administrative". At one point in its (admittedly odd) history, my favourite South American country was governed by a "Raad van Bestuur". Dew gives that as "Administrative Council" and I've no reason to disagree with his translation (my Dutch being of the exiguous variety).

ajay @ 242, and they had Sting do the "Words, words, words" speech, or at least try to with the help of Elmo, if I remember correctly.

I love languages and their quirks. I'm a native Icelandic speaker but pretty fluent in English by now. I know that Icelandic grammar is a pain to learn as a second language and it's very very rare to run into foreigners who are fluent in it (and that's ignoring pronunciation completely).

It's the mix of it being spoken by a very small group of people and almost all of those people being fluent in English and quick at switching to English when talking to people not very fluent.

Anyway lots of cases, moods and declensions to deal with and adjectives that bend along with the nouns and then irregular verbs and vowel changes.

As an example my grandfathers first name goes:

nom - Hörður
acc - Hörð
dat - Herði
gen - Harðar

Yeah we do full noun declensions on proper nouns, can lead to all sorts of fun things.

However my one major pet peeve about English is its lack of a reflexive possessive pronoun.

I know you can paper over it by using "his own" or "her own" to make the distinction clear. I.e. "Louse chatted with her mother while brushing her own hair" vs. "Louse chatted with her mother while brushing her hair" but it still really bugs me.

#248: administration is a good attempt, though still not quite as generic as "bestuur"; I've used it myself.

my favourite South American country was governed by a "Raad van Bestuur".

Suriname or Brazil?

Czech has two plurals but unlike all the other languages I know anything about, it's not single, dual, plural: it's single, less than four or five, and more than four or five.

The less-than-five version is called "paucal". Czech is not the only language that has it, though the only other I'm coming up with off the top of my head is Láadan, which is not a natural language.

This is probably one of the most amazingly beautiful videos I've seen.

http://vimeo.com/16369165

Timescapes

Martin Wisse #251: That would be Surinam.

Erik Nelson: I always wondered what the world would be like if we all still talked like Homer.

All the travel shows on cable would have episodes three weeks long without commercials on getting from the airport/train station/port to the hotel.

Dave Weingart @ #38:
Swedish has four grammatical genders, neutrum, reale, male and female. Although the last three are usually bundled as "utrum", as they all take the same indefinite and definite article(s) ("en"/"den").

Martin Wisse @ #244:
Or even as simple a concept as "bestuur", a nebolous group of people who administrate an organisation and where it doesn't matter who they are exactly?

What? Like "a board"? That's certainly what I tend to think of as the English translation of the Swedish "styrelse" (as an aside, something I am thankfully no longer in the habit of volunteering for; I resisted volunteering as late as earlier today, GO ME!).

For years, I've been addicted to the more challenging forms of crossword puzzle, both the big Sunday ones put together by clever people and the British-style cryptics -- though cryptics can be too very British for me to get all the hidden references. Both kinds of puzzle make use of the huge vocabulary of English, but much of their cleverness relies on the multiple meanings of a lot of words (for example, pitch = toss, tar, tone) in this language, without any distinguishing marks like the accents in French.

Non-anglophones: does that kind of thing drive you crazy, along with the whole business of pronoucing "ough"? Just wondering.

PS: Sometimes I think the *only* use of my graduate education (English lit. plus some of the simpler foreign languages) was to turn me into a better crossword solver.

Czech has two plurals but unlike all the other languages I know anything about, it's not single, dual, plural: it's single, less than four or five, and more than four or five.

Russian has singular, 2/3 and 4+. 2/3 of something is genitive singular, 4+ is genitive plural. "One table, two of table, four of tables".

I always wondered what the world would be like if we all still talked like Homer.

If we always used the same few hackneyed epithets and similes every time we mentioned something or someone? No one ever mentioned "North Korea" without referring to it as "the Hermit Kingdom", for example?

Homer is alive and well and writing for Newsweek.

As far as French pronounciation, from my French studies (which have been even less formal than my German ones), it seems that the way to pronounce French is to just swallow the last syllable.

Just Wonderful.
How about G) The law enforcement, for breaking the law, and expecting to get away with it?
or H) the government choosing to believe "well, the rights we guarantee only apply to the people *we* feel like giving it to."

Any Cantonese speakers in the house? I've got a lady in my office here who has a document that needs to be notarized, but we need some kind of verification that the Chinese matches the English.

Hotay; I think we found her a translator. My Google Fu failed me, but the Boulder Public Library research daemons came through.

I am hoping one of you publishing-industry types can help an aspiring young (well not so young any longer TBH) translator. I've been reading a 2010 novel by Hernán Rivera Letelier of Chile and thinking more and more this is something I would be able to translate very well -- I've done several drafts of the first couple chapters and it is reading (based on the impressions of a couple of friends...) very nicely. I want to get in touch with the author and ask him for permission to translate his work; but I have no idea how one goes about that. His publishing house is Alfaguara, which has offices in several countries; could I write to him in care of their Chilean office and hope that the letter would get to him? The copy of the book that I own says it is printed by Alfaguara Mexico but I am skeptical about writing to him through that office, a continent away from him. Has anyone done this sort of thing and have advice?

(Oh and if any of you read Spanish, do take a look at El arte de la resurrección; it is a magnificent book.)

Serge@221, TexAnne@224: Okay, that's starting to make sense. I do seem to treat language as primarily verbal; I get to English spellings from the pronunciations (which involves exception tables quite a lot :-)). I suspect really good spellers have the written form as primary.

So a language where the pronunciation doesn't at all lead to the spelling would seem confusing and hard to spell to me. (My French was so long ago I don't really remember how it seemed; and I don't know how seriously it was presented to us, this was in graded 3-6).

Leah Miller @189: I thought desu was a contraction of de arimasu -- just as da is a contraction of de aru, thus making then the polite and informal forms of the same thing. De gozaimasu is what you use when you want to be honorific than desu, thus indicating they are not equivalent.

---L.

Mycroft W @ 261, I picked (A), and ranted to that effect at the radio when NPR started saying this verdict could be used to show that accused terrorists shouldn't be tried in civilian courts. That makes absolutely no sense unless you assume that accusation = proof, and that a verdict of "guilty on all counts" is the only possible correct one.

IANAL. But we have these standards of evidence and standards for conviction for a reason. Just because the crime of which someone is accused happens to be terrorism, why on earth would these standards not apply?

Elliot Mason @ 145: Ah, ok. I'd always though of it as drawing attention to the difference between dawn - first light - which is whitish - and sunrise.

ajay @ 258

No, Russian is more like Czech than you think. One table, two three four of table, FIVE of tables. And then, twenty-one table, twenty two three four of table, twenty five of tables, and so on.

If it's a collection of round tables (or tables of any other sort), however, the word for 'round' will go into the plural of whatever case is required, whenever you have more than twenty of them.

ObTurkishstuff

Turkish has no grammatical gender at all, more or less completely phonetic spelling and also - roughly speaking - different past tenses for things you've witnessed yourself and things that you've heard about second-hand. (This is only roughly right, because the 'testimony' endings can also be used for things which are a) only apparently so or b) extremely surprising. And they can be duplicated to make clear that something is only allegedly the case.

It also has the wrong number of 'basic colour terms' - too many kinds of blue. (Too many according to a venerable theory which says that basic colour terms always appear in a language in a particular order. I'm puzzled by the venerability of the theory since what goes for Turkish also seems to go for Russian.)

And finally an OT rant that I've been saving up for a while (it should probably have found its way into a comment on the thread about dairy related proverbs, but I didn't get round to it).

Yoghurt should be pronounced with a silent g. It's a Turkish loan word, and the gh transliterates a ğ, which simply plays the role of lengthening the preceding vowel. (However, a Turkish proverb has it that every man has his own way of eating yoghurt - her yiğit yoğurtun yiyisi var - and the same no doubt goes for pronouncing it.)

praisegod barebones@269: The result of not pronouncing the gh makes something that's strange to American ears (or at least to mine). Not actually difficult to pronounce -- but it gets impossible to spell, since if you put the g in in any form people will pronounce it, and if you leave the gh out the word "yourt" runs into English "rules" where the u modifies the o vowel and makes the word different again.

I'm not really clear, from your description, how it's pronounced in Turkish; the above may reasonably approximate the Turkish pronunciation, but it's not a very good American word.

Too late to get people to change now, in any case :-( .

praisegod, 269: Amazing! So the French "yaourt" (yah-oor) is closer to the original?

L.N. Hammer@267: the Daijisen entry for desu [that's a link to a Japanese dictionary] says there are a number of theories for the origin of desu, including 'de arimasu', 'de gozaimasu', 'deohasu' and 'desou' (the last two of which I'd never heard of before).

ddb @ 270

I think that if you imagine a product called something like 'Yo-Urt', and think about how that might be pronounced you'll come close. (Only close, mind you, since the 'u' is more of an 'oo', but near enough.)

271 TexAnne : yes, exactly. (and in fact, I'm fairly sure that my mother-in-law - who has no particular connection with Turkey, apart from a daughter grand-daughter and grandson who live there - pronounces the 't' in yaourt as well.)

Victoria @118, wrt tutoring Japanese students in English: It was also of much interest to us that the elementary schools (at least the one she went to) sang the same pioneer songs my grandfather sang.

Somehow, I managed to sidetrack myself earlier out of mentioning the Japanese version of the "Do Re Mi" song from The Sound of Music; one set of lyrics can be found here. IIRC I've seen clips of an alternate version that replaced faito with Fanta.

WRT desu, I'm pretty sure I've seen/heard replacement by de aru or de arimasu in formal written contexts, or spoken narration that's meant to consciously evoke a literary style.

Other than the nuts'n'bolts issue of acquiring vocabulary, the hardest part of learning Japanese for me has been wrestling with particles. I have an increasingly positive attitude toward their writing system after a briefish trip to China-- at least with written Japanese, you can home in on the key words by looking for kanji (which may have phonetic furigana alongside) and finding the verb near the end of the sentence. With written Chinese, everything is made of hanzi and the verb could be anywhere in the middle.

Random Open Thread book recommendation: If y'all don't have Connie Willis's Blackout and All Clear on your "I want!" lists you're missing a bet. I re-read the former last week in preparation for reading the latter. I have now read All Clear and have a single word review: Wow.

TexAnne @ 235

Looking through that list of 'reforms' I'm struck by the thought that I'll never be able to spell 'oignon' as 'ognon' without it looking WRONG. And my wife, who left France in 1987, refuses to acknowledge any of the new spellings.

Faren Miller, on crosswords: my city has two papers that the schools get. One runs a crossword that gets harder as the week goes on; I can reliably do Monday and Tuesday, but I seldom exert myself if Wednesday isn't a do-in-ink type of day. The other's crossword doesn't escalate, and for me, it's a pre-Monday. I've taken a page from my grandmother and started doing that one on graph paper. I cover the grid itself and then go through the clues.

On spelling and visually learning languages: oh YES that is me. I have a good memory for what I read and am a very good speller-- I was one of those kids who lost spelling bees because I'd never encountered the word in text or never heard it pronounced. My last spelling bee loss shook my confidence for quite some time because it was a word everyone spelled kind of differently, and none of them had been right. And most people didn't pronounce it right, either.

Praisegod, 277: I'm slowly getting used to the new accents, but you're right; "oignon" is the one true spelling.

And now for some Open Threadiness! A filk of a parody. (There ought to be a word for that.)

Beautiful tea, so steaming hot,
Waiting in a little pot!
Who for such dainties would not trot?
Tea of the evening, beautiful tea!
Tea of the evening, beautiful tea!
Beautiful tea! Beeyou-tiful tea!
Tea of the evening, beautiful tea!
Beautiful tea! Who cares for ink,
Wine, or any other drink?
Who would not give all else for three
pennyworth only of beautiful tea?
Beautiful tea! Beeyou-tiful tea!
Tea of the evening, beautiful tea!

Elliott Mason @149/908: Actually, therein lies a tale, in a way.

Humph. Blocked behind an "Adult Content" notice. Phmpf.

Elliot Mason @ 230 (& also Pat H @ 241):

... Makes me wonder if someone didn't regularize things in the mid-1800s or something ...

The effort to regularize Spanish spelling actually started in the 18th Century, but there have been revisions ever since, including some minor tweaks in the 20th Century; all of this is under the auspices of the Real Academia Española.

This sort of periodic reform is true of several other languages: TexAnne pointed out a recent spelling revision for French, and the most recent German revision was issued in 1996 (it's still controversial; some newspapers are ignoring it).

Portuguese spelling was apparently rather a mess (partly because various Renaissance writers had the bright idea of changing the spelling of some words to make them more closely resemble their Latin roots) up until a major reform in 1911.

No one has ever agreed on an entity to oversee English spelling reform...

praisegod barebones @ 143:

That's a good point; I have the vague impression that written French (almost?) amounts to a different dialect from spoken French, and since (almost?) no one is raised speaking that dialect, some explicit training and work would understandably be needed to learn it.

(Leaving aside the minor issue that what people sometimes mean by "grammar" is a mixture of orthography, punctuation, and arbitrary shibboleths of style like "don't split infinitives"...)

Mycroft:

The article writer's full agenda is easier to understand when you read his next to last paragraph. (Earlier, the article proposed that evidence found by "coerced information" (aka, the cops take you in a back room and beat some answers out of you) be admitted in court.)

Finally, the court could make clear that in situations of ongoing criminality—whether a kidnapping-in-progress, a domestic conspiracy among mobsters, or international terrorism—government may properly oblige suspects to tell everything they know. Because there is an urgent need to find the kidnapping victim or the ticking bomb or the details of some future bomb plot, the rules that regulate ordinary completed crimes do not mechanically apply. In the situation of an ongoing crime, the government is not merely trying to solve one crime but also to prevent the next one. That should make a difference in court.

I can't see any way to read that notion of the authorities "obliging" you to tell everything you know other than torture or threats. Domestic mobsters in a conspiracy would include drug dealers, including small-time ones, I suppose.

So the proposal of the author of the article, Akhil Reed Amar, is apparently that we simply (re-)introduce torture as a formal, accepted part of our legal system. The police arrest you on suspicion of some crime, take you into a back room, and beat you till you tell them everything they want to know. (If you're innocent, well, I guess it's just not your day.) They can't use the confession directly, but they can use whatever information they beat out of you to build a case against you. (Of course, the other people who testify against you will never be worried about themselves facing torture if they say the wrong thing on the stand.)

One interesting side issue here is that Amar continues the common pattern of torture advocates of emphasizing current, ongoing crimes. He's taken the next step from justification of torture in extreme, ticking time bomb hypotheticals, to everyday crimes, but he's still talking about stopping some ongoing or planned crime. And yet, in this case, the torture was used to find evidence to determine that this guy was guilty fo a crime committed a decade earlier.

I predict that upon adopting his proposals, we will quickly get convictions on any number of unsolved crimes. And that annoying the local or federal authorities with protests, lawsuits, unfortunate media stories, or general mouthiness will also become far, far less common.

Julie L. @ 275: the Japanese version of the "Do Re Mi"

And then there's the Video Pirates' version:

Do, some cash, a bunch of cash
Re, a guy that works at Sears
Mi, the guy who sings this song
Fa, the space between your ears
So, a word that goes with "what"
La, a thing that just ain't so
Ti, the guy the A-Team's got
Who makes a lot of do, do, do, do....

Peter Erwin @ 282: Come to think of it, this is relevant to the discussion between ddb, TexAnne, and Serge at 221-225ish about French spelling: from what I've observed, one of the hardest things for young francophones to learn about spelling and reading is that there are a whole bunch of letters there that don't seem to be doing anything phonetically. Most plurals which end in s don't sound the s, for example. (Now, it may be that it's particularly difficult for my children, since they both started learning to read in Turkish, which - as I've said - is wonderfully phonetic.)

Re written and spoken versions of a language being distinct dialects: I suspect that that's truer in many languages than one might at first suspect. (I reckon that a competent native speaker of English might well judge the spoken version of that last sentence to be 'not English' for example.) If there's something that's distinctive of the French, at least by comparison with english speakers, it's that they choose to celebrate that difference rather than pretend it's not there.

I find myself wondering whether this has anything to do with the fact that the French seem - at least since the time of the revolution - to have had, historically, a fairly negative attitude to the existence of different spoken dialects of French. It seems very different from the attitude in Germany where its almost as though people are encouraged to regard themselves as being Hochdeutsch/local dialect bilinguals. (or that's what I understood when I spent a year in Bavaria, when I was younger)

Actually, this whole business of the different status of dialects in different national and linguistic cultures is something I'd like to have more of a grip on, altogether.

Lila @70: the 3 voices [of Greek] (active, passive, middle) came as a shock.

Active, passive, and undecided?

albatross, #283: That's pretty much what I was thinking, only more coherently laid out and with less profanity.

Open Threadiness: Vanderbilt is considering mixed-gender dorms. Ben, fidelio, any comments?

Hmpf @99: different collective nouns for all kinds of different animals.

...providing all sorts of party-time fun. My two personal favorites: a murder of crows and a business of ferrets.

open-threadiness:

Costco has a good corporate reputation--treats its employees well and so on. Walmart seems to be completely evil.

What about BJ's Wholesale Club? Anyone here have any knowledge/opinion/links? I'm having trouble coming up with useful search terms to google on.

I just had a grand time in Toronto, and performed the Cursing Polka for an audience. My voice was in the process of finking out on me (slightly sick, I guess), and my keyboard skills went out the window, but it came across thanks to the words.

Linkmeister @276. Here's how hard I've been pursuing my homework. I didn't look at the new Bujold book. I just did homework. All Clear came in and Cathy finished it, and I just did homework. Today I finally decided I could risk starting the latter, and now I'm 140 pages in. Life is good. (And there's no class this week.)

Teresa, pursuant to events of Saturday night:

There was yet time enough for Fortunato to take a different path. The smart thing, of course, was to prepare for the unexpected, for failure to prepare was preparation for failure. A poor workman blames his tools, he thought, checking his equipment and musing how nail-like the world used to appear when he had carried a hammer.

There was no time like the present. The road rose up to meet his feet and he passed his neighbor's house, noting how much greener the grass was on the far side of the fence that made them good neighbors. The Joneses were already out walking, but he kept up with them easily, overtaking them a minute later.

"You're early to rise," said Jones. "Going on a long journey?"

"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

"Another day of keeping your shoulder to the wheel and your nose to the grindstone?"

"I prefer to think that I am seeking, so that I may find."

"Third time's the charm," put in old Mrs. Jones.

"Perhaps it will be in the last place I look," said Fortunato with a smile, as his legs, long enough to reach the ground, took him away from the slower Joneses. Time waited for no man, and he intended to gather no moss today. Having previously sought the council of those wiser than himself, he knew what he wanted. His eye was on the prize. Yet from time to time, he remembered to stop and smell the roses. His road was uphill, leading to success. He looked back at the Joneses, now distant specks. I will meet them again on the way down, he thought.

The regular tread of his feet were like a song, and he brought out a small concertina from his pack. No sense letting his idle hands do the Devil's work. His ability to juggle several tasks took him far as he lightened his load with music. What charms it had, and how it soothed his breast! It was a universal language, understood by all he passed. Some of these didn't have smiles, so he gave them his own. They were just frowns, turned upside down. He laughed, and the world laughed with him. Some dogs barked at him, but he knew that as long as they were barking, they wouldn't bite.

He had now climbed the ascending road a fair distance, and from his height he saw far. Winding afar off was the river. A river, anyway, and never the same one he'd stepped in before. By its side were houses — glass ones, in which nobody dared throw stones, and humble homes: there were no places like them. Farther away were farms, where farmers put eggs into baskets, though the wise ones didn't put all of them into the same one. In the fields, horses ran free as farmers locked the barns behind them. They would soon realize their mistake.

Checking his watch, Fortunato increased his pace. A stitch in time, he thought, saves nine. In a few minutes, it would be after nine, and he would be late, though that was better than never. He looked down and saw his shadow precede him. When he left, it would be the other way around. When small men cast big shadows, he thought, the sun is going down. He hastened inside and clocked in moments before the town clock struck the hour. Saved by the bell!

He filled his coffee cup and hurried to his desk, not wanting to put his work off to tomorrow. Spying a penny on the floor, he put it in his pocket and thought, well, I've earned a penny already. A co-worker passed by and asked if he'd made his fortune yet. He smiled and shook his head. The smell of cookies wafted from the Chinese bakery down the hall where some of his co-workers were, in a manner of speaking, trapped. Before him were hundreds of small slips of paper that fit into those cookies. They were all blank so far. He rested his chin on his hand and stared at the slips of paper, brow wrinkled in concentration.

Where were the ideas? Why didn't they come?

Kip W. #291:
There is many a true word in that.

IIRC English used to have a verbal distinction similar to Spanish saber/conocer (and German wissen/kennen), but only a few traces remain; I don't think there's still a clear polarity between, say, "wise" (or "savvy") vs. "canny".

I think of quite a bit of difference between "wise" and "cunning". Blackadder would never say he has a wise plan (and, indeed, he generally doesn't).

There's also quite a bit of difference between a wise man and a wise guy...

#281, Peter
The Deutsche Rechtschreibreform of 1996 is interesting but not very widely respected (afaik) - it seeks to eliminate the letter esszet (capital beta with a tail) and the umlaut accent (replaced by the letter 'e' inserted after the formerly-umlauted letter). Aside from laziness in typing, I've seen very little adherence to the umlaut thing (though esszet is getting kinda rare).

Kip W @ 291 - WOW!!

Lee@287: Vanderbilt is only now considering mixed-gender dorms? I am so completely and totally appalled; when I went to college 38 years ago mixed-gender dorms were the norm, and the few people who got stuck on single-sex floors were mostly really unhappy about it.

@294

I hadn't heard of (that particular) German spelling reform but I can understand why what you describe would become useful at that time:

In 1996 word-processing software (mostly designed for the English-language market) didn't handle umlauts very well, and there's no esszet key. Whereas "ue" and "oe" and "ss" are quite easily typed with the computer equipment commonly available in 1996...

all ye luna noticers

Moon! Moon! Moon!

More Moon!

It is a grace and a gift to be able to see, to walk below, to have its light glow, shimmer, shake and sparkle upon the River.

It's also warmed up considerably since the last couple of days.

Let us enjoy Moon since we can!

Love, C.

praisegod barebones@273: Okay, so the original actually is much like I guessed (within the extremely broad variations of English-trained ears hearing the sounds, and conveying them in English spelling, anyway).

This is fun -- and I can't stand the actual product (or, I can marginally stand in an emergency the denatured sweetened American version if I absolutely have to, but the more "authentic" or "natural" it gets the less I like it). I dislike that particular sour; it's the same as the sour in sour-dough bread, which I also dislike.

Constance @298, I am enjoying watching it climb higher in the sky each time I scurry to the laundry room to deal with the detritus of my trip to steampunk-land.

ddb, #396: Behold the difference between Minnesota and Tennessee. The fall of 1973, when I started at Vandy, was the first year without gender quotas on admissions; prior to that, at most 1/3 of the entering freshmen could be female, and most of those (obviously) were going to be in the Nursing School. Jokes about women going to Vandy to get their MRS. degree were both common and (unfortunately) reasonably accurate. ALL freshman dorms were gender-segregated; a few of the upperclass dorms were mixed by floors. Didn't we just recently have a discussion here that included references to visitation plans at Vandy? And remember also, their student body runs heavily to the children of rich Republicans, who grow up to become rich Republicans in turn. I am not even remotely surprised that this is happening only now.

Jacque 286: Active, passive, and undecided?

Active, passive, and versatile?

I was in a coed-by-room freshman dorm in 1987-88. (except for third floor,which was coed by wing. Third floor was all crazy. The standard line was "The guys beat up on the furniture, the girls beat up on each other.) Sharing a bathroom seemed to create a family bond really fast- it seemed creepy to date someone that you were already that close to, or something. "That person you see brushing their teeth and padding around in their bathrobe" seemed to read as "sibling". So my neighors dated people on fourth or sixth floor, or dated people on the other wing of fifth floor, or even seventh if they really liked stairs. [People broke the elevator frequently. We thought they were pouring water down the shaft, but I don't remember why we thought that.]

So that's MY memories of the matter.

I lived on a coed floor my freshman year. Sophomore year, I spent the first half in a coed and very chaotic student co-op (Le Chateau—second only to the infamous Barrington Hall in its unruliness). After one too many incidents of harassment*, I moved to one of the all-female co-ops, and found it much more sane (and clean) than either of the mixed-sex environments I'd been in before. So when I was picking dorm for my junior year abroad, I requested University Hall, the all-female one, which was delightful and magical in many ways. I finished college back in the all-female co-op in Berkeley.

I liked having the choice of single sex or mixed sex, but found all-female environments much more restful. Mileage varies.

-----
* sexual, religious, against me, against other people. I don't blame the mixed-sex environment. Le Chateau was dominated by a culture which valued freedom from conventional restraints, and some people felt that freedom should include freedom from manners, respect, and hygiene.

The common wisdom among my friends during college was that one does not commit floorcest. It's just a bad idea.

Huh. My university was segregated by floor / wing or by dorm (on request; the dorms were pretty small, mostly running to 30 rooms or so, so it just made it simple.) My older brother is the one who suggested single-gender dorms to me, but that was specifically to keep me out of the one monster dorm that most of the freshmen were stuck in— thin walls and frosh going crazy made for a bad study environment.

However, there were plenty of "on-campus apartments" that counted as dorms for the purpose of housing, and those were mixed gender.

There *were* rules about people of the opposite gender not being allowed in rooms after 11PM in the dorms, but this was a Catholic campus, after all. And there were plenty of other places to hang out. The weirder rule was the "dry campus" rule. Of course, there was a certain logic behind that one... the campus had been listed as a great "party school" (by Playboy, IIRC) in the 1980s, and the administration decided to ban alcohol from campus.

The fact that this is a Jesuit school only makes the irony more delicious.

Diatryma @305: I was in the Honors Program, which had about twenty students from each class level. The class just ahead of ours warned us that Honors incest never does well, don't even consider it.

There are no fewer than four* "Honors incest" marriages in each of these two classes— three of them from their class to mine. Mine is one of them. (In both senses, to clarify. Evil Rob is from the class ahead of mine.)

*We had some weird confluences of names. The class after mine had Chris, Chris, Chris, Kristan (male), and Christian**. Out of ten males.

**Totally unrelated tangent: Christian died on Mount Kilimanjaro. Now you can figure out what school I went to and when I graduated.

I chose an all-women dorm, sight-unseen, and everything I saw after I got to campus made me glad of the choice. During my 4 years there, dorms which included men had frequent prank fire alarms; some genuine fire alarms due to fires set on purpose; one bomb explode in a room (it was small, fortunately); people thrown through doors, walls and windows; and stereos played at high volume even late into the night.

In my all-women dorm, it was sufficiently quiet by midnight that I could get to sleep, and prank fire alarms happened at most once per year. I like adult males just fine, but I don't recommend living with packs of 18 to 22 year olds. Mind you, my dorm didn't forbid male visitors at any time of the day or night, so we had quite a few visitors, and even some long-term unofficial residents, but they kept a low profile.

My frosh year in college, I was in a quiet dorm. Or, I should say, The Quiet Dorm. It was explicitly tagged as such, and had special rules about how to handle noise complaints, and at what hours everyone was expected to shut up and put on their headphones. That one was male/female by floor. Quiet. Very quiet. I liked it. Sophomore year I had a better roommate, but a different dorm--also divided by floor, as only one dorm in campus divvied by room, and had to be requested specifically, and was no frosh at that--and good god the noise.

I mostly remember the girls being very very noisy, in the second dorm. But since there weren't any boys on my floor... I suppose it stands to reason those would be the ones I'd notice. A few pulled fire alarms, too. Always fun at 3am.

I moved off campus the year after that to a sorority house, which was small and all-female and, alas, only sometimes quiet. No randomly pulled fire alarms, though with about eight of us in the house, it wouldn't have taken long to find out who did that if so.

Pat H @ 294:
The Deutsche Rechtschreibreform of 1996 is interesting but not very widely respected (afaik) - it seeks to eliminate the letter esszet (capital beta with a tail) and the umlaut accent (replaced by the letter 'e' inserted after the formerly-umlauted letter). Aside from laziness in typing, I've seen very little adherence to the umlaut thing (though esszet is getting kinda rare).

You're imagining something far more radical than the actual 1996 reform. Esszet (ß) is eliminated for certain cases, true, but retained for others. And no one's touching the umlaut.[1] (That, I think, would have caused a much larger uproar than the actual reform generated!)

(Using ae, oe, ue in place of ä, ö, ü is of course an old practice -- Goethe was apparently quite insistent on spelling his name that way and not "Göthe" -- and the umlaut originated as a miniscule "e" written atop other vowels.)

[1] There are a few instances where "ä" is supposed to change to "e", but others where the reverse is supposed to happen; mostly these are cases meant to make the spelling of derived words reflect their root more precisely.

When the USA'ians say "dorm" I think wide open room with lots of beds in it, like I slept in a couple of times when away from home. A lot of private schools in Scotland kept them in use at least into the 90's. Whereas presumably you mean collection of individual rooms, otherwise some of what has been written really would seem odd.

Back to French's pronunciation not being that obvious from looking at the words...
I realize that I recently came across such a situation.

Connie Willis was in Albuquerque this last weekend. When she asked me what the French words on my sweatshirt meant, I explained what they were from. That's when she went "Ahah!". Not only did she know the movie they were from, but she had even been to the castle where it had been filmed.

The words?

"Fetchez la vache!"

guthrie @310, yes, US college dorms are more like hotels than the kind of dormitory you're thinking of. Older ones may have a shared restroom for a whole floor or wing; newer ones are more likely to be suites with one restroom for every two or four bedrooms.

In 1979 at Indiana U, I was on an "academic" floor in an all-female dorm, which was generally pleasantly quiet. Above us was the "virgin vault," a floor with absolutely no male visitation. They were just starting to experiment with a few dorm buildings alternating male and female floors. There was one big bathroom per wing, and I think there were maybe 30 of us per wing.

Here at OU, the honors dorm is segregated by floor and has one bathroom per wing (shared by 16 people), but the renovated dorms and the newer apartments are all suite-style. Dorms are getting pretty luxurious these days, as parental pocketbooks can attest.

guthrie @310 When the USA'ians say "dorm" I think wide open room with lots of beds in it

You are correct; our sense of the term is the collection of individual rooms. (Usually "double" rooms - shared with a roommate - rather than truly individual rooms.) In the traditional configuration, the toilets and showers are down the hall. In some, there are bathrooms shared between a pair of rooms or some other "suite" configuration.

dorm = residence hall

Ugh, language reform. Heaven preserve me from committees -- I'll take organic change any time. I learned German under the old system. When my daughter started school, the new rules had just been implemented. They were tweaked in 2004 and 2006, which led to confused kids, burned out teachers, and a population unsure of what's correct.

It's actually kind of funny -- German is so much more regular in spelling and pronunciation than English, and yet they felt it needed more consistency.

View from this side of the pond: My college at Cambridge, Girton, was the original women's college, but went mixed in 1979* and is now 50:50 female:male. There was no segregation of corridors, or of bathrooms** etc. on the corridors (although there were still men's and women's toilets in the "public", as opposed to the residential, areas). New Hall (recently renamed Murray Edwards) and Newnham are still women-only; I seem to recall that one of them has in its constitution that it can only go mixed when the university as a whole reaches 50% women.

I am extremely glad that I never had to share a room at university; having my own private space was extremely important. The American system (where shared rooms seems to be the norm) sounds awful to me.

Excess noise wasn't a problem most of the time - certainly no setting off of fire alarms. Although that powder that explodes underfoot once dry was scattered along the corridors occasionally. The year my room was next to a guy who tended to play his music too loud, we came to an agreement: when I had an essay to write and was really being bothered by his music, I'd tell him and he would turn it down; the rest of the time, I'd cope. Even then, he didn't play it -that- late (he was a scientist as well, so also had morning lectures to get to.

* Thereby ruining the fun of the club, whose name escapes me, of men who had successfully made it into Girton, had a bath, and got out again without being caught by the porters. I do believe this required female assistance.

** By which I do mean rooms with baths/showers, not just toilets.

Hey, TNH, there's a book about you.

I know this blog is interested in publishing scams, so when I came across this, I thought of you. There's a company out there called "Books LLC" whose business is, it seems, printing POD copies of Wikipedia articles and selling them for about $1 a page.

For instance, the book about you (and other "Investigative Bloggers":

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Investigative-Bloggers/Books-Llc/e/9781158403905

They make no bones about what they're doing:

http://www.booksllc.net/faqs.cfm

selling you stuff that you can get for free.

I guess it's living proof that "there's a sucker born every minute."

pm215 @272: I really should consult Daijisen more often than I do. Fascinating entry.

BTW, that でおはす should be read de owasu not de ohasu -- 御座す (owasu) being yet another archaic honorific form of "to be" that you never learn in textbooks until you stumble over it, stubbing your toe, making you wonder where the heck THAT popped up from. Much like -zu negative endings.

---L.

http://www.booksllc.net/faqs.cfm

The notion of "free digital review copies" in this context is kind of amusing.

Oh, for the love of ice cream and little fluffy puppy dogs.

Elliott Mason, I tried to reply to your LJ message, but LJ declined to deliver on the grounds of "privacy settings." Watch your Yahoo email instead.

I LOVE computers.*

*Nope, no sarcasm here.

Am I being deceived by a false cognate, or does the Dutch for "orange juice" really translate as "Chinese apple sap"?

Carrie S. -- Dutch 'sap' and German 'Saft' both mean juice.

Debbie: Yay, semantic change; does Dutch (or German) have a separate word for the liquid that comes out of the stem of the plant, rather than the liquid that comes out of the fruit?

The musicians and composers who I know personally -- by now, very, very, very many -- are deeply aware of the relationships between music and math, particularly those who deal with rhythm, which is all about measurement, counting, precision, etc. Even if they don't articulate it in mathematician vocabulary, they certainly do in the musical vocabulary they all share, no matter what language they are born learning to speak.

And speaking of mathematics as we -- or some -- are: this of interest from today's NY Times Science and Arts ."

[ "The considerable mathematical knowledge of the Babylonians was uncovered by the Austrian mathematician Otto E. Neugebauer, who died in 1990. Scholars since then have turned to the task of understanding how the knowledge was used. The items in the exhibition are drawn from the archaeological collections of Columbia, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania." ]

13 Sumerian tablets of mathematical exercises are on display until Dec. 17 at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, part of New York University.

You must love this bit:

"With some tablets the answers are stated without any explanation, giving the impression that they were for show, a possession designed to make the owner seem an academic."

There's also a slide show.

Love, C.

Carrie S. -- I can only speak for German, but 'Saft' is used for both tree sap and (fruit) juice. You generally specify the type of fruit (Apfelsaft, Zitronensaft), but you don't say "Baumsaft"/tree juice.

Interestingly (to me), in both languages Saft/juice are colloquial for electricity -- dunno about Dutch.

Aaaarrrrggghhh!!!!

Xopher @ 325 -

News From The Future - Dateline, April 1, 2012 -

Executives at Warner Bros. announced that they will reboot the Harry Potter franchise. According to one source, "The movies from the prior decade were good in their way, but we want to put forth a new Harry Potter for the current generation."

Etchings of 18th century Rome by Giuseppe Vasi with the views overlaid on the first accurate map of Rome. Modern photos also included.

Ugh, Steve, I won't be surprised. Disgusted, yes, but not surprised.

I'm figuring the reboot of, oh, White Collar is due any day now.

You say the show is still enjoying its original run?

Your point?

Reboot Harry Potter?!

They'd need to wait at least eight to ten years...

BUT, think of what they could do if the BBC did it as a TV series -- one year of episodes (22-26?) covering each book.

Constance @323, wrt Sumerian math tablets: "With some tablets the answers are stated without any explanation, giving the impression that they were for show, a possession designed to make the owner seem an academic."

IIRC most sangaku didn't provide step-by-step proofs/explications either. They're still very decorative, in any case.

Carrie S @322:

According to my dictionary, het sap means both sap and juice.

Open Thread coolness: Flying Snakes! ...and the science behind how they do it.

praisegod barebones @285:

Actually, this whole business of the different status of dialects in different national and linguistic cultures is something I'd like to have more of a grip on, altogether.

Well, I've certainly touched on the issue in the Netherlands.

In the comments to that entry, I also gave a quick overview of Dutch spelling reform. As so often happens here, popular dissatisfaction with a centrally mandated solution—het Groene Boekje—led to concrete action. In this case, that was the publication of het Witte Boekje, an alternative spelling reform for people and institutions who disagreed with the official changes. Most newspapers use the latter.

Fragano @ 68 - *splorfl* ROFL - I love it. Committing it to memory, will soon attempt to tell it to friends who don't speak Spanish and will give me odd looks.

(One of these days I'll get caught up on this thread. It will not be today, at least not before I get some actual work done.)

L.N. Hammer@317: thanks for the 'de owasu' correction. I'm definitely glad to be learning Japanese after the post-war kana spelling reforms...

(I learned "el pez perezoso" from my husband, who doesn't speak Spanish, who heard it from an Argentinian coworker. He told it to me in English and the result was my working my way to the punchline much like the "straight man" in the classic "straight man and funny guy" formulation. At which point I laughed for five minutes straight. "The fish!" "But why the fish?" "What does it do?" "Um. It swims. 'Nada?' NADA! HA HA HA HA HA HA whooo...")

In French...
sap - sève
juice - jus (silent 's')

Constance #298: Indeed... I not only saw it that night, but got a gorgeous view of it in my early-morning sky today.

I still remember my youngest niece as a babe-in-arms, pointing up at it... "Moon!"... Her father commented "the moon is magic!" (But then, most of 20 years after I abandoned Wicca, I still think "Hail Diana" when I see a full or waxing moon.)

TexAnne @ 235

I don't think I've ever seen any of these ("ognon"? Seriously?). I think Serge is right - these never caught on (at least, here).

Cheryl, 235: I know, right? I've never seen "ognon" in the wild, but I've seen a few of the verbs.

BTW, where is "here"?

Pat H @175: cue ObSF

Leah Miller @189: I need to learn the key combinations for some other footnote markers, eventually. I'm dying here.

Or, if you wanted, you could use numercal footnotes. Just type ^N to produce ^N.

Cheryl @ 339... these never caught on

Back in the late-1970s(?), the Quebec govt tried to convince people that, when they go to a MacDonald, they should ask not for a hamburger, but for a hambourgeois.

That one definitely didn't catch on.

Leah Miller @189 said: I need to learn the key combinations for some other footnote markers, eventually. I'm dying here.

Or you could use this site, (with cut-and-paste) which I think I learned about in a previous ML Open Thread ...

Xopher@325

Although I really don't see the point of this specific remake. From a commercial standpoint, the reason to do a remake is to attract the audience for the original. This remake is practically designed to actively repel that audience. They'd be better off doing a more or less original movie and perhaps talking about how it was "inspired" by or "in the tradition of" BtVS.

Constance @215: What about that MOON!

Old news by now, but since you asked ....

the most versatile way is just to cut and paste from the character palette.

ᨊ-ᨊ
-ᨆ-
-ᨎ-

After Tom Whitmore's @233, I have to shake off some cognitive dissonance at every mention of Homer.

Oh. Right. That was the point. (Context. Ahem.)

#340 TexAnne

BTW, where is "here"?

Sorry! I'm in Montreal.

#343 Serge

Back in the late-1970s(?), the Quebec govt tried to convince people that, when they go to a MacDonald, they should ask not for a hamburger, but for a hambourgeois.

I remember that. I still see it on the menus of a few old casse-croûtes, along with 'chien chaud' (hot dog), and something else I can't think of right now.

Not that anyone actually uses them. You walk up to the counter and ask for "un hamburger pas d'oignons, un hot-dog-all-dress, frites familial, et 2 7-up, pour apporter". Asking for a hambourgeois or a chien-chaud would get you some very funny looks.

BTW, Serge: "MacDonald". I saw what you did there.*

*Somewhere in Quebec, under the building of l'Office de la langue française, is a storage room filled with apostrophe-esses♀

♀OK, I have no idea how to type that. " 's's"? "Apostrophe S's"?

ajay @242: Did the Muppets ever do Hamlet?

Dunno, but the Flying Karamazov Brothers did Comedy of Errors.

Jacque @ #286:

Lila @70:' the 3 voices [of Greek] (active, passive, middle) came as a shock.'
Active, passive, and undecided?

One of the uses of the middle is to indicate reflexive action, e.g. if you wash something, that's active; if someone washes you, that's passive; if you wash yourself, that's middle.

Lila (352): *lightbulb!*

Thank you! In my almost☂-monolingual-English-speaker way, I never understood how there could be a third voice--until now.

☂I studied both German and Latin in high school, but retained very little of either.

Serge #343:

Presumably, if they were lower-middle-class they should ask for a petit hambourgeois.

Cheryl, 350: Wait...les Montréalais don't make a distinction between apporter and emporter? In France that'd be "...à emporter."

Jacque @ 341:

I wish I could find a link to corroborate this, but, oh, well. I distinctly remember reading some article or essay written by Delany in which he says he really didn't believe in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis when he wrote "Babel-17"; he just wanted to see where it took him. And I for one am glad he did, it's a lot of fun to read.

#355 ::: TexAnne

les Montréalais don't make a distinction between apporter and emporter? In France that'd be "...à emporter."

Properly, yes. At the casse-croûte? Not so much. And if you ask them about it, they are likely to say, "Anéoué, c'est juste moé pis la gang. Je m'en fiche."

Want to really freak yourself out? Watch some Têtes à Claques - it's hysterical, if you can get past the dialect.

And I've managed to turn the conversation around, haven't I? Sorry. I'm off for the evening, but I'll try and catch up with the thread tomorrow.

Michael, #345: Completely unconfirmed rumor (as in, I heard it from someone who heard it from someone who heard it from someone who is probably in a position to have heard it from a reliable source) -- the reason they're doing this is to re-attract the original-age target market, who can't get past the lack of everyday items like cellphones in the Whedon version. It breaks their suspension of disbelief.

Cheryl at 350: Use escape codes?

\'\s's ?

Lee #358: Heh! Funny, how many mystery, thriller, and horror plots get completely broken by the omnipresence of cell phones. ;-) It occurs to me that's probably why they redid Hardy Boys and (a while back) Nancy Drew....

When I was in "Kiss Me, Kate" ten years back, we used cell phones. With our minimal set, it made things a lot easier.

Bruce 356: The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is not nonsense, but Babel-17 (a language in which untrue things cannot be said) is. If Delany said that he had at best an imperfect understanding of Sapir-Whorf, which isn't terribly surprising if he really relied on Mario Pei (a "linguist" renowned for claiming that vowels, universally, are voiced, which several of the commenters on this blog know to be false) for his linguistics.

I only had one year of college and it was at a religious school. My parents went there (met there) and I was a minor; they told me I had no choice (I found out later I could have become emancipated then). The school had me choose three dorms and I chose the three newest. When I got there, I was not only in the oldest dorm, but in my mother's room.

It did have an en suite bathroom while the newer dorms had group bathrooms, but I had two very odd roommates (they probably thought the same of me) and I had a very difficult time. One of the roommates had been a mishkid her entire life and looked at us as her family and just took things of ours that she wanted. Caused her some time in the hospital when she took a pill from our other roommate (who moved her bed into the closet).

After the first quarter, there were enough empty rooms in the newer dorms that they offered me a double room for the price of one bed in a double and I took it. I turned the bed up vertically, put it in the other closet, and brought in a couple of Papasan chairs and a table. That worked out much better, even with having to share a bathroom with about 20 women in that section.

One minor redeeming factor about new spam on old threads is that it gives me an excuse to revisit them.* I just spent an enjoyable hour re-reading "The Vanishing Gibson".

* Or to read them for the first time, if they predate my arrival here.

David Harmon @ 360:

I can't count the number of plot devices I've seen in the last few years that required the protagonist to forget to charge a cell phone at some critical juncture. And that old chestnut will be obsolesced by fuel cell powered phones in the next couple of years.

Xopher @ 362:

I don't think Delany said Sapir-Whorf was "nonsense"; IIRC he objected to the strong version of Sapir-Whorf, that language determines thought as opposed to the weak version that language influences thought.

One odd thing that happened during my recent hospital stay was that I started to have web-surfing dreams. I could feel my right hand twitch as if moving-clicking a mouse. Visuals would shift like cut-scenes in a post-Akira anime, focus on playing an online game, then shift again.

Weird book room: Why Do I Vomit?

There are other odd titles there, like A Lust for Window Sills and (most interestingly for this particular blog) Anticraft: Knitting, Beading and Stitching for the Slightly Sinister.

Among the titles on that Weird Books page, I own copies of both 101 Uses For A Dead Cat and A History of Orgies.

I am flabbergasted that How To Shit In The Woods was NOT one of the listed titles.

David @360,

My father, in the 1950s, was running a business without a telephone. His father was stubbornly against it. We didn't get a telephone until after both I and my brother were born.

When I think of some of the stuff which intrudes on our telephone now ("This isn't advertising." Oh yeah?) I sometimes find it hard to be convinced of the benefits.

Weird books: And they don't include "Flattened Fauna: A Field Guide to Common Animals of Roads, Streets and Highways" Roger M. Knutson.

He was the after-dinner speaker at a conference I went to. I particularly liked the bit about how roadkill toads always have one arm raised "as if in surrender".

Diatryma@207 -- I've long wished that the airlines would provide a geologist (preferably in the seat next to my window seat) on every flight so I could ask "What are those round black areas all over the ground?" Maybe they could hire geologists as air marshals?

rams @ 371 -

They're most likely center-pivot irrigation systems.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/TypicalCenterPivotIrrigationLandscape.png

Xopher @ 362: ...Babel-17 (a language in which untrue things cannot be said)...

It has been a few years since I last read Babel 17 but that's not how I remember the language working. The way I remember it, the language Babel-17 was so wrapped up in the philosophy and world-view of its creators that understanding it fully required and compelled the speaker to sympathise with the cause of its creators. Thus anyone who tried to translate enemy communications during the war against the users of Babel-17 tended to betray their own side.

Would any colour-blind people care to comment on the sand-glass traffic light particle? It seems to me like a stupidly dangerous idea.

Fragano @ 354... A more upscale burger joint could be called "Le Charme Discret de l'Hambourgeoisie".

TexAnne @ 355... Cheryl @ 357... People in Québec may speak the language of Molière, but I'm not sure the latter would understand the local dialect.

rams @371 said: I've long wished that the airlines would provide a geologist (preferably in the seat next to my window seat) on every flight so I could ask "What are those round black areas all over the ground?"

My mom raised me, as a kid, to follow along on the map -- this is one way she kept me occupied on long car trips, and it translated nicely to plane trips. We played a lot of "What's That?" Baseball fields and big-box stores are particularly easy to spot.

As an adult, I rarely pack a map, but if I get a window I still avidly look out them ... and photograph, if they're clear enough (and the sun cooperates).

Between Chicago and southern California, the land goes as follows:
-- City and subdivisions [roughly northern Illinois]
-- Green fields with square fencelines, plus towns [rural IL/IA]
-- The Polka-Dot Land, which is really distinctive from above. It's like a Mondrian plus circles (and partial-circles). In growing seasons, it's a variety of crop colors; in winter, it's a weird mix of snowfields and, um, non-snow. [Iowa/Nebraska?]
-- Increasingly crinkly ranches-not-farms, with straight fenceline roads and the occasional wiggly river: it's easily apparent which sides get grazed (brown in summer, trampled snow in winter) and which don't (green in summer, pristine white in winter).
-- Canyonlands, as the crinkly rivers get deeper and deeper
-- Red and black cliffs ringing mesas, as it becomes more hole and less top surface
-- Real Mountains
-- City Stuff again (in the case of LA, City Stuff with mountains INSIDE it, which was really creepy the first time I saw it in daylight).

I saw a small, heavy thunderstorm from the side on one trip It was gorgeous, like a jellyfish: grey puffy cloud above, slanting straight lines of rain below arrowing into the darkness.

Elliott Mason @377, I too love looking out of plane windows and trying to figure out what is below me. This trip I was flummoxed by something I saw as I descended into Houston -- clearings in the woods with big white rectangles and little white roads leading up to them. All I could think of was concrete pads for houses that never got built, but there were an awful lot of them. (One day I plan to design a quilt around irrigation circles seen from the air.)

Seeing the Grand Canyon from above is neat.
Same with Yosemite park's El Capitan.

Carrie S. @ #322:
Can't speak for German or Dutch, but in Swedish you have "juice" (or "jos", if you prefer newspelling), the juice (haha) generated by pressing or centriguging a fruit or berry; "saft", made by simmering water, fruit and (usually) sugar, eventually diluted before serving; and "sap", the liquid that drips from a tree when cut (and left alive).

Lila @ #352:
So "middle" is (essentially) reflexive?

Marilee@363: One of the roommates had been a mishkid her entire life and looked at us as her family and just took things of ours that she wanted.

... missionary kid? I'm not familiar with the subculture. I guess what I'm asking is, "where is it normal to just raid your siblings' stuff?"

rams@371, and others following: I spent a while a few years back commuting from Hong Kong to Brisbane and there was a channel on the seat-back TV (On Cathay Pacific[1]) dedicated to the aircraft's current location. It showed a very crude map of the rough flightpath, so you could possibly identify where you were by looking out the window.

I'm sure it wouldn't be all that hard to show some canned Google Earth imagery corresponding to the current location[2], with canned Wikipedia entries on notable things you might be able to see if you could look straight down.

Just once, on that channel, there was live shortwave radio playing. It was the BBC World Service. "Beep. Beep. Beeeeeep. This is London." And then there would be the news from the BBC.

Occasionally, it would get drowned out by the local broadcasts of where we were flying over, so we'd get news from Indonesia, or the Philippines in Bahasa or Tagalog, and as we got closer to Hong Kong, Mandarin and Cantonese took over.

[1] I had a bit of culture shock when I flew another airline[3], and they announced the "movie for tonight" on the single screen in the cabin.

[2] I would hope that airplane knows pretty much exactly where it is at all times, and that letting the entertainment system in on that info should be pretty trivial.

[3] Qantas: bringing all the nuance you expect from Queensland to your flight, ya Pommie bastards.

Ingvar M @ 380:

Middle is frequently reflexive, but it is not confined to it. Some verbs, for example, do not have an active voice, but the middle voice takes its place (these deponent verbs tend to correspond roughly to Latin deponent verbs which use the passive, or to the French verbs which use être rather than avoir as the stem when forming the passé composé).

pm215 @335: どう致しましてどういたしまして.

And tell me about it, with the kana reforms. The more I poke at classical Japanese (what can I say, I like the poetry), the more grateful I am that while wa/ha have only been mostly straightened out, I can be reasonably certain that, say, ひ really is hi and not sometimes i.

---L.

Bruce Cohen (265): Or to drop a cell phone in the street and have it run over.

Paul Duncanson (374): The countdown to the end of the red light would be a killer in the NYC area, too.

Back in the late-1970s(?), the Quebec govt tried to convince people that, when they go to a MacDonald, they should ask not for a hamburger, but for a hambourgeois.

I'm a humble man. Just give me a sausage prole.

Sandy B. @ #381: If "mishkid" does indeed mean "missionary kid", I can assure that taking other people's things without permission is hugely non-normative in that culture, as well. Though I can caveat that some parents did seem to teach their kids that "good Christians share!" in a way that lent itself nicely to passive-aggressive co-opting of other people's things. Not just taking without asking, though.

Mary Aileen @ 385... I've been watching Jim Hutton's "Ellery Queen" and one episode's crucial clue involved New York City's phone nbrs of 1946 having 6 digits.

Serge (388): That's interesting, but what does it have to do with my #385?

Mary Aileen, #385: Houston has a lot of intersections where the WALK signal has a seconds-to-go timer on it. As a driver, I find those very useful in deciding whether or not I have time to get thru the intersection safely -- much more useful than a yellow light, the timing of which is distressingly non-uniform. OTOH, it's also true that the driver culture here is notably less aggressive than the one in NYC.

I do see Paul's point, though; there is no way for someone who is red/green colorblind to tell what color that light is.

Mary Aileen @ 389... A curse on my tendency toward brief comments. You and others were talking about plot devices that may not work anymore in the future, which reminded me of this other bit of storytelling that's now obsolete.

Xopher @367 -- I own many of those books. Some were intended to be humorous. Some weren't. I dislike listings like that which don't differentiate between the two. There's another lovely one called Legal Daisy Spacing which was intentionally weird, and highly recommended for those who like odd concepts. I can't remember the title of the odd self-published book by one of the creators of the Shoebox division of Hallmark, which had many different types of paper and an amazing sense of humor. Found it at a library sale; it's in one of my boxes somewhere. It got reprinted in a much less interesting format.

Serge (388): Oh! That makes sense. I was confused because the other half of my comment referenced NYC, so I thought you were responding to that.

Lee (390): There are a few Walk timers like that around here. The one I interact with the most (as a pedestrian) is frustrating because it's a double street, with two sets of lights that go yellow/red at staggered times*, and the countdown is for the wrong half of the street (i.e., not the one that you're actually crossing at the time).

*I'm explaining this very badly, but I don't know how to make it clear to someone who hasn't seen the street.

Lee @390, Mary Aileen @393, re: countdown walk lights. They're becoming quite common in the Boston/Cambridge area. In Cambridge, the walk light countdown hits zero as the parallel traffic light hits red, after a second the walk light for the cross street turns white, then the other traffic light turns green. It's a nicely predictable pattern all along Mass Ave (which is the section I walk regularly). In Boston (at least in the vicinity of BU), on the other hand, the countdown hits zero as the parallel traffic light turns yellow; thus, pedestrians have several seconds more than the countdown would seem to imply. (I cross streets like a Bostonian college student; I'm sorry...)

Ever since I noticed this difference in the timing, I've wondered if Bostonians who come over to our side of the river get flattened by mis-judging the time available to cross...

I was flying from Boston to Atlanta once and we flew over a baseball stadium (I can't now recall where) just as they were shooting off fireworks. Tiny bead-sized fireworks, seen from above. Just extremely cool.

Speaking of cool:

Ginormous organ.

Huge lively acoustic space.

650+ singers.

Hallelujah Chorus flashmob.

Janet Brennan Croft @ 378 ...
Elliott Mason @377, I too love looking out of plane windows and trying to figure out what is below me. This trip I was flummoxed by something I saw as I descended into Houston -- clearings in the woods with big white rectangles and little white roads leading up to them. All I could think of was concrete pads for houses that never got built, but there were an awful lot of them. (One day I plan to design a quilt around irrigation circles seen from the air.)

Depending on the direction you were heading from, you might have been looking at the HP campus

xeger, the question begs to be asked: Is there an HP Way around that campus?

Explanation of HP Way pun here.

xeger @397, hm, no, these were just plain white. Not buildings, as far as I could tell. Even big box stores and warehouses usually have something sticking out of the roof somewhere. Weird.

They're putting the countdown lights in LA, too.
(It also makes it easier to tell when the light's timing is misadjusted. When you barely have time to cross the street, or when it starts counting down literally one second after turning green, it needs work.)

I first saw countdown lights in China in 2003. We have them here in Pittsford, NY. Sometimes people pay attention to them.

Sandy B., #381, yes, her parents were missionaries in Africa her entire life and she didn't have siblings or friends to play with (I don't know why, although she seemed scared of black folk at the college; she was amazingly pale). She apparently could have what she wanted in their house to make up for it, and our room made up for being away from there. It wasn't unusual to come back to the room and be unable to find clothes.

Fade Manley, #387, I didn't say she was normal; my brother's kids aren't like that.

Lee, #390, we have count-down pedestrian lights (white outline and numbers) all over Old Town. When they get to zero, the pedestrians still have the right of way, but the parallel road gets a green. It's good for residents, too, but it helps tourists get around.

MArilee@403, I've known missionary kids but never lived with them. That kind of sounds like a child with a very deprived and undisciplined background.

Janet @ #400, anyone flying over the Sprint Campus in Kansas City (Actually Overland Park, KS) would see the same thing. A ring road with lots of buildings and parking garages.

Of course, with Spring's current business plan (do not be loyal to any employee, they're all crap and profit impediments), the campus thing is getting pretty emptied of Sprint employees. they're trying to find renters of their buildings.

(They think nothing of going, "well, we can't figure out how to move these 10,000 employees to do something else, let's just dump them.) I have a friend who was an executive assistant that finally told her boss that it was all bullshit (she was the one doing the letter-writing, announcements, etc.), left and actually found a much better job with one of our healthcare groups in KC.

I do not think much of Sprint, for many reasons.

Linkmeister @ 398 ...
xeger, the question begs to be asked: Is there an HP Way around that campus?

Given that it was the pre-merger Compaq headquarters (iirc), it seems unlikely... ;)

The coolest thing I ever saw from the air was sunlight reflected from car windshields. We were too high the see the cars, just bright golden jewels on the highway.

Second coolest was the full circle rainbow. I had read about that, so it wasn't a surprise, but still fun to see.

Stefan@179: I managed to miss Four Kings when it was released in the UK, but from excerpts and reviews I surmise that the protagonists are second generation children of immigrants.

Bruce H @ 406: On one flight, around midday, above scattered clouds, I was mystified by what seemed to be spotlights shining up through some of the clouds. I eventually decided that it must have been sunlight reflected back from the (very still) surface of some lakes below.

Paula@404:
My grandparents were missionaries, and I've never noticed any slackness in recognizing boundaries in my father or uncle or aunt.

Also, re lights: Toronto has an increasing number of countdown pedestrian signals. They hit zero just when the car light goes yellow (which stays that way for three seconds, pretty consistently). I've noticed that the effect of introducing them has tended to be to encourage people who walk quickly to start crossing well into the countdown.

The countdown lights I was complaining about hit zero when the *first* set of the crosslights hits yellow. The relevant time for pedestrians is when the *second* crosslights hit yellow, about ten seconds later. The cross street doesn't get a green until three seconds after the second yellow. So I just ignore the countdown.

Marilee, #403: That's appalling behavior (and the first time she did it to me would have been the LAST time, one way or another), but it seems to be the result of astoundingly bad parenting more than of her missionary background per se.

Stefan @ 179 & NelC @ 407: Rather than Four Kings could you mean Four Lions?

If so, four of the five were children of immigrants. Barry wasn't.

Spotted on LJ: Commas: they save lives!

Janet Brennan Croft @378

>> ... as I descended into Houston -- clearings in the woods with big white rectangles and little white roads leading up to them.

Sounds like oil or gas wells to me.

Go to Google Maps, set the address to 30.57, -94.58, set the map type to Satellite, and zoom in till the scale shows 2000 ft/1 km. Is that what you saw?

If you zoom in all the way, you'll see tanks on the edge of each clearing. I don't see any pump jacks, like I do when I look at the same pattern around Midland or Odessa, so they could be gas wells, rather than oil.

The most interesting sight I've seen from a plane was being able to make out Lake Mendota and Lake Monona in Madison when we were flying from Minneapolis to Florida. The plane went right over Madison, and the lakes could be seen quite clearly. It was amazing.

Here's a dumb and/or innocent question for people who know about living in cold climates, of whose number I most assuredly am not: do you sleep in warm woolly socks? Why or why not?

TexAnne @ 416... Not usually.

I once saw some kind of burning building from an airplane. (I'm pretty sure it was a house, but it could have been some other kind of house-looking building.)

I remember flying over the Cypress structure a few days after the Loma Prieta quake, and it was really amazing to see it pancaked. I like identifying places I've lived from airplanes, and following the streets that lead to them.

TexAnne @ 416 ...
Here's a dumb and/or innocent question for people who know about living in cold climates, of whose number I most assuredly am not: do you sleep in warm woolly socks? Why or why not?

"It depends" ;)

When I'm camping, I'll absolutely sleep with socks of some sort on (usually fleece).

At home, I add an extra blanket across my feet, because I absolutely _detest_ wearing socks in bed. They come off, get lost, and then have strange laundry-like effects, where one somehow magically vanishes, only to return as rock-like lumps in the bed at the least reasonable time.

Wearing socks in bed (or discussing such) also seems to cause run-on sentences...

TexAnne @ 416: Yes, because I like to keep my feet warm.

James, #409, my grandparents were missionaries, too, as well as my brother (and eventually his family). My roommate was odd. There were a fair number of mishkids at the college and I didn't know any others like her. I was happy to get the private room the next quarter.

TexAnne, #416, sometimes -- my feet are sometimes too cold for just sticking them under the cats.

@Janet Brenneman Croft regarding irrigation circle quilting: Here's a lovely musing on the beauty of the landscapes mentioned, along with several photos of different types of circle farms (including one the author referred to as "Bubbles.") Hope that inspires you!

@TexAnne: I've lived in a variety of climates, and the answer is that it depends on how good your insulation is and your heating bill. When I lived in Denver the apartment had some huge windows that were not very well-insulated. I didn't wear wool socks but you can bet that every blanket we owned was on the bed in cold weather. Socks just aren't that comfy.

TexAnne, #416: Not as a rule unless I was sick. If your heating system is inadequate, or the lack of insulation makes keeping the house at a reasonable temperature too expensive, it might help; my experience is that I can't get to sleep easily if my hands or feet are cold, but an extra blanket is usually a better means to fix that.

TexAnne, I tend to want my shoulders bundled up but my feet out from under the covers. If it's really cold enough, I'll sometimes wear a pair of fuzzy socks (never actual wool ones, I love the soft velour type), but they do always come off, as mentioned, and I usually find myself kicking them off myself once the bed has warmed up a bit.

When we moved to Illinois when I was a child my mother (a southerner through and through) tried to force me to wear the woolen socks my great aunt would knit for me, and couldn't understand why I hated them so much. Even when my feet are cold, socks aren't the best answer.

Oh! I forgot to mention the best thing I ever brought back from the UK (besides my husband)! A hot water bottle. Much better than wooly (wooley?) socks. I don't know why I wasn't familiar with them, because you'd think they would have taken off in the midwest, but I never saw them used for warming the bed up until I visited my in-laws. And when I brought one back for my friend's daughter, she was excited to have something besides a heating pad to use for upset stomachs, and I explained that she didn't have to wait (or fake) a tummy-ache, but could use it to snuggle whenever the bed was cold.

Yes, Four Lions.

D'oh! That means I recommended a non-existent movie to my aunt . . .

I suspect I'm mentally scrambling the title with Three Kings, which does exist.

Stefan: You could have done worse. Three Kings is a damned fine movie, though it has a few less laughs than Four Lions and, given events that have happened since it was made, seems a lot sadder now.

>> ... do you sleep in warm woolly socks?

Rarely. Unless I'm sick, I produce enough heat that my feet eventually get warm, even if they are cold when I get in bed.

I have used a hot water bottle, but for me it seems more effective to clutch it to my chest than to try keeping it close to me feet. When the core is warm, there is more body heat for the peripherals.

Serge @311: Fetchez la vache in glorious Legocolor!

TexAnne @416 et al. It depends. I like to walk around the apartment in wool-lined slippers or woolly socks, but tend to wear thinner fleece socks to bed. My foot warmer of choice is a hot water bottle, though.

HLN: Woman flies across the ocean to Virginia, makes whiskey the way George Washington did at Mount Vernon.

416: ObPratchett...

"Oh, and always wear something in bed. It keeps a man interested."
"You always wore your hat."
"Right."

TexAnne: Not only do I sleep in my handknit wool socks* in the midst of winter, but I also sleep in my fingerless mitts. My hands and feet get cold easily.

*They don't come off in bed, unlike my cheap commercial cotton ones

Pendrift #429: Welcome to Virginia! How long are you over here for? Any chance of visiting Charlottesville?✦ (Google sez ~2.5 hours' drive from Mount Vernon.)

✦ ObPitch: 100,000 used books. 4th (NE) & Market streets. Explore the labyrinth!

David @ 432: Alas, I am back in Brussels already. I was there for six full days (plus travel time), most of it spent inside the distillery, where I tended Elizabeth I, the main spirits still.

One of the best parts about the stint (and there were plenty) was discovering I had a knack for spirits-making; it seems my palate is more sensitive than most, and I could detect the proper points at which to make cuts in the stream of whiskey being produced so that the bad stuff wouldn't get mixed in with the good.

TexAnne @ #416, this isn't a cold climate (nights below freezing, but only rarely into teens or single digits), but I'll answer anyway. I go to bed wearing fuzzy socks, but they get uncomfortable before my feet are completely warm, and I shuck them off in bed. I am usually awake enough to drop them on the floor but sometimes I find abandoned socks when I change the sheets.

TexAnne @416: I find that if my feet are cold in the night, it's usually an indication that the rest of me isn't quite warm enough either, so an electric blanket is a better remedy than socks (enough conventional blankets would do as well, I suppose, but on one of those nights when the outside temperature is below -40 and the thermostat inside is insufficiently reactive, the resulting layer would be thicker than the mattress).

TexAnne -- although I have a tendency for cold feet and can't sleep without socks even in the summer, I don't wear my handknit wool socks to bed. At some point, I do manage to warm up, and then I'd be *too* warm. Hot water bottles are great.

On the off chance that you're considering knitting socks for a Giftmas present, I'll point out that I've seen really pretty handknit hot water bottle covers.

Julie L @275 (belatedly)
WRT desu, I'm pretty sure I've seen/heard replacement by de aru or de arimasu in formal written contexts, or spoken narration that's meant to consciously evoke a literary style.

The word on the street is that "desu" is a really mouth-mushy contraction for "de gozaimasu" [Which seems ridiculous, until you get used to the fact that Japanese people are amazingly lazy with their mouths. "Ohayo Gozaimasu" (good morning) was compressed to "osu" a hundred years ago or so in some subcultures.] Anyway, gozaimasu is more or less the same thing as one of the 3 possible meanings of 'aru'/'arimasu' ("the copula" (syntactic widget like "to be" but not really the same), existence, possession) So, saying that "desu" is sometimes replaced with "de arimasu" is accurate, and for a good reason.

Using 'de aru' instead of the modern copula (da/desu) makes you sound like a newspaper or an encyclopedia. (authoritative, neutral, impersonal, possibly some other connotations I'm unaware of)
(de gozaru is a deprecated usage, and thus makes thou sound like thee art affecting an olden style of speech (especially a samurai (or ninja), in exactly the same way 'thee' is used by people who want to sound like a medieval knight). Yet the more polite form 'de gozaimasu' is used in a class of exceptional politeness that I can't actually navigate (yet))

To break the topic of Japanese grammar, and bring up the topic of Japanese semantics... it's often said that Japanese doesn't actually have swear words. The way that Japanese people express contempt is actually syntactic! At lesser levels of frustration or in the case of more refined situations, decreasingly clear enunciation is another substitute for using foul language.
There are, mind you, words that are not suitable for TV broadcast. The only ones that I know are unrefined terms for body-parts. As a side effect of the reduced vigilance regarding specific words, they allow the full suite of English vulgarity to be broadcast unaltered. Which has the side-effect of making thousands of elementary and junior high school kids who use the F-word either unthinkingly, out of curiosity, or as a way to make their foreign assistant teachers react...

I'm a NaNoWriMo winner again--50,000 words in the month of November. There was a bit of a problem with a Wordcount bug in OpenOffice. Don't use Custom Quotes.

It's the usual airplane-crazy furry alternate history. but the Zeppelin is real enough.

There were Zeppelins prowling over London that night, and Carol Wilson, twelve years old and definitely a pretty little vixen, was in the middle of a large patch of open ground, the "playing field" for the Barnardo's Home, looking up into the night sky. There were the ghostly finger of searchlights sweeping the sky, and she could hear the distant noise of engines, throbbing slightly. It would be her birthday next month, as near as anything could be a birthday for a girl found by a dockside as a near new-born, by the bloody corpse of a woman who had never borne a child. And soon she would be working, likely in one of the munitions factories. She shivered, not that this was a cold night.

Oh, Barnardo's had done a good job, and she knew how to behave and what the world expected of her, and she was educated. She could read and write, and sang well, and even could dance, not that she wanted to work in a dance-hall. Even a munitions factory would be better than that.

She grinned. The searchlights had found a Zeppelin, and the guns were firing. She rather thought that just flying, at night, needed some courage, but she read the papers, and knew what the Zeppelins did when they dropped their bombs, Even if they were trying to hit the factories, it was just a wild scatter. She watched it, and the tiny little flashes as the shells burst, and wondered why they seemed always to be high, or low, and always trailing the Zeppelin. Couldn't they shoot straight?

But there was something moving, a tiny speck, and she knew it wasn't a night-bird briefly silhouetted against the dust-scattered light of the searchlight beams. It moved wrongly for that, and kept pace with the Zeppelin, and then she lost sight of it. A 'plane? How could you even see enough to fly a 'plane at night? A Zeppelin was just hanging, it wouldn't fall over like a 'plane might. And what could a 'plane carry that could hurt something that big?

Carol didn't know about the incendiary bullets that the Flying Corps used. She was too far away to track the 'plane or see the tracer bullets. But she saw the sudden red glow as the fire started under the airship's tail, and she stood and cheered and whooped, like thousands of other Londoners, as the airship fell blazing from the sky.

Scott #437 - I believe that desu = de gozaimasu rather than de arimasu is the word on the street, but it still puzzles me. For one thing, I was taught to make the negative of desu (when, say, you need to politely assert that not that is not a pen) with de arimasen, rather than de gozaimasen.

---L.

I recommend electric mattress pads over electric blankets. They are way more efficient: the heat doesn't escape upwards into the air; it's trapped by your quilt/comforter/blanket.

On very cold evenings, such as we've been having lately in the Bay Area, I read or watch TV with an electric heating pad on my lap. Keeps the core warm, yes, and it's not as heavy as the cat...

Lizzy L @ 440... it's not as heavy as the cat

A couple of nights ago, I woke up finding Agatha the Cat Genius sleeping across my neck. Luckily she's quite dainty.

Thank you for your comments, everybody! Last night got down to 18, and I was quite happy with my hot water bottle, my warm woolly socks, my several layers of blankets and comforters, and oh yes, my cat.

TexAnne, your setup last night exactly mirrored mine, except my socks were ordinary cotton. Also, I've got the winter flannel sheets on the bed. Yay, flannel sheets!

Rikibeth, my sheets are flannel too. PURPLE flannel.

Bruce H. @414, yes, that's what I was seeing! I guess the big cleared spaces must be for tankers to pull in and load the oil or gas, then.

B. Durbin @423, thanks -- that looks worthy of a long loving read.

TexAnne @416, usually turning on the electric blanket 15 minutes before bed is enough and I don't even need it all night, but just in case, I do keep a pair of red fuzzy socks in my nightstand. If my feet get real cold they cramp, and then I have to hop out of bed to stretch them out, and that's no fun when it's cold.

Oooh, purple! Mine are ivory with lace-embroidered edges. They pair nicely with the burgundy-velvet-and-dark-brocade comforter.

I remember a while back there was a genre writer who supported themselves by chapter subscriptions while writing a book. Does anyone know who I'm thinking of?

EClaire, #425, I'm exactly the opposite: I need my feet warm and usually have my shoulders out of the covers.

TexAnne, #444, I don't like flannel, but I always have sheets with purple and green. On the bed now is lilacs on cream. I have lavender walls and used to have dark green carpet, now laminate, but still a lot of dark green accents. I like purple a lot. Today I'm wearing a purple mock turtleneck, purple pants, and a bright red quilted sweater over.

Earl Cooley III, #447, Lawrence Watt Evans does chapter subscriptions, but he doesn't exactly support himself with them.

Isn't there a gender/social status differentiation in Japanese as to the words for 'please' and 'thank you'? Or has that died out?

Parody commercial for Bronte Sisters Action Hero Figures. Very cute!

So the nine year old (boy) was talking about some amusing part of a video on YouTube, and mentioned that one character "ran away like a scared little girl."

Then he paused thoughtfully. "Not that little girls are necessarily easily scared." Pause. "Or girls at all, really." Pause. "I mean, look at Samus*. She goes up against all kinds of deadly aliens, and she's all alone." Pause. "Maybe [character] ran away like something else scared."

I swear, I didn't even look at him in an admonishing fashion. This was his unprompted thought process.

I'm so proud of him.

-----
* the protagonist of the Metroid series of video games

TexAnne@416: I've very occasionally worn cotton socks to bed, when I was sick. (Waterbed, so it's heated.) I essentially never wear wool socks anywhere, though I do own two pair currently.

I grew up with electric blankets, and bought myself a waterbed quite early when I left home, so in bed is the last place I worry about being too cold.

re this particle: TT is behind the times. Think "guaranteed student loans", and be very afraid.

L.N. Hammer@439: I guess it's just an accident of history that 'desu' and 'de(wa)arimasen' came down different etymological paths to become the usual polite-form pair for the copula. In some alternate universe 'degozaimasen' might have been abbreviated too and we'd have *desen or something for the negative of 'desu'. In this universe, that slot's empty, so 'de(wa)arimasen' is doing that job in addition to being negative-of-'de arimasu'.

Hot water bottle for me every time. Preferably in a furry cover so that it's a comfortable temperature all night. I have poor circulation, and without something to pre-warm that bit of the bed, my feet will simply get colder and colder in a positive feedback loop, and I won't be able to sleep.

On a particularly cold night (like tonight), it's one bottle for the feet, and another to clutch to my chest.

Scott @437: To break the topic of Japanese grammar, and bring up the topic of Japanese semantics... it's often said that Japanese doesn't actually have swear words. The way that Japanese people express contempt is actually syntactic! At lesser levels of frustration or in the case of more refined situations, decreasingly clear enunciation is another substitute for using foul language.

I had the impression that there were two slightly different versions of this--

1.) A "tough guy" vocabulary/accent with yakuza-style rolled Rs, slurred pronunciation (esp. for -i adjectives: sugoi -> sugee, urusai -> ussee), and generally arrogant/rude pronouns and verb forms; the last of which partially overlap with

2.) Selectively deploying deprecatory vocabulary for specific people/situations, e.g. the kisama and temae (-> temee) 2nd-person pronouns and the -yagaru contempt suffix.

tykewriter @450: Isn't there a gender/social status differentiation in Japanese as to the words for 'please' and 'thank you'? Or has that died out?

*runs and hides* Someone else better tackle this one. I know barely enough to know that I don't know very much about these :b

There are lots of ways to say please/thanks, depending on the social context. The common arigatou ~"thank you" is an implicitly shortened version of arigatou gozaimasu because of the adjective form (which would normally be arigatai; gozaimasu mutates -i conjugatable adjectives). Sumimasen can express either gratitude or apology. Both of those could also have their formality level tweaked downward; I think I have seen/heard sumanai, but not arigatai desu.

The most routine "please" is probably via tacking kudasai onto the end of a request. A lot of Japanese prohibitory signage ends with [verb stem]-naide kudasai ("please don't [verb]"). The base verb kudasaru belongs to the tangle of specialized "give/receive; do a favor for" vocab that I can't keep straight-- they're all agent/object-dependent, i.e., whether the active party is the speaker, addressee, or neither, cross-referenced against the recipient of the action and their relative social ranks.

Woolly socks は, I tend to wear them to bed in all seasons; I also have a small auxiliary blanket to spread out from the waist down. My legs and feet always feel too cold otherwise.

abi @ 452... I wonder if his being a fan of the Girl Genius contributed to his re-thinking his own assertions. Probably not that much. Having the parents he has is a much more likely cause.

I have come to the conclusion that I don't experience time the way most people do.

This is in reaction to yet another person (my sister) saying, "Don't blink; they'll [the kids] be grown up before you know it." People are always saying that, and always saying that "it feels like yesterday" when referring to events of some time ago.

And... you know, it doesn't feel that way to me. Sure, I remember the events in question clearly— I remember most things pretty clearly— but I also remember the intervening events pretty clearly, and have a definite sense of time plodding along (though in a much less boring fashion than "plodding" implies.)

Maybe it's because I'm paying attention? I don't know, it's not a shock to me when kids grow up, and it's not a shock to me that my older child is 2.5 (almost feels like three years, honestly.) And if I try to explain this, people look at me like "You poor deluded fool," because they misunderstand my protest. I get the whole carpe diem bit. But... it just doesn't feel like that to me...

B Durbin @ 559:

IME life feels more and more as if it's racing along the longer you've been around. My kids took a long time to grow up until suddenly they're both in their 30's. I can remember all the stuff in between, but still, it seemed like their teens went on forever, and were just last week.

abi @ 452: Wow.

TexAnne: not wolly socks, because I find wool scratchy. Cotton socks, sometimes - usually kicked off when half-asleep and found in the laundry, like other people have mentioned. Occasionally loop-inside socks over the cotton ones if staying somewhere really cold. And now I'm thinking about it, tonight would be a good night to try out my new furry-covered hot water bottle.

Our cat has learned to burrow in between the two duvets (we have two on the bed in winter) on cold days, to stay warm when the humans are not staying still enough for her to sleep on a warm lap (we don't have the house very warm; can't insulate the walls (solid brick) and the gas bills are high enough already).

Earl Cooley III @447: First thing that came to mind was Cat Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.

Hyperlocal Thanksgiving:

The Black Vultures (Coragyps atratus) too, of Honk County on the Eastern Shore, got their Thanksgiving feasting on. On our way to Annapolis for dinner I counted 5 dead deer, one of which had at least four of the local Black Vultures gleefully performing their environmental niche duties.

As I heard the Fish and Wildlife fellows say about ten days ago, "The major part of our job for now is removing dead deer from roads and highways. It's deer mating season and they've got no brains."

Lots of other, smaller road kill too. This is a rural county.

I'm wondering about venison for Christmas.

Deer hunting season started either Wednesday or Thanksgiving.

Love, C.

Has anybody in Europe seen the French movie "Les Aventures Extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-sec"? Is it any good, whether or not one has read Jacques Tardy's grapic novels from which the movie was adapted? It should be fun, being about a lady novelist in 1911's Paris who has to deal with suitors, cops, monsters, and other distractions.

Serge @464, I am ever so eagerly waiting for that one. The previews looked fantastic.

(I spent a week or two pursuing other things, and I'm catching up with ML now. I'll try not to overpost-and-a-half here.)

Lydy Nickerson@897, starting work as a polysomnograph technician - Yay! Not just that you've got a job, but as somebody who did the sleeping half of "Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep" earlier this year, and has since been playing with CPAP machines and various random meds, I really appreciate having people around doing your job!

TexAnne@163 favorite bagel recipe - My absolute favorite bagel recipe was to have a local real-bagel shop, and find that they made bagels in the evening for next morning's delivery, so that when we went to the el-cheapo movie theater on Sunday nights we would first stop and get fresh hot bagels. It's kind of like getting Krispy Kreme glazed donuts hot, except that when those cool down they're poor imitations of the real thing, while these were real stuff.

Several people "Full Moon" - Better see it now, because next month it's going to disappear.

Lee@46 "mañana" - There's some Irish author who said that the Irish word "tomorrow" is sort of like "mañana", except that it doesn't carry the same terrible sense of urgency. I also remember once reading somebody, probably Parkinson, talking about the pre-Mao Chinese bureaucracy having an expression that they'd do something in three days. It meant that they weren't going to do it today, or tomorrow, or the day after that, and that while they were too polite to actually tell you No, you'd benefit from buying yourself a clue.

Serge@173 typewriters in the prehistoric days not having accent marks - My mother's manual typewriter, which I grew up with, had accent marks, and c-with-cedilla, and ñ. On the other hand, she was a French major in college, and had been born near Paris where her parents were studying, before coming back to the US where they both taught French. There were also language books around the house; when she'd worked for spies\\\\\the defense department during the Korean war, she'd been translating Korean as learned on the job, and studied a bit of Chinese and Greek as well. The French was the only one she actually kept up with, plus a bit of Spanish for travel, but she seldom got a chance to speak it with anybody at home and I only picked up a bit from elementary school and random exposure.

Tom Clancy, of all people, has an IRA/ULA character in his Patriot Games say "Insh'Allah," a Latin colleague had once told him, "meant the same thing as manana -- but without the urgency." The phrase seems to be universally used to denigrate cultures which don't do things at the speed one wishes them to do them.

Bill Stewart @ 466... I had a typewriter with accents and other squiggles, what with my growing up in Québec City. When I left though, typewriters and computers in the anglophone world had no such possibilities because, well, they didn't need them. One gets used to figuring out the correct words from the context, but it feels weird leaving them out when writing.

Janet Brennan Croft @ 465... It does, doesn't it? I pretty much expect I'll have to get the European DVD otherwise I'll never see it.

Giving Thanks a day late that the lump on my dog's elbow is only a lipoma.

Mmmmm, dog fat!

* * *

The released-at-a-bad-time thriller Unstoppable is modest but quite enjoyable. Working stiff railway men race, literally, to stop a runaway freight train full of toxic badness. Very nicely paced, filmed in wonderfully gritty Pennsylvania industrialscapes, and it quickly establishes through cinematography that rolling stock is way dangerous to be around.

I made an impulse buy of YET ANOTHER VERSION of Fritz Lang's _Metropolis_ at Costco the other day.

This is the third version I've bought in the last five years or so. There was a cleaned-up print made by picking and choosing from the best negatives on hand (Kino Mk. 1), and then a probably-illegal recreation of the rocking' 1984 Giorgio Moroder version made by a guy in New Zealand.

This latest version is probably as complete as will every by made; a 16mm print of the uncut original was found in a vault in Buenos Airies, and there was enough usable footage to add 25 minutes over never-seen-since-1926 scenes. The new stuff is really grainy and scratched, but holds together.

The best new scene is kind of funny. Grigory, AKA worker 11811, switches clothes with Freder and rides off in Freder's limo with instructions to go meet Josofat, Jon Frederson's disgraced flunky. While stuck in traffic he sees a rich woman putting on her makeup in the next car. Then a guy standing in the girders above the roadway starts tossing about bundles of flyers for Yoshiwara's, the high-end nightclub. Grigory goes D'OH! and diverts the limo to the place for a night of debauchery.

Most of the scenes are of the activities of Slim (The Thin Man), Frederson's investigator, who is supposed to keep track of Freder but ends up harassing Grigory and Josafat. There are a few scenes of Metropolis street level - - - nothing too detailed --- and a scene where we learn that Rotwang is really loopy. He apparently got that robot hand while doing his research on the Machine Man. Freder's hallucinations include Slim dressed up as a monk and reading from the Book of Revelations while looming over the foot of his bed. And finally, there's some more to the flight from the fleeing worker's city (the stairway the kids escape up is initially blocked), and the workers' persuit of Maria.

I don't know it if was worth $24 to see the extra scenes, but the Blu-Ray print is very, very nice.

The proper configuration of blankets does much for foot warmth. Blankets may not be too tight at the foot, lest the foot feel as if it's being bent under them. If coldness is too severe, break out the electric foot warmer that goes under the bottom sheet. Be aware it may feel too damn hot by morning.

Kip @ 472: We actually have a twin comforter sideways across the foot of the bed. It keeps the feet warm without being tucked in at all, because it's got a decent overhang. Mind you, if it gets too far to one side, gravity may take over, leaving somebody cold, but that's when you pull it up again.

And on the overhang note, why is it that we have to buy a king size blanket to cover our queen bed without having air get in the sides? It's as though blanket manufacturers don't realize there will be people on the bed, pulling up the sides, when they design the size requirements.

473
I think they've been making them smaller. (Why should I need extra-long sheets, just to tuck them in?)

The comments on the recent full moon minded me of filk lyrics I wrote some years back:

Lunar Reflections

The moon's no gentle lady, nor beautiful balloon,
But the harshest desert ever a human foot has trod;
A freezing, burning wasteland, dust-scattered, rubble-strewn,
Our planet's stillborn sister, seeming half-forgot by God.

No place to watch an Earthrise, for one face to Earth is locked.
This is no ghostly galleon, but a spinning rock, bone-dry.
Yet this orb, drab and barren, rill-furrowed, crater-pocked,
Is a mirror, a mirror, a mirror in the sky,

Reflecting sunlight's glory, and making of that light
A softer glow that human eyes can bear,
Reflecting dreams of other worlds we spin out in the night,
Bringing dreams within our reach, if we but dare.

So dreamers, sing your visions; I will listen till the end.
Though your dreams are mist and moonshine,there is truth within the lie:
We follow where dreams lead us, and our future may depend
On what we see reflected in that mirror in the sky.

Anne Sheller @ 475... Thanks for posting your poem.

B. Durbin @473, only the bottom sheet goes all the way across the bed. We realized early on that we had two entirely different ideas of how a bed should be made up, so we each have our own set of covers. This seems to eliminate pulling covers off, leaving only the problem of covers on one's own side that shouldn't be there. Every time we stay in a hotel where there's a single top sheet and a comforter, I'm reminded of the wisdom of our method.

Anne Sheller: appreciated.

abi@452: You do seem to be doing something right there! (And he still picked up the initial phrase from "society"; but at least he heard what he'd said and found it questionable.)

I wonder whether the artist behind the Funky NoKo particle in PNH's list was aware that making fascists dance has a long history.

Here is a British clip from the early 40s in which Nazi propaganda footage (mostly from "Triumph des Willens") is set to the popular dance tune "the Lambeth Walk", for the purpose of mocking fascist high seriousness.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYJ5F8ctyus&feature=related

Stefan @426 and Paul @427, yeah, when I first heard of Four Kings, having seen Three Kings when it was in the theaters, I immediately ran to the IMBD to see if there was a movie called Two Kings, and there was. As well as any number of movies called King. No "Five Kings", though. (It could be about someone who cheats at poker.)

Patrick's sidebar item about NDM1 antibiotic resistance ... It's absolutely 100% genuine, not an over-sensationalized journalist but a clinical epidemiologist delivering the news, and it's very scary indeed.

(This is especially on my mind right now, because my mother has (a) a persistent leg ulcer, (b) is MRSA-positive, and (c) lives in the UK in a city with a significant population travel to and from India and Pakistan, i.e. she's about as exposed to it as it's possible to be without having a target pasted on her forehead.)