I find different languages layer themselves in my head, rather than dividing themselves into English/Not-English. The reason I know this is because, invariably, if I'm groping for a word in German and can't find it then the relevant one in French will present itself to me, while French will default to Welsh, and Welsh to English - never in the other direction.
#368: [I]t's the *Platonic ideal* that we're talking about.
We've got a Platonic ideal Wikipedia already. It's over there *points* outside the cave. However, the Internet & the contents thereof don't make a very good projection screen. (The hundreds of people jumping up and down and waving 'Hello Mum!' placards don't help, either.)
It makes a pretty damn good pub quiz crib sheet, and it's an unrivalled source of trivia, but aspiring to be a universal source of knowledge does seem rather like aspiring to be the Emperor Napoleon.
(Thank you for letting us know your Wikipedia username, by the way. For disclosure purposes, I'm User:Eithin.)
Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it. - DH Lawrence.
Or (as paraphrased rather later by Neil Gaiman) Never trust the storyteller - only trust the story.
From #283, I recall that Sandman line as "Nobody clever be's cardboard boxes." A couple of people online have that same phrasing as a sig quote -- unfortunately, I don't have a copy of the collection handy to check it.
Season of Mists, Ch. 6, p. 21.
Shivering Jemmy of the Shallow Brigade:
Hmmph. We is always more fun than the order people. Cardboard boxes! Nobody clever be's cardboard boxes.
Dream: So: I take it that I have incurred the wrath of Chaos, from now until the end of time. "From the Shivering Brigade to the Laughing Dancers."
Earlier (Dream's internal narrative) - "I watch the Lord of Order, his form that of Order manifest: an empty receptacle."
Oh, dear. That sounds like a quilt from the razorwire-wreathed copper-canopied halberd-held bed of Great Klono himself.
And I thought I was spoilt for choice in comparison, coming from the sleepy sheep-strewn hills and hollows of Wales to here, but there at least we had corner shops for food.
And I freely admit, I don't like the idea of a culture that will produce a drive-through espresso stand. Even if I'm now consumed with curiosity... do US cars come pre-fitted with really small cupholders?
Jacob Davies, at #44, writes about unlivable modern burbclaves with no sidewalks and no local shops and no nothing except giant, energy-inefficient houses and loathesome lawns plastered over a totally inappropriate landscape. I suppose this is a European perspective shift - up till then in the thread I was thinking about suburbs in terms of where I live, in a Victorian brick terrace in East London, five minutes from the Central Line and twenty from the City, with all the amenities a dozen cultures could want.
(Except, sadly, a good English-language second-hand bookshop.)
Developing-world megacities may not be "nice" compared to Western cities, but that's a problem with known fixes - sewers, transit, building codes that are easy to apply as soon as the money is there to do it.
It sounds easy on the face of it, but I've just been reading Jerry White's London in the Nineteenth Century, which talks about the problems of London's expansion, and the combination of the rapidly exploding economy with the hideous inequalities between rich and poor.
Old London was growing as fast as the bright shiny New London, but much denser, and of course it was cheaper and quicker to build - being mostly composed of the contemporaneous equivalents of the refrigerator box and the discarded scaffold plank - and it was quite literally choking New London, with only a very few clear access roads in and out. The authorities undertook quite a lot of urban regeneration projects, but mostly with the explicit and primary aim of getting rid of all the inconvenient, unpleasant, and downright threatening poor people who lived there.
Of course, if a beautiful, modern, efficient, pleasant city is what the said authorities want, and they want it now, that's probably the best place to start, and the work can go on unhindered. Move along now. There'll be plenty of affordable housing going up in Phase Three of the project, scheduled for 2021 - design sketches are on display at your local planning office between 9 and 5 on weekdays, and you have plenty of time to leave your comments. Meanwhile, the construction industry is badly in need of skilled workers (own tools essential).
Sorry, I'm rambling now. Anyway, the point I took away from White's book is that that sort of Augustus project didn't happen all at once, and it took massive amounts of dislocation and a fair-sized death toll to make it happen at all. I'm not convinced the same model applies to developing-world cities, with good planning and humanitarian priorities, but I'm also not convinced there is a solution to the question.
I don't do Wikipedia edits, partly for the same reasons others have cited - not wanting to face edit wars or a lack of community status - and partly because I only ever go there when I'm looking something up, and I can't shift out of 'researcher' mode and into 'presenter' mode. Well, not and keep the flow of what I was doing.
If I go to look something up in an encyclopaedia, I want to find it, have a reasonable idea of its accuracy or lack thereof (and the fact that something's included in Wikipedia, or indeed isn't, is usually a good piece of metadata), and take it away with me. I don't want to be told that being interested in that piece of information makes me responsible for it.
Fundamentally, I'm not interested in Wikipedia as a project, a community, a tool, or indeed anything else except metadata for the information in it. For that matter, I'm not interested in the Encyclopaedia Britannica in those ways, either, but at least they aren't trying to tell me that I've bought into their project by opening the shrinkwrap.
PJ Evans wrote at #11: My German dictionary is in one of the Magic Boxes. I doubt that the OED or Y Geiriadwr Mawr would help on this!
Now that would be a very futuristic solution!
Send No Money Now for Geiriadwr, the power drink for tomorrow's world, and expand your vocabulary with just one handy travel-size bottle a day. Nobody will ever kick sand in your face in the library again!
This is one good thing about having psychopaths and sociopaths around. They don't care nearly so much what the rest of the group thinks, and aren't doing nearly as much of the whole 'standing around waiting for the group to reach a consensus' thing. Actually, maybe it's less 'not caring' and more 'not being able to sense the uncollapsed social waveform'.
At that age - or what I'm guessing is that age, I'm not up on the grade system - I was reading juveniles by Asimov (Heinlein's came later, when I was old enough to look through second-hand bookshops on my own - until then, I was restricted to my local library and my family's collection), anything by Harry Harrison (I spent years looking for another copy of The Men from P.I.G. and R.O.B.O.T.), and anything by Monica Hughes.
I also have very fond memories of anything issued under the Dragon Books imprint - the dragons on the spine were almost as good a guarantee of quality for me as the name 'Kay Webb' inside a Puffin paperback. Speaking of which, one of the books I fell most in love with at that age was James Thurber's The Thirteen Clocks & The Wonderful O. It's a pair of funny, magical, poetic fairy tales, and for me it deserves to sit up there in the same golden-light-and-silver-bells category as Diana Wynne Jones.
I've never met anyone else who was brought up on it, though, and only ever seen three copies, two of which I own. Reassure me that others have encountered this book too?
I got the author instantly, with a relatively high level of confidence - I think I saw 'palan-tīrala' on scanning it and then the first line reinforced that for me. It wasn't one of the ones I'd memorized, but there's something unmistakable about it nevertheless.
I haven't looked at the linked page yet but the URL confirmed it for me.
#155 & #136 - 'ab' is a relic of pre-standardisation, yes. You can still see the remains of it in some surnames, eg. 'ab Owen' turned into 'Bowen' the same way as 'ap Huw' turned into 'Puw' and 'ap Hugh' into 'Pugh'.
The only one I can think of offhand that survived in both versions is 'ap/ab Rhys', which became variously Bryce or Price, and a few other spellings.
Referencing something a bit further upthread - it took me at least five minutes to get the reference in 'Dafydd Uck', until I worked out that he obviously wasn't pronouncing it right.
Cage door swinging open -
snow, one track to follow out.
There blog carried me.
Tail twitches, eyes glint -
winter's light that might have been.
Poetry scurries.
I liked the TV version of Hogfather a lot. They only cut out a few of my favourite lines, only wrecked one (and that not beyond repair), and as far as I could tell only conflated two characters, which didn't cause problems.
The sets and costuming were more or less uniformly good, though Fhfna'f yrngure obqvpr was rather rkprffviryl boivbhf at times. All that urnil oernguvat...
It did look a bit disorienting to me at times, but I put that down partly to having been brought up on the Kirby covers as a young teenager, and subconsciously not associating anything Discworldish with real or even realistic people and scenery.
And from the never-to-be-sufficiently-praised Les Barker, we have The Hard Cheese of Old England. I've been known to sing this at parties.
It's a still, soft evening in East London, with a gentle lavender-sepia sky settling in for the night, and a few green leaves still on the pollarded trees lining my road.
Best of wishes to all of you, and to everyone you care about.
That would be the 1897-pattern weasel-stick, with the birchwood grip and two-pronged fork, affectionately referred to as "Susie Dean" by the men, rather than the all-aluminium 1912-pattern weasel-stick with the two long tines and one shorter one ("Jennie with the limp") which was worn at the lower back on route marches rather than on the head. The "Jennie" weasel-stick eventually proved to be unacceptably flimsy, and was withdrawn after the 12th Wiltshire Rangers (the "Mustelmen", who wore green turbans to denote their long service in the Middle East) were wiped out almost to the man at Ypres when their own weasels, maddened by the sound of German artillery, turned on them.
The definition I always used - from $random_pagan_book_I_can't_remember - was that "gorm" is the clear blue colour of a summer sky. (Am not responsible if your summer skies are not gormful, or indeed not blue. Your Climate May Vary.) Looking at it in actual detail, it's an Old Irish colour covering deep blue, cerulean, green, and somehow or other black and fiery red. (Opposed on one hand to glas, which is grass-colours (glaswellt, or glaswair, is Welsh for "grass" - modern Welsh uses 'glas' exclusively for "blue") and on the other to uaine, which is, er, the other kind of blues and greens.)
On the other hand, checking the only dictionary I have readily available (Webster, 1913) says that gorm is axle grease, from the Icelandic "gormr", ooze or mud.
It's also a verb, "to daub with anything sticky".
There's also a Gorm, dubiously called "the Old" (authority for the nickname is disputed - perhaps they called him "Gorm the Greasy" instead) who was King of Denmark in the tenth century CE, the father of Harald Bluetooth and "first King of the Vikings".
I'm sure that Gorm often took the opportunity for a nourishing, if oozy, bowl of grey-green (greasy) soup in between viking. Which is presumably why Harald's teeth turned out gormfully blue - unless one takes a less Lamarckian view and assumes he just gormed them.
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