marietheran

[marietheran]

if you read in a frog paper “specimen was released in the field immediately after capture” chances are very good that what it actually means is

“i dropped the damn frog and despite the fact that we fell all over each other no one could recapture it”

[marietheran]

I can deal with it, but actually caring what people whose opinion on most things I really don't trust think of me is one of my biggest... not faults, but... problems, maybe?

[marietheran]

...So! There are at least two people on tumblr who hate me with absolute loathing 🙃

[marietheran]

How do we categorise or classify things, thereby imagining them as one thing and not another? Unlike French or German, gender does not provide categories in Chinese, which groups things by something else entirely: shape.

Tiáo 条 is one of at least 140 classifiers and measure words in the Chinese language. It’s a measure word for long-narrow-shape things. For example, bed sheets, fish, ships, bars of soap, cartons of cigarettes, avenues, trousers, dragons, rivers.

These measure words embrace the ways in which shape imprints itself upon us, while playfully noticing the relationships between all things. The measure word kē 颗 (kernel) is used for small, roundish things, or objects that appear small: pearls, teeth, bullets and seeds, as well as distant stars and satellites.

Gēn 根, for thin-slender objects, will appear before needles, bananas, fried chicken legs, lollipops, chopsticks, guitar strings and matches, among a thousand other things. “Flower-like” objects gather under the word duo 朵: bunches of flowers, clouds, mushrooms and ears.

It’s endlessly fascinating to me how we attempt to group anything or anyone together, and how formations change. Philosopher Wang Lianqing charts how tiáo was first applied to objects we can pick up by hand (belts, branches, string) and then expanded outward (streets, rivers, mountain ranges).

And finally tiáo extended metaphorically. News and events are also classified with tiáo, perhaps because news was written in long vertical lines, and events, as the 7th-century scholar Yan Shigu wrote, arrive in lists “one by one, as (arranging) long-shaped twigs”.

Onwards the idea broadened, so that an idea or opinion is also ��long-shaped news,” and in the 14th century, tiáo was used for spirit, which was imagined as straight, high and lofty. In language, another geometry is at work, gathering recurrences through time and space.

Madeleine Thien

[marietheran]

Aegon VI and Rhaenys Targaryen, children of Elia and Rhaegar ☀️🐉

My commission by the wonderful and talented @shripscapi thank you so much!

[marietheran]

@eri-pl, this is making me think of a certain pair of brothers...

The Trap

___

PATREON // SHOP // YouTube // Instagram

[marietheran]

Norman Hartnell gowns for Queen Elizabeth II

1. Wedding gown, 1947 2. Evening gown ca. 1956 for a speech in Lagos, Nigeria. Neckline similar to African necklaces 3. Evening gown 1957 for a dinner in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia 4. Evening gown, 1957 5. Evening gown for a State Visit to The Netherlands in 1958 6.  Evening gown 1965 for a visit to Ethiopia: one of the colors of the flag of Ethiopia 7. Evening gown 1967 for a visit to Canada: note the maple leaves 8. Evening gown 1967 9. Evening gown 1973

[marietheran]

Vintage card - HMS Victoria, early 20th century

Source

Just wanted to share this with you

[marietheran]

my partner is only 40 but nestled within him is the soul of an elderly man

[marietheran]

italian academia. it's like dark academia, except the the walls of your school building have long cracks running all the way down to the floor because they haven't been fixed since the irregular construction boom of the 80s, one of the ceiling lamps creaks and flickers ominously, you drink espressos from the machine, and the most common crime is not murder but driving down the corridors in a scooter

[marietheran]

Were the ‘legendary’ names of ancient Greece common among the population of the time? Ie: were there people named Hercules, Icarus, Midas, Narcissus, Odysseus, etc getting around?

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The short answer to your question is that, yes, there would have been real people with the names of heroes and gods, but no, they were not common.

The long answer is that Ancient Greek naming conventions are a complex and fascinating topic. On the one hand, there are no surviving sources that explain to us how or why the Greeks came up with names for their children. Ancient authors do not seem to have found this topic interesting enough to write about. On the other hand, Greek names form a tremendously large body of evidence - the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names claims to have published as many as 215,000 so far - and the fact that most names are composed of words with a direct meaning in Greek means that they present a unique window into the social world of Ancient Greece. Because of their components and their meaning, names can often tell us about people’s place of origin, family ties, social status, cult practices, looks, and so on.

With the exception of some restrictions on the naming of slaves, there do not seem to have been any particular rules about what people could and could not be named. We might expect, for instance, that it was frowned upon to give your child the literal name of a god or goddess, but there’s no evidence that the Greeks actually found it taboo. Admittedly the names of divinities, while becoming more popular after the 1st century AD, are rare enough in the Classical period (5th-4th centuries BC) that individual known cases have been extensively discussed by scholars. However, they are not altogether absent. There certainly were people named Artemis and Leto. This shows that there were no hard limitations to what a child could be named, but only conventions by which most names were chosen. The only names that genuinely don’t seem to have been used at all were those of underworld gods (Persephone, Hades).

So what were the conventions they stuck to? One of the most powerful factors, especially among elite families, was the names of ancestors; some sons were named directly after their fathers (such as Perikles, son of the famous Perikles), while others were named after their grandfathers (like Kleisthenes, father of democracy, grandson of Kleisthenes the tyrant of Sikyon). Modern scholars are on pretty firm ground when they assume that people with similar names are related; often a name would “run” in just one family, sometimes for centuries. A related strong influence was the desire to express social status (again especially among the rich), which meant that many wealthy people would have names that contained words like aristo- (the best), -archos (leader), and especially mutations of the word hippos (horse). The latter is often regarded as a firm indicator of high status, since only the richest men in Greece would be able to afford to own horses, and horse-riding was the favourite pursuit of the leisure class. Famous examples include Perikles’ father Xanthippos (“yellow horse”), the physician Hippokrates (“horse power”), and Philippos II of Macedon (“horse lover”).

If there were no particular traditions binding new parents, they would be able to choose a name they liked. Endless possibilities are known. Particularly striking to us, though not necessarily the most common, are male and female names that contain a direct reference to warfare - Kallimachos (“beautiful battle”), Archestrate (“army-leader”), Nikomachos (“victory in battle”), Andromache (“battle of men”), Deinomache (“terrible in battle”). Other names are more straightforward, like Leon (“lion”), Kephalon (“head”) or Melissa (“honey”). People were named after cities, mountains, and, very commonly, rivers; Aristotle complains about rare and ridiculous names like Hermokaikoxanthos, a pile-up of the names of 3 rivers. Generally, words like kalos (beauty), stratos (army), agora (marketplace), demos/damos (people), -anax (king) and old values like bia (strength) and kratos (power) occur often in what we might call “posh” Greek names. Names ending in -kles (Perikles, Themistokles, Damokles) refer to kleos (glory). The combinations of these words don’t always make sense; what sort of a name is Isagoras (“equal marketplace”) or Iphikrates (“strong strength”)?

Interestingly, while the actual outright names of gods are extremely rare, by far the most common type of name in Ancient Greece was actually the indirect reference to a god or goddess. There were 2 ways to do this. First, the name of a god could be easily adapted into an adjective form, so as to become a name derived from a god rather than the god’s name itself. Some of the most common were adaptations of Apollo (for example into Apollonios), Dionysos (Dionysios), Artemis (Artemisia) or Demeter (Demetrios); the latter is still in common use now, in its vowel-shifted form of Dimitri. One of the most famous examples of such a godlike name is Alexander the Great’s companion Hephaistion (from Hephaistos). The second way to adapt divine names was to add words to them - most commonly kleos (glory),-doros or -dotos (gift, given). So we have authors like Diodoros (“god-given” - the reference is to Zeus), Apollodoros, Asklepiodotos; in the Roman era, when Eastern gods made their way into Greek lands, new names like Isidoros (gift of Isis) crop up. While it has proved impossible to say with categorical certainty that names are an indication of which gods were being worshipped in a given place, regional patterns are very clear in the evidence, and names derived from gods are at least a clear indication of which divinities were considered important. Perhaps the most touching are the few cases when parents who consulted the oracle on matters related to childbirth would name their child after the god who had advised them or after the place of the oracle.

Given all these factors and trends, it’s perhaps easy to understand why the literal names of heroes were not commonly used as names, even if there were no strict rules or moral taboos against them. There wouldn’t have been any family tradition to do so; there was no social credit in making pretentious references; since mythological figures were not always the recipients of cults, they wouldn’t often have been credited for advice or protection in childbirth. It’s possible that their names would have been regarded as old-fashioned or an ill omen, given the fates of most of them. According to the searchable part of the Lexicon, Ikaros is attested just 20 times; Narkissos a more respectable 74 times. I can’t find a single person named Odysseus. Only the hero Iason has a famous “real-life” counterpart in the 4th-century Thessalian tyrant Iason of Pherai.

Source for most of this: R. Parker, ‘Theophoric names and the history of Greek religion’, in S. Hornblower/E. Matthews (eds.) Greek Personal Names: Their Value as Evidence (2000), 53-79

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/73epkn/were_the_legendary_names_of_ancient_greece_common/dnpyyh1/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

[marietheran]

melody

the pitch of the barn roof, the red brick windowframe

in city height or low-browed field, the sky's the same

I couldn't count on me, to set me free

I had to bid farewell the shining sea, the forests for a single tree

the swell of a bruise, of a storm-cloud black against the setting sun

made the scarlet streets look empty, made a stranger of everyone

I had to follow a song, though silence lasted long

and wait for silver dawn, through shadows shaped all wrong

the pitch of my voice and tears, the quiet hope's refrain

in conversations lost to the lowland hush, the answer was your name.

[marietheran]

“all the walls, all the skies, all the faces were gray for the colors would fade though she begged them to stay she was high in the wind with her back to a door she was waiting, without anything to wait for only that isn’t true, it can never be true because hope remains hope even when it’s shot through with the wild and lonely, the drear edge of fear– we are never so brave as we are when we’re here in the gray, and the wind, and with icicle lines of the tears on our cheeks, like a map undefined by anything other than what took our hearts, dared to build them with love and then take them apart do you think it gets easier, when we live on? do you think we’ll find peace, when we’re finally gone? I can only remind you that peace has a price, but that virtues stay virtues when pinned down by vice you are here, you are begging, you still know to pray and that faith that feels lonely will save you one day you are her, with your icicle tears and your door never closed very tightly, because you want more the more is the hope and the faith that you hold and the gray is the sorrow that love turns to gold.”

—

and though you will not wait for me, I’ll wait for you

@itspileofgoodthings

[marietheran]

January Morning - St. Petersburg by  Ed Gordeev

[marietheran]

a mother warning a child that fire burns

list of mundane things that feel like ancient human rituals

cleaning or wipe your bare feet

breaking off a piece of bread and handing it to someone

putting the weight of a basket on your hip or head

eating nuts or berries while hunched over close to the ground

seeing something startling just out of your line of sight and very quickly stepping or leaping on to a larger object to get a better view

cupping your hands into running water to wash your face

the unanimous protection of a baby or child in a public space where women are present

when an elderly woman laughs and grips your forearm tightly

[marietheran]

Katara in Inuit inspired clothing! I wanted to take inspiration from the references I looked at while still making it fit into the ATLA universe 💕

[marietheran]

“Remember me“

Ursa and little Zuko