#can’t speak for the book in s&s discourse because I never finished it but like. 1995 and 2008 both had lovely endings

[whenthegoldrays]

I don’t know what it is about the Jane Austen adaptations I’ve seen recently, but they just have so much trouble sticking the landing.

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 54: How linguists figure out the grammar of a language

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 54: How linguists figure out the grammar of a language. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 54 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today we’re getting enthusiastic about how grammars come into existence. But first, we are doing a liveshow in April. We will be doing a liveshow recording on the internet so that we can all be in the same place at the same time on Saturday the 24th of April, Eastern Daylight Savings Time in North America, which will be early on a Sunday morning for us here Australia.

Gretchen: That’ll be 6:00 p.m. for me on Eastern Daylight Time. We will include a link to a time zone converter so you can figure out when that is for you.

Lauren: We’ll be doing the whole show about backchanneling, which is all those ways that you –

Gretchen: Mm-hmm.

Lauren: – actively listen to someone as they’re talking. Thank you for that excellent backchanneling, Gretchen. Something I think a lot about in our era of lots of video calls and online chats.

Gretchen: You can’t see me, but I’m doing a thumbs up right now.

Lauren: Excellent backchanneling.

Gretchen: These are some kinds of backchanneling. We’re gonna be talking about lots more. I think it’s fun to do a liveshow about backchanneling because it means that you get to backchannel in the chat while the show’s going on and chat with each other. That’ll be fun. We’re running the ticketing of the show through Patreon. If you’re a patron, you’ll automatically get a link to the liveshow to join. If you’d like to become a patron, you can also do that to get access to the liveshow stream.

Lauren: Patrons also get access to our recent bonus episode on reduplication as well as 48 other bonus episodes because we have almost 50 now.

Gretchen: That’s a lot! Lots of Lingthusiasm for patrons, which helps keep the show running.

Lauren: Our liveshow is part of LingFest, while will be taking place across the last week of April, which is an online series of events about linguistics. You can find out more about LingFest at lingcomm.org/lingfest.

Gretchen: That’s “comm” with two Ms as in “communication.” Speaking of LingComm, if you’re interested in communicating linguistics to broader audiences, you can also join the LingComm conference, which is a conference for practitioners of linguistics communication such as ourselves and many other cool LingCommers to learn from each other and help produce more interesting and engaging materials for all of you.

Lauren: LingComm, the conference, is taking place online the week of April the 19th.

Gretchen: You can also go to lingcomm.org/conference to see the schedule and other details there.

Lauren: That’s “comm” with two Ms.

[Music]

Gretchen: Lauren, how many people would you say you know who have written a grammar of a language?

Lauren: Hmm, okay, well, both my PhD supervisors. I’d say half the people in the department that I current work in. I have written a grammar of a language. This is a perfectly common activity among my professional cohort. I assume it’s a thing most people do and know about, so we don’t really have to explain it for this episode at all. This is fine.

Gretchen: [Laughs] Yeah, I would say that at least several of the people that I went to grad school with – not necessarily at my university – people I knew from conferences, professors that I knew – one professor I knew had her grammar come out the same year that her baby came out, and she posted a photo of the grammar and the baby, which were about the same size, on Facebook after that happened. It was really cute.

Lauren: Grammars definitely take longer than nine months to gestate. I can definitely confirm that.

Gretchen: I have not written a grammar. So, when someone’s going about writing a grammar, what – okay, here’s a language. There isn’t a grammar written or the grammar that’s written of it is not adequate. What do I do to start?

Lauren: What you’re talking about is taking all of the amazing complexity of how humans use language and finding the rules that reoccur within a particular language and then finding a way of articulating that concisely in written form in a grammar so that, by the end, you’ve worked through most of the common features you find in this language – all of the variations and irregularities – and you’ve put that into some kind of readable book format for other people to then learn about how the grammar of this language works. That is the overarching aim of this endeavour.

Gretchen: I’ve consulted grammars in the process of doing linguistics. I have the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language sitting on my desk. When I was in grad school, I spent a lot of time consulting Valentine (2001)’s grammar of Nishnaabemwin. There are grammars that I’ve consulted. They’re 1,000 pages, 2,000 pages long. Sometimes you’ve got a really massive grammar. Sometimes you get a shorter sketch grammar. They have certain similarities in the structure and the types of things that people cover in a grammar.

Lauren: Absolutely. You tend to start, traditionally, with smaller bits and work upwards. You’re likely to find a description, if it’s a spoken language, of the sound system or, if it’s a signed language, of the hand shape and body space phonology at the beginning of the book and then work up to word-level – you probably expect if a language has adjectives, a section on adjectives, which we’ve talked about before.

Gretchen: We have talked a little bit about adjectives.

Lauren: And then if you’re look at sentence-level stuff, like asking a question, how you do that, it happens at the level of the sentence, that tends to be more towards the end. You’re going from smaller bits up to bigger bits. It really depends on the tradition. We talked about lumpers and splitters before. If you like to split things down, a grammar is great because you can have so many sub-headings. I remember reading the rules for one set of grammars where it was like, “Please do not go beyond five layers of headings,” and I was like, “That’s actually quite a challenge.”

Gretchen: Because you have your chapter level headings, and then you’re like, “Oh, okay, if this chapter’s about verbs, you’ve got this type of verbs and those type of verbs – within the transitive verbs, you’ve got this type of verbs and those type of verbs,” and so on and so forth.

Lauren: Then you’ve got the irregularities. They might need their own subset. You can go from – the table of contents, you can get this big picture and then go down and down and down into the different sections. The grammar that I wrote of Lamjung Yolmo was a sketch grammar, so it’s only a couple of hundred pages. It makes sure to knock over – it would be very weird to have nothing about nouns in a language that very obviously has nouns – but it doesn’t go into the deep level of detail on some things that a longer grammar gets to. There’s always more to be done as well.

Gretchen: Any grammar is gonna be incomplete – even these massive doorstop-sized grammars. You’re gonna leave some stuff out where you’re a speaker and you’re like, “I know this,” but you don’t necessarily include it in a grammar. I’ve also read, in grad school – I don’t remember what language it was of – but I picked up this grammar that was written in, like, I wanna say maybe the 70s or 80s. There was clearly some sort of fad for doing this very abstract schematic thing of sentences or verbs or something. It didn’t have any complete sentences or complete verbs just written there. It drew them all on this diagram that I have never encountered before or since where everything was piece-able together. I was like, “Oh, wow. You’re participating in some sort of grammatical tradition that I’m just not aware of here.”

Lauren: I mean, I think the important thing is that grammars are written by humans, and humans are trained by other humans within particular traditions. I remember when I was building my sketch grammar, it was while I was also working on my thesis because I was looking specifically at evidentials, but you can’t know what’s happening with evidentiality without understanding how verbs work and how verbs relate to other parts of the sentence. And then I realised I was accidentally on my way to writing out the bones of the grammar of Lamjung Yolmo.

Gretchen: Sometimes you just accidentally write a grammar.

Lauren: That is how I accidentally started and very deliberately finished writing that sketch grammar. But I remember talking to my supervisors. One of them found it quite unusual that I wanted to include the methodology in my grammar. I wanted to explain specifically who I’d worked with, what I’d recorded, what kinds of elicitation I’d used. That wasn’t in that supervisor’s grammar tradition, but it was something I wanted to include.

Gretchen: A lot of grammars aren’t gonna include the gestures of the language or something, which I know is one of your things that you enjoy.

Lauren: Yes. There are traditions that do focus more on narrative structure, and you might find more about the structure of narratives in a grammar, and others that focus more on verb structure. There’s a very brief few pages on phonetics and then a really massive chapter on verbs. It’s sometimes because the language has lots of really fun, complex things happening with the verbs, but sometimes it’s just because that’s what that person was interested in.

Gretchen: This person was a verb fan.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Some parts, you know, it’d be pretty hard to do a grammar without doing some level of phonology at the beginning. But, yeah, what level of pragmatic stuff at the end, discourse stuff, or like, “How do people of this language talk to children?” or something like that – that might not be in a grammar.

Lauren: I’m doing a paper with a colleague on onomatopoeia at the moment. Some grammars will have a separate section on that. Because it’s not as central to every single sentence as, say, nouns and verbs can be for a lot of languages, it doesn’t tend to crop up as its own specific subsection in a lot of grammars.

Gretchen: Which doesn’t necessarily mean that language doesn’t have onomatopoeia. It’s just that it didn’t get the focused attention that got put there.

Lauren: This is always the question that you have while reading a grammar, right. It’s about what makes it in, but it’s also what doesn’t. Sometimes things don’t make it in because of trends or because of what people are focusing on or sometimes just because they’re important but incredibly low-frequency things that happen. Or if someone is doing fieldwork, and they come into a community as a man, they might spend a lot of time around other men and recording a particular variety. That’s where the methodology was really important for me to make clear why I was making choices. Also, the title of a grammar – I find it really interesting whether people say, “The Grammar of” or “A Grammar of.” I, very consciously, called it, “A Grammar” or “A Sketch Grammar of Lamjung Yolmo” because this is just my analysis and my take. Other people might come to exactly the same data with different conclusions. Or they might be way more into adjectives than I am, and that section is way more fleshed out in someone else’s analysis.

Gretchen: That’s an interesting side effect, as you were saying about, okay, well, if we wanna look at onomatopoeia in a bunch of languages, or if you wanna look at any sort of thing whether it’s verbs or sounds or handshapes or something in a bunch of different languages, okay, how can – if you’re making those beautiful graphs like are in the WALS database, which we’ve mentioned before, or if you’re gonna write a Wikipedia article about like, “Here’s how this language works,” or “Here’s how this phenomenon works,” the grammars turn into this input material of what gets cited there.

Lauren: Those big overviews are often built up from these grammars of different languages. That’s where having structures that are easy for people to access in the table of contents becomes really easy because, just as a human writing the grammar, there’s another human reading that grammar to put into those databases.

Gretchen: Dictionaries are often a very collaborative project where you have a bunch of people contributing words or contributing entries. You can say, “Okay, you need to take care of the letter P and see what’s going on here.” But a grammar is often written by one person, and so it reflects that one person.

Lauren: Almost, like the very overwhelming majority of the time, it’s people who aren’t members of that community. It’s a linguist who’s trained as a linguist and then come into this community and often built incredibly long-term, deep relationships with those communities and speak the language but not always. I know I’m kind of – it’s very easy to over-problematise something you do and spend a lot of time thinking about but, again, it’s worth remembering while reading a grammar.

Gretchen: Right. And what types of things you think are interesting, what types of things you think are novel or worth drawing attention to, or what types of things you think are common is a function of what you’ve been exposed to from a grammatical tradition. I’ve been thinking a lot about this question of “What do we put in a grammar” and “How is a grammar constructed by the societal context in which it’s written” because I’ve been reading this book called, Grammar West to East, by Edward McDonald. The subtitle is “The Investigation of Linguistic Meaning in European and Chinese Traditions.”

Lauren: Cool.

Gretchen: I will say, at the beginning, this is an academic book. It is a monograph. If you don’t have a background in linguistics, you’ll find it fairly dense going, potentially. But, as someone who does, it’s really interesting.

Lauren: Awesome! Pick out the anecdotes for us.

Gretchen: One of the first observations that it makes – and, when you think about this, it’s totally true – is that – so the European grammatical tradition is based on Latin and Greek. Latin and Greek are languages where you do a lot of changing the endings on words – sometimes the prefixes, but often the endings – on words to make them do grammatical things. The European grammatical tradition is a lot about making tables of all of the different ways that a word can inflect and being like, “Well, it does this and it does this,” and giving names to the different sorts of groupings and patterns that you find out of that.

Lauren: Which is great, but doing those things, it makes it a little bit confusing sometimes when you apply it to a language like English that doesn’t have the same ending changes, but we give them the same labels. That’s because the analysis of English is very much in that Latin tradition.

Gretchen: It’s inherited from the Latin tradition. There’s a pedagogical motivation for some of this because Latin and Greek were not just the languages that started out analysing themselves, although they were that as well, but they were also considered prestigious languages that you needed to learn. So, a lot of the grammatical analysis of Greek and especially Latin were in terms of how to teach them to speakers of other European languages. And it’s like, “Here’s a bunch of endings, and you need to learn them, and you need to learn what they correspond to and what their function is.”

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: What’s interesting is that the grammar of Chinese is different from that. They don’t do endings. What they do instead is you have things that have a grammatical function, but they’re considered to have the same status as full words. And so, the Chinese grammatical tradition is concerned with looking at those particles that have grammatical functions but are hard to write definitions of and cataloguing them and figuring out what’s going on with them and grouping them into groups. There are some words in the European tradition that are invariant – they’re often all lumped together in “adjectives” – words like “often,” or “always,” or something like that, which are – they just look like that all the time. They don’t have endings like the verbs and the nouns do. The Latin tradition grammarians didn’t care about those words, and they were really into the endings. The Chinese grammarians were really interested in, first of all, this fundamental duality between words that had a meaning to them, had what they called, “full words,” and words that were only for their grammatical function, what they called, “empty words.”

Lauren: That is a great metaphor. I like it.

Gretchen: Also, because culturally they were really interested in dualities, you know, the sun and the moon, and the full words and the empty words, and having a nice, mirrored duality was really appealing to them for aesthetic reasons in the same way that the European grammatical tradition is often descended from the rhetorical tradition because they were really interested in the aesthetics of rhetoric when it came to doing that sort of analysis. What your culture’s into aesthetically brings forth, okay, what are we trying to explain this. So, both of these are sort of ancient history, you know. Around 2,000 years ago they were the beginnings of this doing their own analysis grammatical traditions. You get this really interesting descriptive grammar that was published in 1898 by China’s first grammarian, Ma Jianzhong, called, Mr Ma’s Compleat Grammar, which I think is great.

Lauren: That is an excellent late-1800s name of a book.

Gretchen: It is exactly of a particular era. It’s “compleat,” E-A-T, not E-T-E, which is just –

Lauren: Perfect.

Gretchen: He was a native speaker of Chinese who had also been educated by Jesuits in French, and so he had exposure to both the French and the Chinese grammatical traditions. He writes this grammar where he distinguishes between full and empty words the way that the Chinese had – introduced these particles to be these “empty words” – but he also further subdivides the full words into the lexical categories that Europeans had been doing, which are verbs and nouns and so on. This distinction between verbs and nouns and so on was really important to the Europeans because verbs and nouns have different types of endings. You know whether something’s a verb or a noun because the endings are all different because this is a really endings-based grammatical system. The modern linguistic conception of how languages and their structures work is, to a certain extent, a hybrid of that because these full and empty grammatical categories is now reflected in what linguists call, “content words” and “function words.”

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: You have words like, “dog,” and “cat,” and “run,” and “see,” and stuff like that where you can actually write a definition, and then you have your grammatical words like “of,” and “is,” and “to,” and stuff, which just have this grammatical function. So, this category that’s still really relevant in modern linguistics is there in one country’s grammatical tradition, but also modern linguistics does also still talk about “nouns” and “verbs.”

Lauren: Absolutely.

Gretchen: The history of the contact between these two grammatical traditions and how they figured out how to adapt things to each other is an interesting way of looking at what is it that we think of as important when we’re trying to write a grammar of a particular language or we’re trying to do grammar. A lot of ancient grammar traditions were really concerned with describing one very prestigious, golden-age language – or one or two – you’ve gotta write your grammar of Latin or of Greek or of Old Chinese because that’s the one everyone thinks is fancy. And the local vernacular that ordinary peoples talk, like, no, no one’s gonna write a grammar of that. It’s a very interesting way of thinking about, okay, what were people concerned about and how did those interests derive from the structure of the language or languages that they were familiar with.

Lauren: This book sounds so great, but I wonder if actually the title of it should be, “Grammars from East to West,” because if we look where our modern tradition of writing grammars in Europe is, it’s very much motivated by those Latin grammars and grammarians of old, but it’s also very influenced by Paṇini and the Sanskrit grammarian tradition that is two-and-a-half, three thousand years old as well.

Gretchen: One of the things that I was thinking about reading this, being like, “Wow!” – I knew some of the stuff about the European tradition, not all of it, but I didn’t know most of the stuff about ancient China – thinking, “I know that there was a really interesting grammatical tradition going on in India, like, right between these two major geographical regions.” There’s a bunch of stuff going on in Arabic as well, at a slightly later time. Can I have a book that writes about all four of these, please, in comparison to each other?

Lauren: Yeah. I know very little about the Arabic tradition. Most linguists at least know the name “Paṇini” That first N has a little dot under it in English, so it has a kind of palatalised vibe, but it also means his name is great. I know more than one university that has the “Paṇini Café and Sandwich Shop” because that’s a great multilingual pun to use.

Gretchen: Who can resist a pun? I learned a bit about the Arabic grammatical tradition when I was taking a bit of Arabic in undergrad. There are a whole bunch of things that that grammatical tradition does also in the tradition of “We’re going to look at our language and catalogue it in exhaustive detail and figure out exactly what’s going on in it.” One of the things that I remember was that there’s an exhaustive catalysation of what they call the “binyan,” which are the templates that you can slot your three-consonant roots into, and how you put the vowels in between them that mean all of these different things.

Lauren: Because Arabic is very interested in what happens in shifting the vowels of the language rather than what happens at the end of a word like the Latin tradition.

Gretchen: It’s very relevant in Arabic all of the different things you can do with the vowels in between them and whether, maybe, you double a consonant in a particular context or you put this vowel here or that vowel there. The classic tri-consonantal root that everybody cites is K-T-B, /k/-/t/-/b/, which has to do with books and writing. “Kitab” is “a book,” and “kutub” is “books,” and “maktab is “office,” and “kataba” is “He writes.” You can do all sorts of things with those three consonants and how you arrange the vowels between them. There’s an abstract way of representing “Here’s what the patterns are” with a template verb that you can show all the patterns with and going through and exhaustively cataloguing the patterns. This is the exciting thing to do if you’re an ancient Arabic grammarian. I’m excited by just thinking about it. But that’s very much influenced by the structure of the language. I don’t know as much about what Paṇini was doing except for the fact that he gets cited in a lot of Intro Linguistics classes as the first grammarian.

Lauren: Part of why he gets cited a lot is because he’s excellent. I’ll talk about that. I think part of why as well is that Paṇini synthesized and brought together everything that had been happening in the Sanskrit grammar tradition. Sanskrit is kind of like the Indian linguistic area equivalent of Latin, which is that it was the language of sacred texts and religion. It’s a language that is still handed down. People still learn Sanskrit in the way they learn Latin. But in that area, languages like Hindi and Nepali, the Indo-Aryan languages, are all later siblings and children of Sanskrit. It’s a very convenient analogy to Latin to draw with Sanskrit. I think, also, the motivation for thinking a lot about the language came from a theological attempt within Hinduism to understand truth through language and understand how language works. It was one of the core areas of study within the larger religious tradition. So, that was the motivation. But Paṇini – we know his name. We know not too much else about him except that he wrote at least two-and-a-half thousand years ago. He synthesized this work, and he name drops ten other people whose work he draws on. We’ve lost the record of all of their work. I think he’s excellent. That’s not in dispute. But it’s also just a convenient prominence he receives through being the kind of earliest record we have when the work was going on for thousands of years behand.

Gretchen: The person whose manuscript survives with his name attached to it.

Lauren: Absolutely. A very convenient way to appear to be very excellent is just to have none of the foundational work you draw on exist still.

Gretchen: No. This is like the Library of Alexandria all over again.

Lauren: What made Paṇini’s approach really distinct – and distinct from what was happening with those learner-driven motivations for analysing Latin – is that there was a logical progress to how he set out his description of Sanskrit. Similar to what we talked about with modern grammars where you start with the base elements of the sound system and then build up to words and parts of words. If something goes on a word after another bit, so you’ll describe the earlier bits first and build outwards. It’s this logical order and progression.

Gretchen: In a very real sense, the order that Paṇini devised over 2,500 years ago is reflected in the order of the grammar that you wrote a few years ago?

Lauren: It’s absolutely not an accident. The early 20th Century linguists like Saussure, Franz Bopp, where directly reading Paṇini and going, “This guy was doing this stuff thousands of years before we started thinking about it” and were directly influenced by Paṇini’s approach to thinking about how the language worked and thinking about it very descriptively. This is why he’s known as the first grammarian within even the Western tradition because he was like, “Look, there’s these words and they have these histories, but actually, the important thing is that we think about how the words are being used by people now.” The funny thing is he wrote that about what we now think of as Classic Sanskrit. People have not moved on from thinking about Classical Sanskrit in that way, and it’s become a learning tool, but –

Gretchen: We should all just be speaking Classical Sanskrit.

Lauren: The motivation is exactly the same motivation we use in a descriptive grammar now. It’s not about setting out the rules of a language and how it has to work, it reflects how a linguist has analysed that people are using that system.

Gretchen: I think that’s one of the things that comes up when we talk about a grammar is, particularly because grammar in the Western tradition is associated with Latin, and, okay, you’re learning about the grammar of English only so that you can translation Latin into English better rather than learning about the grammar of English as an object of its own study. This translates into, “Okay, well, what if we made the grammar of English more like Latin because that would obviously be better.” That’s where this secondary meaning of “grammar” as, you know, “Thou shalt not split an infinitive,” does – because in Latin an infinitive is all just one word. You can’t split it. It’s just one word.

Lauren: You can’t split it.

Gretchen: This idea that grammar is a tool to beat people over the head with comes from this, “Well, you’ve got to learn this language in school because this is how you’re gonna access all these classical texts that you are supposed to access, and you need to do it a certain way because it’s dead now, and it’s not evolving, and so you’re just learning to do this very particular thing,” that’s where this additional connotation of grammar as a stick to beat people over the head with comes in.

Lauren: That’s that very Latin tradition that we still have.

Gretchen: And it’s not only English that had a grammar as a tool to stay in touch with a lost golden age. This is also what they were doing in ancient Chinese of like, here’s this older thing. One of the other interesting things that I learned about the Chinese grammatical tradition, in particular with the writing system – because the writing system in Chinese can obscure different pronunciations – you could have a poem that you could still read in the written sense that’s very old but, for a modern reader, it doesn’t necessarily rhyme. At a certain point, when they were doing more historical linguistics, they realised, “Oh, this poem actually rhymed back in the day.” The pronunciation has changed so much that we weren’t really thinking about it because the characters look the same, but it actually used to rhyme, which sometimes shows up when you’re reading Shakespeare or something, and it’s got “thrown” and “drown” or something. Like, “Wait, those probably were supposed to rhyme based on where they are in this poem.” You can use that to reconstruct what was going on.

Lauren: It can feel a bit anxiety-provoking about committing an analysis to paper because you are pinning a butterfly for a moment in time. People are still speaking the language, and it moves on. As long as you don’t think of the descriptive grammar as anything more canonical and authoritative than people’s actual intuitions, that’s an important thing to remember. Especially if you’re working with a grammar that’s more than a few generations old, it may be that the person didn’t quite capture what people were doing. It may be that the language has changed again.

Gretchen: Another thing that I found really interesting about “What are the ideas that people were thinking about at the time” – so this is from Grammar West to East again. The author points out that when Chinese characters first became known in Europe, it was late 16th Century and, in Europe, for unrelated reasons, the idea of a universal language was the hot philosophical topic. You had people like John Wilkins, who ultimately created Roget’s Thesaurus, but he was really just trying to make a universal taxonomy for understanding the world, he ended up making quite a nice thesaurus but not with making a universal way of understanding the world. What was actually going on in China at the time was that Classical Chinese was a scholarly and diplomatic lingua franca of the East Asian region. It was acquired as a learned language in the different parts of those regions. The Chinese words were given a local pronunciation. So, children in different parts of China would learn to read using a literary register of the local dialect, and there wasn’t the idea of a standard spoken language for the whole country. That’s a modern innovation. This is a situation that was a lot like Latin in Europe at the time. But Europe, you know, “Oh, you learn Latin in school so that you can do the literary thing.” But European scholars misunderstood the situation and thought that this meant that Chinese characters were interpretable by speakers of any language without them being based on one language, even though they were very much based on an ancestral language of the region.

Lauren: Oh dear. And their obsession with universality that they came to this very functional but still based on a language thing. Oh dear. I see exactly where this is going. That’s not good.

Gretchen: Also, they did the same thing with the Egyptian hieroglyphs, which had not yet been deciphered yet. They were like, “Guys, we found it! We found the universal language of ideas, and it’s not tied to a particular language!”

Lauren: Not translated adds an extra air of mystery.

Gretchen: European scholars thought this was great. Francis Bacon thought this was amazing. It’s interesting to see not just, okay, here’s this thing that was going on in China at the time, which is interesting, but also, here’s how these things get reflected and refracted, whether that’s the Europeans approaching Chinese grammar as maybe this is a thing that’s universal or this Chinese grammarian, Mr Ma, looking at it and saying, “Okay, how can I merge these two grammatical traditions of the full words versus the empty words?”, and then also “What if I have nouns and adjectives and stuff?”, and “How could I group them in ways that make sense for the grammar of the language?” Everyone’s bringing their own preconceived notions to this space.

Lauren: I think the descriptive grammar has really figured itself out as a genre in the 20th Century. A lot of the discussion around how to make sure people aren’t just bringing themselves to it has been to widen the scope of what gets included. One really big influence has been the idea that you need to have the grammar, but it has to be presented alongside the wordlists because the grammar just tells you the rules not which words go in which places and also a collection of texts that are broken down and translated so that people can access what’s happening in narratives. That solves a little bit of that what gets included problem.

Gretchen: Because somebody could always go back and look at the text again and say, “Well, what if I interpreted them differently or wrote this grammar differently based on what I can see here in this longer thing?”

Lauren: Yeah. “The author didn’t get around to a section on the use of particles in narratives, but there’s enough texts here I can see what’s happening.” This little trio of publications is sometimes known as the “Boasian trinity,” which sounds a little bit more pompous and religious than it actually is, but it’s part of this expanding what gets included.

Gretchen: This is after Boas, whose first name I have forgotten.

Lauren: Franz Boas.

Gretchen: Franz? Franz Boas. He was one of the early grammarians in this descriptive and comparative tradition where it’s not just, okay, every intellectual in this one country or this one society is devoting themselves to this one language but, “Oh, what if we looked at lots of languages? What if we compared them?” This goes along with the colonial project of like, “What if we went and conquered some people?”

Lauren: Yes, there’s a lot of scientific rationalism happening here.

Gretchen: This is not entirely unproblematic either. It is interesting how the forms of the grammars start shifting when it stops being this sort of seeking this one language of like, “Oh, everything descends from Greek” or “Everything descends from Sanskrit.” Even the Europeans, at a certain point, when they encountered Sanskrit, were like, “Oh, everything must descend from Sanskrit,” and said, “Okay, well, what if we realised that we can’t actually know what the first language was? This is lost in the midst of time,” and figured out “What can we know about relationships and what is the possibility space for what are different things that languages do?”

Lauren: I mean, I think it’s also worth pointing out a lot of 20th Century language description has happened to try and translate religious texts and political documents and that is a subset of problematic colonisation within the grammatical tradition.

Gretchen: The longest text that’s been written down in a lot of languages is the Bible, which has all sorts of really weird consequences when you start using those parallel texts as the input for something like machine translation because you can have machine translation systems start spitting out things that sound like religious prophecies because they’re just regurgitation versions of that Bible input, which is pretty weird.

Lauren: Such a weird consequence of a weird set of earlier decisions.

Gretchen: Exactly. Here was this earlier decision that maybe this was even a religious text that was created 100 years ago by some missionary, but it’s the longest text that’s available in this language, and the grammar is more or less accurate – and yet. It wasn’t trying to record the stories and the oral histories of the people who actually spoke that language that they cared about themselves, it was trying to introduce this foreign religion to them.

Lauren: Again, it’s one of those things that is hard to avoid and so it’s just important to be aware of when you’re looking at some grammars. They may have a lot of Christian religious texts. It doesn’t necessarily reflect the religion of the speakers so much as the religion of the person doing the documentation.

Gretchen: Going back to that theme of grammars that are made by people and sometimes people’s agendas for making a grammar is –

Lauren: A different endpoint.

Gretchen: It’s less about like, “Oh, I want to help this language be taught in schools and support its speakers in their own goals” and more “I wanna impose my goals on the speakers.”

Lauren: I think another important change that has happened across the 20th Century in terms of grammars is the increasing availability of recording equipment and, therefore, the ability to make recordings of the language as a fourth part of that three-part collection of what’s important when documenting a language.

Gretchen: There are some really interesting ancient recording technologies like the wax cylinders that were used –

Lauren: You say, “ancient,” but you mean, like, 150 years ago.

Gretchen: Yeah, not ancient compared to Paṇini.

Lauren: Not Paṇini ancient, just, it’s really that the story of the 20th Century descriptive tradition is the story of embracing these recording methods.

Gretchen: There was a really cool thing where they had these old, cracked wax cylinders, I think it was in the Smithsonian, and they couldn’t put them on a machine to read them because, obviously, the needle would stumble over the cracks. It’s kind of like a record.

Lauren: They just fall apart.

Gretchen: Picture it as a tall record with all the lines tall rather than a flat record. But it was cracked, so they couldn’t put it in the thing, and they eventually figured out a way with lasers to read the recordings. I got to hear, you know, here’s a song in this language that hasn’t been heard for 100 years because the cylinder cracked. If it’s online, I’ll try to find a link to it.

Lauren: With recording technology, early on, and even for some linguists, it’s mostly about doing recordings so you can go back and listen yourself and really identify that you’re correctly analysing structures. But I think the more exciting thing is that it lets you really observe more people using language in more natural ways. The “Can you say this?”, “Can you say that?”, “Does that sound grammatical?” way of eliciting stuff can lead to an unusual way of approaching the language, but really drawing on people singing songs and telling stories not only makes for a richer, more realistic grammatical description that allows you to see those fuzzier, more complicated bits of language, but it also means that you can make those recordings available for speakers who are interested in going back to an oral history of the language for people who might come in the future and go, “Ah, you didn’t look at the way people’s prosody goes up and down and their intonation changes in stories. I’m gonna look at that, and I have access to these recordings.” I think this is where grammars are more exciting as we integrate more of that richness of actual language and bringing the people who speak the language back into real prominence within the grammar document.

Gretchen: Yeah. Because there is a certain way of writing a grammar which is very old which just assumes that whatever bits you have about “Here’s how this language works,” that information just exists at this abstract level, and it’s not necessarily tied to particular speakers or particular communities, and saying, “Oh, it would be good to give credit to the speakers who were saying this, or to identify this is a particular way that a language is spoken in a particular region,” or “Here’s something that’s going on here.” There have been some initiatives to do things like pair people who are trying to revitalise their languages with linguists to try to understand what’s going on in some of these older grammars because they can be hard to decipher without the special training. The one that I’m familiar with is Breath of Life.

Lauren: There are the Paper and Talk Workshops in Australia as well where you’re coming full circle and making sure that you give people the tools that they need to access the materials about their own language because you can make grammars for many reasons, and we’ve discussed some of them but, at the end of the day, the most important reason to me is that speakers of a language can access the materials that were created for that language.

Gretchen: I think when we look at the multi-thousand-year-old history of making grammars and the very different sorts of questions that people had about language thousands of years ago, I find it very humbling because we can think about what are the questions that people might be asking in another thousand years, and how can we make things that would help with that?

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, schwa pins, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found at @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes and you wish there were more? You can get access to 49 bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and other rewards, as well as helping keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include reduplication, Q&A with a lexicographer, and a Q&A with the two of us in honour of our 100th episode. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Lauren: Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[lady-plantagenet]

What are your top ten novels about the Wars of the Roses? And why?

I think it’s obvious by the length how enthusiastic I was to answer this ask xx thank you for asking me and giving me also an opportunity to make a masterlist of some sorts of all my reviews xx. But you know? I speak like quite the expert but in reality I’ve read very little histfic about TWOTR because I just newly got back into this hobby (about a year ago) and have little time in general so tbh the last three books on this list I do not personally care for but since I’ve read so little novels of this kind they are here nonetheless hhh (so please people, give me no angry asks asking me why I am endorsing PG, I’m not).

1. The Last of the Barons by Lord Edward Lytton-Bulwer

This is quite possibly the best book I’ve ever read in my life. The gap between these books and the rest is a chasm the size of the world and I wpuld genuinely reccomend this book as an actual piece of literature to anyone, not just TWOTR fanatics. It is written in 1840, in quite old timey lingo and it centres around Richard Neville 16th Earl of Warwick, but in the true tradition of a real classic it is more than just a character drama, it astutely showcases the purpose of Warwick and what he did in the context of his wider world and doesn’t just chalk it up to personal greed. There is also this fascinating subplot about courtship, science and such. Hell, you even get this eccentric ‘natural philosopher’ guy called Adam Warner who tries to make something like a steam engine and gets employed as an alchemist by Jacquetta and Edward IV.

From a historical standpoint it is quite biased as the author himself was a politician (and an actual baron) and tbh I don’t completely agree with his interpretation of history and I can see some of the Victorian inluences slip in, but some of his takes are very refreshing and he clearly consulted the primary sources. I am much interested in his philosophy and life outlook though and while I don’t think his Warwick is the Warwick, I think he (Lytton-Bulwer) understood him like no other novelist could. As for the writing style... here’s an excerpt of a good reads review that I agree with and tells you all you need to know:

“Of course, such a style of writing no longer exists. The language used is essentially foreign to us. But the nobility, the pride of this story work their ways into your bones, your heart. You will yearn for honor once you have left it.“

Basically, go type it into google and see what I mean. You don’t even need to purchase this book it’s all online at the first click on Gutenberg.

Nevertheless, I’ve posted excerpts of it here, here and here =)

2. The King’s Grey Mare by Rosemary Hawley Jarman

This book (unlike the latter) has zero actual historical value. Actually, it sort of does in the way that it hilights certain real events that most people are unaware of when it comes to its protagonist: Elizabeth Woodville, eg the whole Cooke tapestry affair and the whole Desmond affair. Both things which I still stand on the fence about (if you don’t know what I’m talking about send em another ask or pm me). But like, it isn’t political, philosophical or such in any way like the first book, yet you still feel like you are *there* in the 15th century - by the time I finished reading it my heart was wrung dry and I kind of fell into a down for a couple of days because I just wanted to feel the magic again. If anyone would ask me I would give this 5 stars because it perfectly achieved what it set out to do (I can’t expect all books to go above and beyond like #1), it made me feel for the characters who were super complex, was accurate historically and even when it wasn’t it made sense, it got very creative with its themes (which I like to see because I am not interested in reading the exact same story over and over again) and the prose was absolutely magical and brought all the depth to this novel. I’ve read classics with less flowing and poignant prose, yes actual classics!

This book also switches POVs quite a lot (basically it headhops because it’s written in omniscient- but whatever, rules are meant to be broken), so you’ll get to see many of your faves in there, Edward IV, Margaret of Anjou and Grace Plantagenet feature quite heavily. One thing that disappointed me is that it wasn’t really Edward IV/Elizabeth Woodville (at the time I bought it for that), she never really likes him and his love for her kind of wanes towards the end. If you’re not too bothered about that then I say go buy it.

3. The Daisy and the Bear by K L Clark

I put this here because we are already going into shakier territory when it comes to this list. This is kind of the last *really* good, truly five star one. It is a long spoof about TWOTR but god it’s smart! Yet, It does not take itself seriously and has Margaret of Anjou/Warwick the Kingmaker as a crackship and centrepiece and had me in stitches the whole time. I’ve written a long detailed review for it here.

4. Death be Pardoner to Me by Dorothy Davies

This is a novel about George Duke of Clarence. Quite possibly the only novel ever written about him in existence and boy is it a trip - the author claims to have channelled him (she’s a medium). I’ve written a detailed review for it here. I read this last spring and my views have unfortunately changed, the thing is, I’ve come to find out through my research that this was quite possibly a hoax as there are some indisputable inaccuracies (Ankarette Twynyho’s age, the details of Isabel’s death - we *know* she did not die from childbirth, Isabel did not reunite with him after Tewksbury 1471, but right before Christmas 1470). It’s also quite Richardian (the author admitted) and she could have *had* me had she not chose to divulge it in the foreword. Nevertheless, I still like this book because it did get to me at certain points and it’s good quality as a novel, I remember shedding a tear at one point even which is extremely rare for me but I think that says more about my sentiment for the subject matter than the book itself.

5. We Speak no Treason by Rosemary Hawley Jarman (not yet finished, so ranking may vary)

I haven’t finished it yet, so I’ll leave it here for now. This book is a Richardian book about Richard III, but I can’t get enough of this author, I haven’t found anyone to replace her with. The prose is magnificent as usual and I must confess that I’m happy that this book is told through the POVs of three OCs and not Richard, he remains rather elusive and tbf I find the three OCs very interesting and at this point I’m more interested in their stories than anything else. Of course, Richard III is still a fairly prominent part of this novel (even when he doesn’t appear) and it has led to me getting annoyed quite a bit. Given who I am I fumed massively at that one aside that Clarence and Edward have bastards whereas Richard isn’t like that... like are you serious?? At one point the author reassociated the Games and Playes Chesse book to Richard when it was in reality dedicated to Clarence and I got even more annoyed. Leave the poor figure something ma’am? Whatever, as a book about three medieval commoners it’s fantastic and that’s what I pretend it is.

6. Wife to the Kingmaker by Sandra Wilson

Nothing more to add than what I wrote in my (super-long) detailed review on here. This is the case because I read it very recently. This is a novel about Anne Beauchamp 16th Countess of Warwick, it’s ranked higher than Sunne because though it’s less accurate it’s got panache.

7. The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon K Penman

I feel very strongly about this Richard III book and what it represents. I wrote a long detailed review about it on here and a follow-up post on the discussion is here ft my awesome mutual @beardofkamenev ‘s insights also thrown into the mix. Xx

8. The White Queen by Philippa Gregory

This is a step higher than the other two because this book pretty much changed my life. The thing is, I read it translated into my own language by an extremely talented translator and I was also only about 11/12 years old so it was all very impressive to me then. This book about Elizabeth Woodville effectively introduced me to the TWOTR; an interest that has never really left me these past ten years (though at one point (ages 14-19) it was quite wane). It’s not a good book by any standard (I was quite shocked when picking it up at a bookstore, I had found that when read in the original language it lost all its magic), but I owe a lot to it and some people who now endlessly discourse about how bad PG is need to recognise their debt of gratitude and be a bit more respectful, I think. That is of course unless you came into this era via different media, but you got to admit that a massive part of us got to this place through TWQ, though we outgrew it.

10. The Red Queen and The Kingmaker’s Daughter by Philippa Gregory

Exact same commentary as above, just objectively not good books. Flat characterisation, misunderstanding of the era, historical innacuracies which don’t add anything, lack of nuance in prose which often dances too close to *gasp* YA prose *shudders*. But these are lower because I don’t owe them a debt of gratitude as I do TWQ. Funnily enough, they are still better than the series.

[thestarkerisobvious]

    this amazing art is by @von--gelmini   aka @starker-stories inspired by the divine art of @starker-sorbet.

                                      Chapter Two:  Fifteen

3.  The Dream

But when Tony sat upon the bed Peter pulled back a little, startled by a shiver of fear.  He hadn’t noticed, up until that moment, what his friend had been wearing, and found himself unnerved at the sight.  There was nothing frightening about the shirt itself, it was ivory white, the same color as the roses (the same color as the bedcover) with billowing sleeves and a frilly collar that was currently open, exposing his pale white chest.  Peter couldn’t say why he was suddenly afraid. Only that Tony had reminded him of something just now, something that had made him very nervous…

“They all have one motion; all jointly move from east to west in twenty-four hours upon the poles of the world.  Or so the wise men said.  But the wisest of men spoke in freshmen’s suppositions -- none were so wise as Master Peter.  Lie beside me and tell me more.  Hath every sphere a dominion?  An intelligentia?”  

Peter stood, silently. This was a bad dream, only Peter couldn’t remember exactly why.  Something about the shirt that Tony was wearing.  Something about the windows in the stone wall that looked out onto the nightsky, because this castle was on a terrible precipice, and if he were to look out of those windows he’d be looking down at a sea of green tree tops with silver threads where the rivers ran through the forest… they ran across the forest… it was across the forest that was the problem, he was sure of it.

“Be brave, Peter.” Tony was whispered again.  And when Peter looked into Tony’s dark eyes, he knew that he could.

Or at least he would try.

He wasn’t sure he would succeed, but when he looked into Tony’s eyes, he also knew he couldn’t say ‘no.’

But it didn’t comfort him at all to find, as he toed off his shoes before climbing onto the bed, that he was wearing the exact same outfit as Tony; tight black pants and a billowing white shirt and a collar that was opening up, exposing his throat, his shoulder, his chest.   He was trying to remember why that was a bad thing even as Tony pulled him into strong, solid arms.  He leaned his head to rest on Tony’s shoulder, taking a deep breath, trying to stay calm.  Tony smelled of burned incense and warm earth.  He tried to be brave.

Then Anthony slipped one hand into the open collar of his shirt and Peter gasped in surprise.

“No!  This is a bad dream!  We’re in Transylvania! This is Castle Dracula, Tony look!”  He grabbed the man by shoulders in terror, his heart pounding in his chest, his head jerking around frantically, taking it all in.  Oh course… it was all so obvious.  The tall black windows.  The battlements, jagged against the sky.  The many shadows.  

“I know this dream, I’ve had this dream before, this is going turn into a nightmare and I’m going to lose you.”  He buried his head in Tony’s embrace, afraid to look around the room anymore, knowing he would see something terrible.  Somewhere very close he could feel it, the much younger boy that had stayed up passed his bedtime reading that book until VERY late at night alone in his house, afraid to shut the book, afraid to close his eyes, afraid to move from that spot until Aunt May and Uncle Ben returned.

But Tony’s arms were solid and unmoving.  He held Peter against chest and murmured to him, stroking his hair and arguing with him gently.  “Hold to me Peter.  Hold fast. Hold close.  Stay with me.  I conjure Master Peter and do not release him.  Fear not, Master Peter, but be resolute.  By the uttermost magic I bind you to me…”  

“But that’s not real,” Peter scolded.  “That’s not even in Dracula.  Even if it were real in this dream it won’t stay real for long.  Because dreams turn into… I told you Tony…”

“Look to me, look to me,” Tony crooned, stroking Peter’s back with strong hands, finally resting his head against Peter’s hair, shushing him, almost rocking him, until he allowed himself to be gentled.  Peter leaned into the warm embrace.  It was a wonderful feeling.  Even if this moment faded into something else, it was a moment he would remember.

“Whatever you want to tell me, tell me quick.  I can’t make it last.  Please Tony.”

Tony lay his mouth against Peter’s ear, scraping his beard across Peter’s cheek.  Peter shivered at the touch.

“You need not fear.  I am the master of this place.  We can speak, dispute, have discourse one with another here.  We spoke so little in the dreams when you first called unto me, for then I was so weak, and you were a magician unskilled.  Do you not see that we are stronger now?”

“I’m not a magician at all,” Peter whispered.  He wiggled a little and Tony loosened his arm a little, looking down into Peter’s face.  

“But you are the Master Doctor, master of all arts, the one who named me.  Who feeds me his light, but does not know of it.  I will instruct you now.”

He guided Peter into a sitting position (Peter had been laying back in Tony’s arm, looking up at his face, thinking that he was wrong, this was in fact the best dream in the world) and looked closely into his face.

“Do you fear?”

Peter thought for a moment, then shook his head.

“I must feed of your light.  ‘Light’ is not a fit word.  Likewise is not ‘feed’ the fit word.”  Gently he scraped the pad of his thumb across Peter’s lips.  “There are no fit words.”  

“But I can show you…”

Gently Tony slipped a hand into Peter’s open-necked shirt and moved it aside and, just as gently, pulled Peter against his chest.  Breathing against Peter’s throat for just an instant, he covered the pulsing vein with his mouth and began to suck.  Peter’s heart pounded against Tony’s chest.  He tried to remember to breathe.

Soon then were laying together on the bed, Tony moaning and stroking Peter’s back with strong hands.  His back, his waist, sometimes down the sides of his legs.  Peter clung to him, trying not to moan as well. Sometimes he would push Tony away and Tony would always comply, (eventually) laying back against the white pillow, panting.  At those times Peter’s hand would fly to his shoulder to look for blood, but he never found it.  Sometimes Tony’s mouth seemed to be wine-stained, sometimes it seemed to Peter that there were wine-stains too, upon his shirt, upon his fingertips, but at other times there were none.  Sometimes Peter’s head spun, sometimes he feared he would fall asleep (but he was asleep. Could he fall asleep in a dream?) Then Tony would move toward him again, whimpering, nuzzling against his cheek, his nose, wordlessly asking for more. And every time, Peter obeyed.

Finally Tony pulled away, sated.  He stroked Peter’s hair and thanked him repeatedly, touching their foreheads together and caressing his face.

“What that… have you… fed?”

“After a fashion.  It is a dream of feeding.  It gives me nourishment. In your bedroom, when night falls on the morrow, you will feed me again.  You will make me strong.”

“And is this…” once again Peter reached up to finger the wet place on his neck, surprised once again that there was no wound there.  “Is that ‘light?’”

“Your light made me strong enough to speak,” he said, tracing one finger over Peter’s lips. “Your light made me strong enough to touch your dreams.  Your light gave me form enough to touch you.  When you lay on your bed and wept tears, I fed from your loneliness.  When you read your books that made you laugh, I fed from your joy.”

“But… that’s not ‘light.’ Loneliness and joy aren’t light. Those are feelings.”

“And when you sit on your bed and read to learn?  And when you make your scholars drawings of plans and schemes of clever instruments? What is the fit word for this?”

“Is it… curiosity? Or… wait…”  Peter pulled away from Tony’s touch enough to think.  He turned his head and considered the old-fashioned words that he knew.

“Is it… passions?”  

He moved back closer, please with himself.  Tony seemed pleased too.  He took Peter’s hands and wove their fingers as he spoke.

“If you were a painter, I would feed upon your light when your landscape was complete.  If you did compose, I would feed upon your light as the ink dried upon your opus. If you were a sculptor, you would feed me when the statue stood completed in your studio.  Not before, for fear you would never finish it.”

“But you learn, Peter.  Daily.  Hourly. You never finish.  And you question.  Even your questions feed me.  I’ve never tasted the like.”  

Peter lowered his eyes and tried not to grin.  It wasn’t easy.  He was sometimes praised for being ‘smart’ but he wasn’t often praised for learning constantly (and he certainly was NOT praised for constantly asking questions.)  He hid his smile by moving his forehead closer to Tony’s chin.

“If… wait… if you are old enough to remember when scientists thought the sun revolved around the Earth, instead of the other way around… that was before the 1600’s.  How old are you, Tony?”

Tony moved away enough to look into Peter’s eyes.  He traced gentle fingers across his jaw, his lips, his chin. Peter moved his fingers to touch the line of Tony’s beard, but wasn’t brave enough to do more.

Then Tony pulled away completely and tucked one arm under his head, staring at the top of the canopy bed, contemplating.  Finally he spoke.

“I was first conjured and tasked to vex the stylite Simeon the Elder before I killed him.  I believe.  Do you know the date of the death of Simeon the Elder?”

“No, but I can look it up in the library.”

“But here are spirits far older than I.  I knew of a demon tasked by Eratosthenes to take messages Alexandria to Syene.  He was a great deal older.  It is hard to tell.  When I am not fed I must sleep.  When I sleep I forget.”

He turned back to Peter and gathered him up in his arms again.  “You are the Scholar Peter, you will consult this vast library you travel to, the one so far away from your dwelling place…”

Peter snuggled in and described the tiny, disappointing library that he visited weekly in Devil’s Holler, and how he could only get his Uncle Bed to drive him to the slightly superior library in the next town over, and how all of them paled in comparison to the libraries he visited in New York City. As he spoke Tony’s hands began a delicious journey up and down his back, the back to his waist, then back to his back again.  

Once, that hand rested in the small of his waist for a moment, then began moving further downward, causing Peter to gasp and jump a little. He couldn’t help it.  He reached for the hand and squeezed it in apology.

Embarrassed, he started talking again.  “But everything is better in New York City.  The schools are better.  The museums are better.  There are more movie theaters.  There aren’t even any museums here at all…” and so on.

They fell into silence and Peter felt himself dozing.  It wasn’t a pleasant sensation.  It made him feel that the dream was changing.  He was hearing strange voices intoning solemn words outside the room.  He jolted awake and looked up at Tony, to see if he had spoken, but Tony only smiled. Then his eyes drifted closed again.

When he jolted awake the second time Tony pulled him closer, rubbing his back through his shirt and calling his name.  Peter’s hand flew to his neck… he had dreamed he was bleeding and staining the sheets… then grinned in embarrassment.

“I’m sorry.  I keep thinking you really bit me.”

Tony smiled and took one hand in his.  “Wherefore?  I did not bite you the first time I fed from you,” he said with a wicked grin, lowering his mouth to Peter’s wrist and sucking gently at the pulse.

Peter was confused.  “You… what?”

Tony moved a little and fished for Peter’s left hand, that had been laying between them.  He pulled it gently to his face and touched Peter’s fourth finger.

“Do you know what this is, my scholar?”

“That’s my ring finger… Tony…” Peter scolded, scandalized when Tony fit the entire finger into his mouth and sucked on it vigorously, finally pulling it away from his lips in a gesture that felt slightly obscene.  

“That finger carries the vein that leads directly to your heart, a perfect place to feed.”

“But it doesn’t really have a vein that… eww gross….” Peter giggled as Tony went down on his last two fingers, sucking on them.  It felt ridiculous (but it felt something else, too. Something Peter didn’t really have a word for.)  

“And yet I can feed this way.  I need not hurt you.  I did not hurt you when you fed me sorrow the first time, when Wagner did not come to your celebration.”

“What… what?”  Peter pulled his hands away and sat up suddenly.  “What are you talking about?”

Tony lay his head back on the white pillow and looked up sadly. “When your schoolfellow agreed to come to your celebration.  You came to your room and told me all about the joy of it.  But then the message came upon the telephone that he would not attend. His father conveyed the message to your Uncle.  You wished to contact your other schoolmate in New York City in consolation, but your Uncle angered you when he said the cost was too dear.  You came to your bed and cried, and then you came to the floor to speak to me.  You gave me your tears.  Then you gave me your hand,” he touched Peter’s left hand, but didn’t take it.  

“Tony that doesn’t… no.  That doesn’t make sense.  I don’t know anyone named Wagner.”

Tony closed his eyes and sighed.  Peter was suddenly worried and reached for him, and soon he had Tony’s head laying against his chest, and he was the one with his face nuzzling Tony’s hair. Tony wrapped strong arms around his back and held him close.

“Forgive me Master Peter, my scholar, my novice magician.  My pilgrim of great libraries.  Forgive me. Grant me pardon.

“I was so hungered.  I had hungered for so long.  I fed poorly. I fed too deeply.  I drank up all the sorrow and loneliness of the moment, and left none behind.  Without the light of the moment you no longer carry the memory.  Forgive me my clumsiness.  I will not injure you thus again.”

He planted a kiss upon the center of Peter’s chest.

Then he whispered “Unless you ask me to.”

Peter wasn’t sure what it meant, and wasn’t sure he was ready to. So he did what he knew how to do. He held on.  He didn’t speak anymore.  He held on until he fell asleep.

When he woke he was cold and achy and laying on the floor.  He crawled up into his bed and under the covers and tried to tell himself it was all a dream.  He hadn’t really spent the night in the arms of a demon, who could be sent out to kill people.  Or take away the memory of his only friend in town.

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MORE TOMORROW

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From now on, as promised, the tagged list has a new name.  From now on you are named

MY FEELS:

@mrstarksbaby

@starkerprince – @starkeristheendgame – @dizziestofdaydreams – @twokinkybeans – @fleet-of-ships – @flush-styx  – @mrstarksbaby – @starker-sorbet – 

@castiruth – @starkerthanreality

If you would like to be added to the dinnertable, let me know.

[minijenn]

Blood Stained Thorns Still Sting

A sequel to Drama and Discourse and Old Faces with New Problems

The walk to the Shack was an unusually difficult one for Pearl.  She had made the trip hundreds of time before, but this time was different.  Instead of going to see the twins’ excited faces or confronting Stan over a petty nitpick she had with him, she was delivering a rather dreaded message. Garnet had instructed her to go down to the Shack and discuss with Ford on how to deal with Bill.  The author was the only one with the most experience with the demon, so the White Gem secretly hoped that he would have some idea of how to protect Steven and Dipper from Bill.

Pearl gave a tired sigh as her thoughts wandered back to the two boys.  Amethyst’s earlier outburst was still echoing in her mind as well.  No matter how hard Pearl tried to convince herself otherwise, she couldn’t deny that the purple Gem was right, they were terrible at keeping the kids safe.  Throughout the summer, the Gems had done a satisfactory enough job of protecting them from physical dangers.  However, Bill endangered the kids with a mental and emotional threat, a threat that they were powerless to stop.  And it was that very powerlessness that made the white Gem’s inside feel so twisted and sick.  Steven was Rose’s son and almost felt like her own son as well.  Dipper was one of Pearl’s best proteges, and she couldn’t be prouder of how far he’s come.  To see them both in such grave danger and being able to do anything about it just made her feel like a complete failure.

Pearl relaxed her fists as she slowly approached the front of the Shack.  Pearl couldn’t dwell on what she couldn’t do to protect the boys, she had to think about what she could do to protect them.  She made a promise to herself that she would do anything to protect the one thing Rose had left to the planet she had sacrificed so much to save.  She made her way to the front door, ready to knock so that she could finally speak to Ford about this matter.  It was now or never.

However, before the white Gem could knock on the door, it abruptly opened, causing her to step back a bit.  Pearl was then surprised when she saw Ford standing at the door.  Pearl carefully looked to see that the elder scientist was unusually disheveled and appear to have a few bags under his eyes.  “S-Stanford,” Pearl said. “I was just looking for you.  Why do you look so-“ she was then interrupted before she could finish her question.

“Pearl!  Thank Tesla’s coil that you’re here, I’ve been meaning to come see you!”  The author then looked around to make sure that the two of them were alone.  Thankfully, Stanley was out in town, so the this was the best opportunity to meet with the Gem.  Ford then grabbed Pearl by the arm and pulled her into the shack.  “We can’t risk being overheard,” he explained.  “There’s something that I MUST discuss with you!”  While Pearl certainly didn’t appreciate being dragged by the author, she still couldn’t help but wonder what was so important that would rile him up so much.  She decided to just go along with this and hear him out.  Then she would finally be able to tell the elder scientist the terrible news.

Ford had taken Pearl to his study, where he believed that they would be save from unexpected eavesdroppers.  As soon as Pearl entered into the darkened room, something had immediately caught her attention.  Scattered across the room, from the desks to the floors, were documents and manuscripts that seem to information on Bill Cipher.  Paper littered the floor and books were stacked high on the desks. 

“Stanford, what is going on here?!  Why do you have all of these documents concerning…that cretin of all things?” she asked, rather struggling to even mention the dream demon’s name.  Ford made his way across the room and leaned heavily on his desk and lowered his head.  The author took a deep sigh and finally revealed his purpose for bringing the Gem here.  “Listen to me very closely Pearl, I have strong reason to believe that both Dipper and Steven are in grave danger.” Ford plainly said.  For a moment, Pearl couldn’t say anything out of complete awe at what she was hearing.  Ford was telling her the exact same thing that she was going to tell him.  Her mind was racing on how on Earth Ford could have acquire such information.  There was only one possible way, and it made Pearl sick to her stomach.

“Bill threatened them, didn’t he?” Pearl grimly said.  Now Ford was the one who was caught by surprise.  Was it possible that he wasn’t the only one that Bill decided to reveal his plan for the boys.  “Don’t tell me,” he said.  “that psychotic triangle came to you and taunted you about how he plans to torture Dipper and Steven using fusion?”  Pearl was silent for a moment, but then confirmed the elder scientist’s fears.  “Yes, Bill gave all of us a visit.  He was rather vague, but he was clear enough for us to be terrified at what he could possibly do to Stepper.”  Both went silent again, rather unsure on how to proceed.  Both of them were prepared to give such terrible new, but they weren’t ready for this information to become common.  Was Bill really that confident in his plan that he would just tell anyone about it?  Pearl and Ford both found this thought concerning, and both were determined to find a way to protect the boys from the demon’s sadism.

“Have you found anyway to stop him?” Pearl said, getting right to business.  Ford turned back to his desk and began flipping through a book.  “Not as of yet,” he said with disappointment.  “But I’ll keep looking for any permanent solution to stop him.  We still have the barrier up for the shack and Temple, but I highly believe that Bill will find a way around that.  Therefore, we need to find a temporary solution.”  Pearl gave a firm nod at the author’s plan of action.  “Agreed,” she said.  “So…you wouldn’t happen have any idea as to what that temporary solution would be?”  While Pearl was determined to protect the boys from Bill, she was still at a loss as to how to properly do so. 

Ford then gave a tired sigh as he was about to propose a solution that was less than ideal.  “I realize that this might be easier said than done, but I believe it would be best if Steven and Dipper spend some time apart from each other.  I know that their comradery is highly important to them, but as long as they’re together, they risk fusing and falling into Bill’s trap.”  Ford honestly didn’t want to tear the boys apart, but he had no choice.  When he first met Stepper, he was absolutely fascinated with how the young Gem and the inquisitive boy performed something that he thought was exclusive to Gemkind.  The last thing he would want to do is to take that away from the boys, but if it meant doing so meant for their safety, then he had no choice but to do so.

While Pearl full-heartily agreed with this plan, she couldn’t help but voice a few of her concerns.  “Stanford, that is a sound plan, but do you really think it’ll be that easy?  Those two have basically become brothers by this point, therefore I hardly doubt that they would take the idea of being forced away from each other very lightly.”  She also couldn’t help but feel bad about separating the two boys on the inside as well.  Throughout the many events and revelations throughout the summer, Pearl was inwardly glad that Steven could go to Dipper, Mabel and Connie for emotional support and comfort.  While she wouldn’t hesitate to provide that for the young Gem herself, the Gems were rather new at human interaction, so Pearl was worried that she would only make things worse for him.  There was also something else other than the force separation of the boys that Pearl didn’t particularly like.  “Also Stanford, you do realize what you’re saying when you say we should forbid the boys from fusing, right?  I understand that you’re just a human, but you have to understand that fusion is a very delicate topic.  You can’t just go and tell them-“

“I KNOW what that implies, Pearl,” Ford firmly interrupted.  “Rose was very detailed on how important fusion is to you and the rest of the Gems!  And I know that this is a rather cruel to deny the boys that privilege, but it’s for their safety!  I know you’re smart enough to know that!”  Ford had to be a bit firmer now so that Pearl would understand.  The elder scientist was genuine in saying that he didn’t want to do this, but what choice did they have?  Ford could tell how serious Bill was when he invaded his dreams.  He knew that the demon wouldn’t hesitate from tormenting the boys to near death, only to finally finish the job.  The author found it his duty to protect Dipper and Steven from Bill, even if it meant that they would be upset with him because of that.

Deciding that this topic was tense enough, Ford decided to change the subject.  “So, other than mentioning Dipper and Steven, did say anything else to you?” he asked in a much gentler fashion.  Pearl also decided it was best to move on, so she decided to answer the elder scientist’s question.  “Not much.  He did make some rather…crude remarks towards Rose.  Obviously, he said those things to try and…get to me.”  The white Gem was still bitter at the demented triangle for muddying Rose’s good name.  She had spent too much time with the pink Gem to not defend her honor, even after she had passed.  Ford responded with a sigh and shook his head.  “He mentioned similar things to me as well.  It seems that Bill likes to poke at that pressure point a lot.” 

Pearl suddenly slammed her fist down on a nearby desk.  She had just about had it with the dream demon attacking Rose like this.  “What is wrong with that triangular sadist?!” she exclaimed.  “Rose was a saint that never hurt anyone!  All she wanted was the best for this planet and Bill is just…mocking her for it!  It’s appalling and unorthodox, right?!”  Pearl had expected Ford to instantly agree with her, but instead the author remained silent.  “Stanford?” Pearl asked again.  The elder scientist looked to the ground, refusing to look at the white Gem and remained silent.  Pearl didn’t like this one bit, and then jumped to a rather grim conclusion.  “Stanford,” Pearl said unbelievably.  “You can’t be serious in thinking that Bill was actually correct in say that Rose-“

“There are many, MANY things I hate about Bill, Pearl,” Ford interrupted.  “One of the things that I hate most about him is when he has a point.”  Pearl just looked at the author with complete shock and awe.  She just couldn’t believe what she was hearing right now.  “Stanford, what are you saying right now?!  Rose thought so highly of you, and now you’re saying this?!”  Ford finally stopped looking at the ground and looked at Pearl dead in the eyes.  “Rose was one of my best companions and I will always cherish the time I spent with her and the rest of you!  But Pearl, open up your eyes!  The only reason Bill is going after Steven because of what Rose did!  Bill is a very petty being, and he’s going to hurt Steven from what his mother did to him in the past!  Do you see what I’m getting at here?! The author practically begged the Gem.  Pearl’s eyes darken and tighten her fists at her sides.  “No Stanford, I don’t know what you’re getting at.” She said venomously.  Ford then started to approach the white Gem.  “ROSE WAS SELFISH!” the author exclaimed.  “Everything that she did was for her own benefit!  She didn’t think about you when she took your memories, she didn’t think about her friends when she started a war, she didn’t think about me when I was suffering all those years ago, and I’m starting to wonder if she didn’t think about Greg when she had Steven!  And now, we’re all suffering because of her mistakes!  If you really think about it, did Rose really give up anything for others?!”

Ford didn’t have enough time to react when Pearl suddenly punched the elder scientist to the ground.  The author caressed his stinging cheek as he looked up to the Gem.  He had never seen Pearl this livid in his time he had known her.  “ROSE GAVE UP EVERYTHING FOR US!” the white Gem shouted at the top of her lungs.  “You have no idea how much Rose sacrificed to get as far as she got!  You have no right to say those things about Rose and you have no right to judge her actions!  Rose was far from perfect and she made her fair share of mistakes, but she does not deserve the slander that you and Bill are throwing at her!  The point is that I respect Rose too much to continue to let you think of her like that!  Rose has spent her entire existence to sacrifice!  Ever since she-“  Pearl cut herself short when her arm inexplicably shot up to cover her mouth.  Hot tears were staining her cheeks as she finally realized what she had just done.  Here she was, trying to find help from a trusted friend, only to punch him down in his own home.  For once in her life, she was actually glad that this curse stopped her from saying something she would later regret.

“Stanford, I’m so sorry!  I didn’t know what I was thinking!  I never meant to…hurt you like that.” Pearl apologized as she extended her hand to help up the elder scientist.  Ford hesitated for a bit, but he eventually accepted the white Gem’s hand to help him up.  “it’s fine,” he said quietly.  “Rose meant so much more to you than me.  I didn’t mean to insult her like that.”  Ford honestly did feel bad about what he had just said about the pink Gem.  Despite all of her shortcomings, Rose had truly been a good friend towards the author all those years ago.  She was one of the first ones to show actual interest in his studies and ambitions.

The two stood in awkward silence, unsure how to continue after that outburst.  Fortunately, Pearl was the first one to break the silence.  “So, how about I look after the kids and make sure they…spend some time apart for a while, and you continue looking for a long-term solution to Bill.  Okay?”  The elder scientist was still quiet for a moment, but he finally responded.  “Okay, that sounds like a good plan.  I’ll make sure to talk to Dipper tonight without…bring up Bill.”  Pearl gave a solid nod.  “Alright then.  I’ll just take my leave then.”  The white Gem began to take her leave, still feeling rather guilty about her outburst.  However, before she left the room, she asked the author one more question.  “Ford, did Bill say anything else that would hint at what Bill would do to the boys?”

Ford was silent for a moment, as he was in deep thought.  In truth, Ford did conclude that Bill was going to do something terrible to Stepper.  It was only a theory, but it was a solid theory none the less.  Ford was more than ready to tell the Gems immediately about his theory, however a thought did come to him.  If Ford were to reveal this revelation to the Gems, they would be in an absolute panic.  There would be no way Gems would be able to focus on anything and would be in complete terror at all times of the day.  Therefore, the elder scientist decides to keep his theory quiet, in hopes that the Gems would have full attention in dealing with the situation at hand.  “No,” the author said.  “Bill didn’t go into any more detail about what he was going to do to them.”  It was a blatant lie, but it was a lie that Pearl seem to have to believed.  “Alright, take care then, Stanford.”  As Pearl walked out of the room, Ford returned to his studies on the dream demon.  Guilt was still plaguing him about not telling Pearl Bill’s full plan, but he knew that the Gem’s needed to be on full alert if they wanted to truly stop the dream demon from taking away what they all held most dear.

Meanwhile, Pearl was just outside of the shack, looking down at the palms of her hands.  Hot tears were flowing off her face as she almost revealed her darkest secret out of anger.  Could she really protect Rose’s son and her protégé when she was in this condition?

Time would only tell if Pearl would be able to continue to keep her eternal promise to Rose.  

[chopping-onions]

Let me look up the definition... My problem with Greg’s understanding of language

This morning I stumbled upon Onision disrespecting LaineyBot video. Here, Greg is trying to explain how language and words work. I have a problem with the way he claims using literal definitions is showing respect for the language you are speaking.

I’m not sure how many of you in this community are from Europe, but here (at least in my country and this part of the continent), we have high schools with special curriculums. We have medical schools, technical schools and so on.

The school I went to is a gymnasium, where students choose from  4 different fields of curriculum focus: general, linguistics and social sciences, informatics, and mathematics. The curriculum which I picked and finished is linguistic and social sciences, which means that my main focus for 4 years has been language. I’ve studied my native language, English, Latin, and German.

A gymnasium education takes four years following a compulsory eight or nine-year elementary education and ending with a final aptitude test called Matura. In these countries, the final test is standardized at the state level and can serve as an entrance qualification for universities. With the final test, we also have to pick one subject, write and defend our own thesis to graduate.

Why am I explaining this? Because I’ve spent four years studying language and social sciences, my finishing paper was about language and literature and I’ve finished my education with high grades.

As a result, it really pisses me off when Cucky McFucky decides to play the all-knowing here because he has no fucking clue how language works.

The first thing we were taught is: LANGUAGE IS A LIVING, CHANGING MATTER. And I don’t think you need to study language excessively to know that. Words evolve and they change their meanings all the time. I’d really love to see Onion boy trying to talk to Shakespeare because for the love of God the only way to respect your language is to blindly follow dictionaries.

I won’t be addressing how clueless he is about biology and social dynamics here because that is a whole other story.

But here we go:

First, what is language?

Language is a system that consists of the development, acquisition, maintenance, and use of complex systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do so; and a language is any specific example of such a system.

(I am aware that Wikipedia is not always the most reliable source, but on this particular subject, it’ll have to do. I could list my sources here and even retype paragraphs and paragraphs of official literature that supports these statements but it would be pointless considering that the literature would be unavailable to most people reading this. And if anyone is interested in more in-depth reading on the subject I’m sure you can find all of it online in the languages of your choosing.)

Languages evolve and diversify over time, and the history of their evolution can be reconstructed by comparing modern languages to determine which traits their ancestral languages must have had in order for the later developmental stages to occur.

But to notice how language changes you don’t have to study ancient languages, just pick an older person to talk to. Talk to your grandmother- chances are she is using words and phrases which you never use, or she uses those words differently than any person your age. If you don’t really feel like talking to old people go ahead and watch an 80′s movie or open an older book.

See the difference? Those changes don’t seem like a big deal, but they pile up and in about hundred years a language gets a complete makeover.

All languages change as speakers adopt or invent new ways of speaking and pass them on to other members of their speech community. Language change happens at all levels from the phonological level to the levels of vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and discourse. Even though language change is often initially evaluated negatively by speakers of the language who often consider changes to be "decay" or a sign of slipping norms of language usage, it is natural and inevitable.

But even if we disregard this phenomenon, language is not a simple set of rules. It consists of many layers. American English is a great example of that. A person born and raised in Texas uses language quite differently than a person born and raised in California. Things get even more diverse when we include class differences, levels of education, and age. These differences within a language are called dialects, sociolects, and idiolects.

In this particular video, Greg focuses on the definition of male and female.

He lists google definition of female:

femaleˈfiːmeɪl/

adjective

1.of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes." a herd of female deer"

noun

1.a female person, animal, or plant.

But let’s look at other definitions (I personally prefer Merriam-Webster dictionary).

Definition of female

1a (1): of, relating to, or being the sex that typically has the capacity to bear young or produce eggs

(2) : having or producing only pistils or pistillate flowers

b: made up of usually adult members of the female sex: consisting of

females

c: characteristic of girls, women, or the female sex: exhibiting

femaleness

d: designed for or typically used by girls or women

e: engaged in or exercised by girls or women

2: having some quality (such as small size or delicacy of sound) associated with the female sex

3: designed with a hollow or groove into which a corresponding male part fits

Oxford dictionary

female

1. Of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes.

1.1 Relating to or characteristic of women or female animals.

1.2 (of a plant or flower) having a pistil but no stamens.

1.3 (of parts of machinery, fittings, etc.) manufactured hollow so that a corresponding male part can be inserted.

Wiktionary

female (not comparable)

Belonging to the sex which typically produces eggs and/or, in mammals, has XX chromosomes.

Belonging to the feminine gender (social category).

(grammar, less common than 'feminine') Feminine; of the feminine grammatical gender.

(figuratively) Having an internal socket, as in a connector or pipe fitting.

This is how these four dictionaries define a female. Google, Merriam-Webster, Oxford, and Wiktionary all give slightly different definitions of a female. How can that be? Ever noticed how when you open an actual dictionary there is more than one definition listed?

The thing is a female (and it’s not the only example of how sometimes a simple little definition is not enough) is quite a broad concept. There are both biological and social connotations tied to it. And guess which is easier to define?

How does Greg identify males and females? Does he ask each and every person he meets about their ability to produce offsprings? What about people who are infertile?  What about people who have certain chromosome variations? Women who can grow beards and men who have more pronounced breasts? How do they fit into this neat little definition?

Even if we stick to the binary division of only two sexes and genders, it is impossible to go strictly by biological definition in everyday life. I’m not saying we should completely ignore biological definition, but there is a reason biological definition is not the only one.

And what really annoys me is how he screams SCIENCE, even tho three seconds earlier he didn’t even know what’s spermatozoa.

Just because you google the fucking definition doesn’t mean you understand science, Greg. Science is one of those pesky little things where you really need to go in-depth to understand shit, Greg. People study biology for years, get specializations in specific fields, Greg. Believe it or not, actual people of science dedicate their entire lives to specific fields just to gain an actual, deeper understanding of how shit works. Science is not two seconds of googling it takes you to find whatever definition you like the best, Greg. If any of my professors heard this man talk on any subject whatsoever they’d probably return him to preschool.I swear to god, I’ve met thirteen-year-olds who are better educated and have more understanding of how stuff works than him.

And I’m a bit lost here, now. He takes the biological definition to define males and females. Then he jumps to defining sexuality. He gives definitions which are directly tied to sex. If infertile people aren’t male nor female, does that mean they have no sexuality?

This is where I’m finishing this video, I can’t bear to listen to this obnoxious man any longer. 

So, to all you trans ladies and gentlemen out there, don’t listen to this giant manchild. Your gender and sexuality are valid, you are respected, you don’t deserve to listen to this sort of bullshit.

Sorry for this unnecessary rant, but it annoys me when a person with no actual understanding of a matter tries to lecture others about it. 

[fadinginfluencerblaze]

Armageddon

I received my book from FAKKU.com and it is wonderful, just a shame I could never share it with anyone or read it in public or anywhere besides the comfort of my solitude and dark spaces. I don’t know, I bought it, so I’ll be able to make time to finish it. I am excited with how well “Fallen,” has come along. https://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/adventvoice/fallen-dreams  https://www.patreon.com/AdventVoice, https://www.deviantart.com/adventvoice/art/Fallen-803479192 I have not illustrated an angel in quite some time https://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/adventvoice/we-are-going-old-school and to have the opportunity to do so in response to a lot of negativity that has been broadcast by conservative and secular programs. I’d love to be able to soar over and surmount in real life and it feels good to get it off my chest. https://www.tumblr.com/blog/fadinginfluencerblaze “Fallen Dreams,” be sure to read the article and let me know what you think.

You know I am an artist first and foremost. I am owning it, then I write everything, I edit my own work, correct blogs, connect old stories with new ones, and I love to speak to the world through pictures. Well after “Fallen,” there is a second piece which could be considered the follow-up to the previous conversation. A discourse that was not given much opportunity to see the light of day, through Wordpress.com or any of my connected online galleries and forum sections. Not only are wings to be associated with demons and angels, but when we talk about them, it was always understood that their actions were the direct response or command of, an all powerful god. I say that because the demons answer to their leader and the angels answer to their own leader. It is good verse evil, darkness against light, purity against impurity. That was the tradition. This is the reason for wars, death by chemical warfare, plague, pestilence, children being held with their families or alone in detention centers, without food and toilet paper. This is why we can watch on television government workers playing theoretical tennis with the issues because neither side wants to be correlated with death camps, incinerators, or concentration camps, by illustrators. Painted with the brush of artists like me that does agree there are concentration camps akin to those used in North Korea, in America no matter what those, who did not find the story first, try to tell you. “Cough,” Glenn Beck, ‘your a lying, filthy mouthed troglodyte that won’t be seen in heaven because you keep breaking the ten commandments.’

Just felt like adding that in there cause it is true.

I don’t want him to feel safe because I only illustrated Hillary Clinton and Mueller and not him. I don’t find him attractive enough to illustrate and I don’t know who’d I have fucking him in the ass yet. Maybe Kellyanne Conway, she likes fat men. They all make it too easy to rag on them. I should not be so childish but I am on my 4th of July, vacation as I write this.

Anyway the notion of good and evil being orchestrated by winged beings who whisper in the ear of those with or without influence; I mean just ordinary people can help to move a story along and they are just as susceptible to the supernatural as the President of the United States, whom many may feel is untouchable, but will have to answer for his deeds in the next life, like all of us, is how “Armageddon,” is framed.

For centuries a prophet has come and sought to shed light on which the angels do not know and if they did know, would only be following orders and could not seek to change anything, even if they could. I personally stopped trying at the age of fifteen because I realized, there is a lot I can do before the world ends and I earn my wings.

The month of June was so odd. Wordpress.com (www.avproductionsblog.wordpress.com) Reddit, DeviantArt.com, sites I use to publish articles that give hightlights about present art pieces, and future projects, to promote commissions, requests, and access to my online galleries featured on https://adventvoice.newgrounds.com/   https://twitter.com/Scope2Mars, refused to publish “Fallen Dreams.”

Out of all of my publications, my dilution of the Mueller Report: https://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/adventvoice/mueller-report , my cries against For-Profit-Prisons: https://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/adventvoice/dream-wavers-aim and overall censorship of creative material, none have ever been deleted, or refused visibility. It was really disturbing; I thought it was something I said, so I moved some things around. Deleted this and that and by the time I was done, there was little to read, yet still I was ‘shadowed banned,’ or whatever that is and all I sought to say was, “Even Black Angels Deserve To Fly!”  https://avproductionsblog.wordpress.com/2017/11/03/even-black-angels-deserve-to-fly/   I personally felt the denial of publication rights was due to the giant black angel, but they kept the picture, they refused the words associated with the art. Anytime a person is denied the right to publish an article,I was always intrigued and made to ask, “What is so damaging in that article, that no one should be allowed to read it?” It is those kinds of questions that made “The Davinci Code,” by Dan Brown, “Harry Potter,” by J.K. Rowling, “Dangerous Liaisons,” by Choderlos de Laclos , or Gustave Flaubert ‘s “Madame Bovary,” and several other stories famous, well read and desired by the masses. “Fallen Dreams,” is not a large article. I purposely was not trying to drag out the conversation or bore my readers with a long winded monologue. It does cut to the heart of how I feel about our role as people to curb color barriers in our present culture. Thanks to Tumblr, your able to read the article without the Paid-per-view requirements of my other sites, https://www.patreon.com/AdventVoice

The drama surrounding the article I had hoped to use to guide readers to pay for something that would not have been read anywhere else.

Other online platforms were so against allowing, ‘Fallen Dreams,’ to see the light of day, I’m not even sure if it’s good to mention it, if I desire to have anything else published. Be assured my present apprehension to share my thoughts, has nothing to do with fear of ridicule. I’d rather be told what made  someone rebuff me, thus adjustments can be made to correct my ways, opposed to outright denial access to a public forum. With nothing more to gauge a reaction on, than that of the mentioning of black people equally obtaining the right to heaven.

“Armageddon,” is the cover art of this publication. That is what my summer will consist of, showing the world how dark, drab, dreary and repulsive it would be if artists did not exist. If we did not have the ability to take bleached parchment, use the art of calligraphy and the education of the times to chronological the day to day affairs of this world. Things would have gone boom a long time ago.

That could be an exaggeration, but I am sure there is a museum of propaganda art, from WWII, the Vietnam War, Cold War, etc, etc, that inspired you to take a stand, to choose life over death and end the Armageddon’s of our present lifetime.

Is that not what American’s were doing when they were in Cambodia, paving the way for the free world to set up the golden arches along the mountain side? The Dream Weaver holding a briefcase with pieces of parchment and what looks like blank sheets of paper flying in an updraft that does nothing to move the nuclear and radioactive cloud in the distance, without words, says a mouthful. It is hard for me to pin-point which moment in my life made me feel I was facing coming destruction and any amount of work I am able to produce or convey to the people will be as worthless as dust.

Can’t tell you what I’d equate in my life to be as devastating as the events of Hiroshima. I really feel insignificant compared to that day and doubt I’d ever be able to know how they felt or if I ever wanted to. I want to exist in the mind of the millions that have more respect for artists like Hudson & Company Tattoo Studio, than for that of the illustrator. I want to be remembered as an individual not afraid of challenging convention, always seeking to expand his environment and incorporate others into his very small section of the world. I want what would be considered worthless, in the midst of homelessness, unemployment, lack of health insurance, foreclosure of ones home, death camps, migrant detentions centers, Ebola outbreaks, death to ecol i, cancer treatment, radio active exposure, and poisoning, Marshal Law and police states that do not end because of talk of doing without government assistance and welfare would be treated as sedition, insurrection, and treason. To permeate the minds of those around me and release the spark of Wormwood, that when translated means Imagination.

I refuse to be an echoing memory lost in history never having the chance to impart my gift because the enemies of freedom were successful in creating silence. Before everything I hold dear is razed to the ground and replaced by GMOed Spider silk and we are expected to comply to man-made rules of self-preservation from an enemy that can not be seen and a threat materialized from paranoia, hysteria and mentally ill people. I will have my art in every home of the world, continuing to give hope to the dream weaver’s in us all.