#german phrase literal translation

[foldingfittedsheets]

Through sheer happenstance my beloved and I both speak German. They’re significantly more fluent than me, having done a year abroad and double majoring in it. But both of us have stories passed down to us of the hilarious cultural misunderstandings present in learning a new language.

One of my German teachers had also spent a year abroad. He had a good grasp of the language but not the nuance. So when he’d closed on his first apartment and his lady got him a good deal he said, “Oh mein Gott, ich liebe dich!” (“Oh my god, I love you!”)

Now in English I love you is a multi-use term applied to friends, family, and for emphasis that you’re very happy, like someone just got you your first apartment.

In German however that phrasing is very specifically romantic. Not even casually romantic, it’s Serious Love. Parents tell their kids “Ich habe dich gern” or “Ich habe dich lieb” (literally “I have you gladly” or “I have love for you”) rather than “Ich liebe dich.” (This is as it was explained to me, don’t @ me it was public school)

So this woman was horrified and creeped out that this strange man, who she was alone in a room with, had pulled the cultural equivalent of declaring his undying love for her and asking her to have his babies.

He was equally horrified to have made such a faux pas when he realized how upset she was and profusely apologized. She understood better when he explained he was American.

A silly bonus story was that in that class we pranked one of the girls into thinking “Baum” was slang for cool. It just means tree. She’d be like “Das ist so Baum!” (“That is so tree!”) It went on for a few months before the teacher corrected her.

The next story is one of my favorites. My beloved heard from her teacher of a woman who had hosted a German exchange student for a while. At one point the girl came up to the her host mom to ask, “Where can we go buy a rubber? My sister collects them.”

“A rubber? She collects them??”

“Yes, can we buy her one?”

The woman was shocked that her exchange student was asking for a condom. But, she told herself, cultural norms were different, and she knew that German teenagers were given more sexual freedom. So, trepidatious but determined, she drove the girl to a local sex shop.

The girl, in turn, was horrified when they arrived. Most German student learn British English instead of American English and they call erasers rubbers.

The translation error made her host mom think she was asking for condoms when she just wanted a cute eraser and they both ended up embarrassed, surrounded by dildos.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: Halloween

REFERENCES (Banshee; Ghost; Ghoul; Goblin; Haunt; Specter; Vampire; Wraith; Origins of Halloween)

Banshee

A female spirit in Gaelic folklore whose appearance or wailing warns a family that one of them will soon die.

Banshee came from combining the Gaelic words meaning “woman of fairyland,” but any positive associations with fairies ends there.

Are female spirits that, if seen or heard wailing under the windows of a house, foretell of a death in the family that lives there.

Today, the word is most frequently heard in the idiom “scream like a banshee” or “wail like a banshee,” which shows the power of myth and the imaginative power of language, since probably no one has actually heard one.

Ghost

Most common meaning today is “a disembodied soul” or “the soul or specter of a deceased person”, which came next, a meaning based on the ancient folkloric notion that the spirit is separable from the body and can continue its existence after death. It originally meant “vital spark” or “the seat of life or intelligence,” which is still used in the phrase “give up the ghost.”

An older spelling of ghost, gast, is the root of aghast (“struck with terror, shocked”) and ghastly (“frightening”).

The German word for ghost, geist, is part of the word zeitgeist, which literally means “spirit of the time.”

Ghoul

A legendary evil being that robs graves and feeds on corpses.

Ghoul is a relatively recent English word, borrowed from Arabic in the 1700s.

Because it’s spelled with gh-, it looks vaguely like the Old English words ghost and ghastly (which share a common root in the Old English word gāst, meaning “spirit” or “ghost”).

In fact, it comes from the Arabic word ghūl, derived from the verb that means “to seize,” and originally meant “a legendary evil being held to rob graves and feed on corpses.” The word was introduced to western literature by the French translation of Arabian Nights.

Goblin

An ugly or grotesque sprite.

Usually mischievous and sometimes evil and malicious.

Haunt

To visit or inhabit as a ghost.

However, this is not the original sense of the word.

For centuries, it had a perfectly unfrightening set of meanings: “to visit often” and “to continually seek the company of.”

In the 1500s, it began to mean “to have a disquieting or harmful effect on,” as in “that problem may come back to haunt you.” The meaning here is simply the lingering presence of the problem, not the possibly scary nature of the problem itself; it is applied to thoughts, memories, and emotions.

The noun haunt retains this fright-neutral definition, “a place that you go to often,” as in “one of my favorite old haunts.”

A lingering idea, memory, or feeling may have led to the ghostly meaning of haunt, or one by a disembodied or imaginary spirit.

Specter

A visible disembodied spirit.

Specter originally meant “a visible disembodied spirit” in English—a good synonym for ghost. But, unlike ghost, the notion of being visible is paramount in specter, which came to English from the French word spectre, which developed directly from the Latin word spectrum, meaning “appearance” or “specter,” itself based on the verb specere, meaning “to look.”

Specere is also the root of many English words that have to do with appearance: aspect, conspicuous, inspect, perspective, and spectacle.

Vampire

The reanimated body of a dead person believed to come from the grave at night and suck the blood of persons asleep.

Legends of bloodsucking creatures go back to Ancient Greece, with harrowing tales of them rising from burial places at night to drink peoples’ blood before hiding from dawn’s daylight. These stories were popular in eastern Europe.

Originally comes from the Serbian word vampir, which then passed from German to French, coming to English in the 1700s.

The extended senses of vampire, “one who lives by preying on others” and a synonym of vampire bat, were both in use within a few decades.

Wraith

The exact likeness of a living person seen usually just before death as an apparition. The distinguishing quality of a wraith, compared with other ghosts, is its specificity.

Originally, it referred to either the exact likeness of a living person seen as an apparition just before that person’s death as a kind of spectral premonition of bad news, or a visible apparition of a dead person.

When referring to a living person, it’s a synonym of doppelgänger, or the “spirit double” of a living person (as opposed to a ghost, which refers to the spirit of a dead person). Doppelgänger is now frequently used in a broader sense to mean simply “someone who looks like someone else.”

When referring to a dead person, wraith is a synonym of revenant, which originally referred to a ghost of a particular person and subsequently has been used for a person who returns after a long absence.

ORIGINS OF HALLOWEEN

The traditions of Halloween have their origins in Samhain, a festival celebrated by the Celts of ancient Britain and Ireland.

Samhain marked the end of summer and the onset of winter, and occurred on a date that corresponds to our November 1st.

It was believed that during the Samhain festival, the world of the gods was visible to humans, and the gods took advantage of this fact by playing tricks on their mortal worshippers. Those worshippers in turn responded with bonfires on hilltops and sometimes masks and other varied disguises to keep ghosts from being able to recognize them. Things tended to get spooky and dangerous around Samhain, with bloody sacrifices and supernatural phenomena abounding.

Samhain chugged along for centuries, until Christianity poked its nose in: in the 8th century CE, All Saints' Day, a somewhat new Christian holiday, got moved from May 13th to November 1st.

The evening before All Saints' Day became a holy—that is, a hallowed—eve. Within a few centuries, Samhain and the eve of All Saints' Day had been merged into a single holiday. Protestants of the Reformation and all that came after largely rejected the whole thing, but the holiday persisted among some communities.

19th-century immigrants to the U.S., including many from Ireland, brought their Halloween customs with them and deserve no small amount of credit for the holiday as it's celebrated in the U.S. today.

More: Writing Notes & References ⚜ Word List: October

[swordsonnet]

my favourite german phrase will always be "fick dich ins knie", which is used to mean something like "go fuck yourself", but literally translates to "fuck yourself in the knee". the image it conjures is just delightfully nonsensical. like, how would you even go about fucking yourself in the knee? pretty sure that's physically impossible.

[asongaboutpirates]

So, I’m watching TOS in the German dub and there’s this scene in “A Piece of the Action”:

Kirk is pointing at Spock and says “Hey you, sit down!”

A perfectly innocent, uncomplicated phrase that can very easily be translated into German. There wouldn’t be too many syllables to match it to the movements of Kirk’s mouth either. There’s literally no reason whatsoever to translate it to:

"Na du Süßer, komm, setz’ dich!”

Which translates to: “Hey you, sweetie, sit down!”

I have no idea what happened there, but I like it.

[haru-dipthong]

Fansub Release + Analysis of Utena Ep 14

This is a big one!!

My fansub release posts aren't usually like this, but this episode is so jam packed with stuff I want to talk about that I had to write my translation notes as a series of essays. It's longer than usual so strap in!

First, a word on “The Mikage Seminar”

I’ve always found the translation “the Mikage Seminar” very strange. In English, a seminar is an event — a lecture. Yet “the Mikage Seminar” is discussed as though it’s not a recurring lecture, but a society or a school of therapy, or a cult (like scientology). In fact I did a bit of reading about scientology to try and find an alternative translation, and discovered that the origins of scientology, namely a set of ideas and practices called Dianetics, bears a lot of similarities to “the Mikage Seminar”. Both involve a type of therapy where one person looks into their mind and talks to an “auditor”.

The auditor coaxes the preclear to recall as much as possible. — Wikipedia

This in particular stood out to me! Mikage often says 「深く。もっと深く」 during his interviews (”Deeper. Dig deeper.”).

The Japanese word ゼミナール doesn’t actually come from the English “seminar” but the German “Seminar” (capitalised). According to Wikipedia, in Germany, and often in Japan, Seminar/ゼミナール is used to refer to a university course that includes a thesis project. So ゼミナール refers to a course of learning, rather than a talk or lecture. And it would make a lot of sense to call a system like Dianetics a “course”. Almost like a “course” of medicine — a “course” of psychological practices that you can join but never complete.

So it would make sense to translate it as “the Mikage Course”. But “course” has more meanings in English than just this, and in the context of a university this makes it sound more like a mundane teaching course. So I tried some other words: the Mikage Sessions, the Mikage Method, Mikage Psychotherapy, Mikage Therapy, the Mikage Movement. None seemed quite right. Until I remembered this post. ゼミナール is a foreign word in Japanese, why not find a foreign word for the translation? And so I settled on this:

The Mikage Seminarium, AKA The Society of the Black Rose…

Seminarium is Latin, and is where both the German and English derive seminar from. Its original meaning is “seed plot”, but it’s also just the Polish word for seminar. I really like how the Latin makes its meaning ambiguous — it kind of sounds like a location, kind of sounds like a society, and kind of sounds like a learning course. Because it is all of these things.

Anthy: では、香苗さん。失礼します。 Kanae: ね、あたしの事、お姉さんって呼んでいいのよ。もうすぐわたしはあなたの本当のお姉さんになるんだから。

A more literal translation:

Anthy: Thank you for having us, Kanae-san. Kanae: Please… you can just call me “sister”. I’m going to be your real sister soon enough anyway.

The translation I ended up going with:

Anthy: Thank you for having us, Miss Ohtori. Kanae: Please... you can just call me Kanae. We're going to be family soon. There's no need for the formalities.

Japanese honorifics strike again!

In English, sisters-in-law don’t ask to be called “sister”. That would be super weird in most scenarios, and this scene is trying to evoke a particular familiar feeling of closing a distance gap in a relationship. The audience is meant to relate. Changing how Anthy addresses Kanae was pivotal to this scene working properly.

わかりました。あなたは世界を革命するしかないでしょ。

I understand. Your only choice is to force the world to change around you.

This line is translated as “Your only choice is to revolutionise the world” by basically every other translation. The reason is clear — the Japanese is the same as when Utena pulls the sword out of Anthy, or when any of the other characters talk about “revolutionising the world”. However, in this context, I don’t like it. The nuance of the English phrase is quite different to the Japanese phrase. In English, it’s often used to describe new commercial products: “This new device will revolutionise the world!” It comes with an implied “for the better”, but has used to describe technological developments so unexciting that it can also feel hollow. When the student council talk of revolutionising the world, they sound like revolutionaries — the context makes it work. But in this context, it comes out of nowhere and doesn’t have any of that fervour, which makes it sound hollow and flaccid when it should sound sinister and manipulative.

I think a pervading throughline for all the Black Rose duelists is that they see their problems as caused by other people, with themselves being blameless. Rather than change how they approach their situation, Mikage tells them they’re in the right.

Your behaviour will set you down a path. If that path leads to your goals, well done! However, if your path does not lead to your goals, there’s only two ways you can achieve them.

The first is to change your behaviour so that it does align with your goals. The second, impossible way, is for the rest of the world to change such that your current path DOES end up leading to your goals. This second way is not possible in the real world. But it is possible in Utena.

Also I’ll just leave this here: “around you” → “revolve” → “revolution” 👀

Kanae tried to build a relationship with Anthy in a passive, non-confrontational, extremely Japanese way — the way she has been taught to behave, the “proper” way, a mechanical following of the social scripts. We don’t see a lot of their relationship, but the way she behaved and spoke of behaving towards Anthy is very very similar to the way my Japanese grandmother has behaved towards my and my brother’s partners.

It was unthinkable to her to change this pattern of behaviour. Her only choice was to change Anthy, change the rest of the world, so that her behaviour would lead to the outcomes she wants. You could describe this forceful bending of reality to be “revolutionising the world”.

この黒薔薇のある限り、私はこれから嘘の私を演じなくて住む。

As long as I have this Black Rose, I'm free from the lie I was living before.

Besides gender, growing up, and resisting change (which exist as separate themes but also all intertwine as one), another major theme present in Utena is the self and subjective reality. The self is explored within those first major three themes, but also in terms of how the self dictates reality with the Black Rose duellists.

Black Rose Kanae says that her past self was a lie.

It reminds me of all the times when I’ve been going through a personal trial and I’ve looked back on my past self and thought “How naive I was. I understand things better now.” And then after a while I realise I was wrong, and my first self was more right. And then later still, maybe I re-realise that the second self was more right! And so on! The reality of truth (or to use Kanae’s language, “lies”) is so subjective.

Who dictates knowledge production? Who decides what is true; what is valid knowledge? This is a question of sociology - and at the moment that answer is "science does, kinda". But science and academic systems are supported by capitalist structures and tainted by capitalistic incentives — needing to be published in a journal, issues of replicability, the barrier to entry into academia in the first place, etc, etc. In the future we may find our current way of organising knowledge to be archaic and primitive in the same way we look back at medieval scholars.

But what about organising self-knowledge? Knowledge where the only one who can really decide what is true is yourself. And the only one that can decide what yourself even IS is yourself. I feel like I have looked back on my old ways of conceptualising myself many times (not even counting the gender-based revelations) and thought it primitive and archaic, and NOW I truly understand who I am and how to think of myself and how my thoughts interact with my other thoughts. But I have no doubt that I’ll look back on this current self of mine and reject their way of thinking too.

After their heart is replaced by the Black Rose, the duellists themselves frame this change as a moment of self realisation, of clarity. Once the rose is inside them, they wake up from themselves, like I have countless times. Kanae says herself, “This is the true me.” Honestly, I don’t doubt it. I think that version of Kanae was her true self at that moment, given the things influencing her. Being brainwashed doesn’t make you less of a person, or less yourself. It just makes you organise your reality differently.

心を凍結させて作っただけの間に合わせのデュエリストでは、彼女は破れないな。

We won't be able to defeat her by simply freezing someone's heart and forcing them to duel.

Anya and I discussed this in depth. I originally translated 心 as “mind”, because that was the first thing that popped into my head and I thought that was the simple part of the translation. However, Anya pointed out that it didn’t make sense with the themes of self and subjective reality, and I strongly agreed, so I changed it to “heart” instead.

Anya suggested “conscious mind” instead of “heart” but I think heart is more accurate. 心 (kokoro) can mean heart or mind in Japanese (I find it interesting that those two things are portrayed as opposites in English), and that kanji is found in the word for biological heart, 心臓 (shinzou). When they say of the Black Rose "This is your new heart" they use 心臓. They also say "Your new 命 (life/lifeforce)" which I translated as soul since it sounded more hardcore and because "your new life" is a set phrase in English meaning a new chapter in your life rather than your life force. I think the idea is that they're freezing the duellists' ability to love and feel empathy, which in my opinion is necessary for them to commit to the unbelievably selfish act of revolutionising/reconstructing/bending the entire structure of the world for their own convenience.

A very special thanks to @dontbe-lasanya for being there to talk through all these themes and ideas. I'm incredibly proud of this episode's translation and I wouldn't have been able to do it without them.

If you want to see more analysis like this, let me know! And also follow this blog to see episodes of the fansub as they're released. You can find all episodes released so far here:

Rose divider taken from this post

[mysticstronomy]

WHAT IS AN ISLAND UNIVERSE??

Blog#422

Saturday, July 27th, 2024.

Welcome back,

No other science engages human curiosity like astronomy. From antiquity onward, attempts to comprehend the architecture of the cosmos have commanded a substantial fraction of humankind’s mental budget for intellectual endeavor. Only in the last century, though, have astronomers grasped the structure of the cosmos accurately. Just a hundred years ago, a great debate raged about the fuzzy patches on the nighttime sky known as “cloudy stars,” or nebulae.

Some astronomers believed that those cosmic fuzzballs resided within the Milky Way, the galaxy containing the sun and billions of other stars. In those days the Milky Way essentially comprised the known universe. But some experts suspected the nebulae to be very distant stellar systems much like the Milky Way itself — “island universes” populating the vastness of space. Skeptics argued otherwise, contending that the nebulae would be impossibly far away if they contained stars similar in brightness to the sun.

In October 1917, the prominent astronomer Harlow Shapley reported that the brightness of novae in various nebulae would place some of them millions of light-years away, in conflict with other measurements of rapid internal motion within the nebulae. (At such large distances, internal motion would not be perceptible.) “Measurable internal proper motions,” Shapley wrote, “can not well be harmonized with ‘island universes’ of whatever size, if they are composed of normal stars.”

The centennial of Shapley’s paper is not being widely celebrated, of course, because he was wrong — distant nebulae are, in fact, island universes (the measurements of internal motion supposedly ruling that out turned out to be bogus). But there is another anniversary worth celebrating this year — the dodransbicentennial (or dodrabicentennial) of the founding of the Cincinnati Astronomical Society in 1842. That event is noteworthy for its connection to one of astronomy’s greatest mysteries: who first coined the phrase “island universe.”

Often that honor is attributed to the philosopher Immanuel Kant. But Kant wrote in German, and he didn’t use any phrase that could be translated as “island universe.” He was among the first to figure out the nature of the Milky Way, though. From ancient times, skywatchers had wondered at the eerie dim glowing band of light visible across the nighttime sky (until modern light pollution drowned it out). Galileo’s telescope revealed within the milky glow a vast population of stars too distant and dim to discern with the naked eye.

More than a century afterward, in 1755, Kant reasoned that the Milky Way was actually a large lens-shaped disk, a system of stars (including the sun) analogous to the sun’s system of planets.In essence, the Milky Way was the universe, a grand collection of countless worlds — stars surrounded by planets, possibly inhabited. Kant further speculated that the Milky Way was not alone. Nebulae, it seemed to him, were too big to be merely dim fuzzy stars. He deduced them to be at a great distance (too far for their individual stars to be detectable), each of them another entire “universe” like the Milky Way.

But he didn’t call them islands. When he used the German word for island (Insel), he was referring to things like Jamaica, or an uninhabited planet. When Kant said “these elliptical figures are just universes,” the actual term he used in German was Weltordnungen, which is literally translated as “world orders” (or in some places Weltgebäuden or Weltsystemen, world systems).

Originally published on https://www.sciencenews.org

COMING UP!!

(Wednesday, July 31st, 2024)

"DOES DARK ENERGY EXIST??"

[to-be-honest-i-dunno]

German Phrases for your König Fics

I have seen a lot of people writing stuff about König and using some german bits to dirty talk or just in general conversation. 

And while I love seeing my native language being included in stuff, google translate sucks ass for that type of things sadly, because german is a gendered language and words are written differently depending on if your partner is masc or fem. 

Under the cut there are a few phrases and things germans use 

“My love”:  Masc: “Mein Lieber” Fem: “Meine Liebe”

“Ah fuck” either “Ah Fuck” or “Scheiße” scheiße is a more vulgar word for “shit”

we do use “Bunny” Masc: “Hase”, Fem: “Häschen” but it isn’t that common”

“Treasure” so in german we use that as a form of enderament, it’s “Mein Schatz” this is one of the non gendered things.

“Angel”, “Engel” 

Ok so here is the thing right? if you use “mine” it depends on the presented gender of the partner, it’s either Masc :”Mein” and fem “Meine” 

Words which we just use the english terms for it:

“Fuck”, “Darling”, “Mommy”, “Daddy”, “Baby”, 

Nice German Phrases to spice up your fanfic:

“Halt deine Fresse”, “Shut your mouth”, it’s quite aggressive

“Quatsch” and “Quatsch mit Soße” so these saying are being used if someone is ridiculous and you are like “nahh nothings bad is going to happen” 

“Leck mich!” and “Leck mich am Arsch!”, these could be translated to “Fuck you”, but the more literally translation would be “Lick me” or “Lick my ass”

“Mist”, this means “shit” 

“Ach du lieber Himmel!”, “Oh dear Heaven.”

Something no german speaker would do, ever:

Dirty Talk in German. It sounds horrible to us and is just not really done here

Also we are not Austrian, so we have no clue what sayings are being used there, we know german sayings because I am german. @certainpeachsweets helped with the list.

[riality-check]

Out of all the languages she knows, Robin thinks English is the worst.

It’s so… restricted. English has a lot of words, and it has a lot of fun words, but they’re all so broad. English has a few words that mean a lot of things. It’s confusing and takes five more sentences and mental gymnastics to understand the specific meaning of a phrase that could be conveyed much better in Spanish or French.

This is part of the reason why she wants to learn German, once she’s got a good enough grasp on Russian. They have specific words, and they actually use them. That and it should be pretty easy, as a native English speaker.

Reading Cyrillic was fun and all, but her brain needs a break.

All of this, of course, is the subject of her latest ramble to Steve since her parents already know and no one else listens to her the way he does.

(She repays the favor when baseball season rolls around, and he starts spitting stats at her. She thinks that if the word problems in school were about baseball, or if he believed in himself enough to take a statistics course, he would have kicked ass at math.)

“There’s only one way to say I love you in English, and that’s so stupid!” she says, starfished on top of Steve’s bed. God, his sheets are soft. “In other languages, there’s ways to say it to friends, to family, to whoever you’re dating-”

“Wait, really?” Steve glances at her in the mirror. His hands fuss at his hair, which, as always, looks fine.

She’s a little jealous of that.

“Yeah,” she says. She sits up and shakes her hair out of her face. “Like, in Italian, you say ti amo, which means I love you, to who you’re dating, and that’s only if it’s super serious.”

Steve straightens the collar of his shirt, the blue one with the white stripe, and turns back to her. “What do you say otherwise?”

“Ti voglio bene,” she answers automatically.

“What’s that mean?” Steve asks. He moves sits down across from her, tucking his knees to his chest.

That can’t be comfortable in jeans, but that’s what Robin has affectionately dubbed Steve’s listening position, so she knows he’s paying attention and actually cares.

“I means I love you,” she says.

“No, like…”

“Oh, do you mean the literal translation?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “What’s it mean?”

Robin wracks her brain for a few seconds before she remembers. “It means I want you well.”

Steve cocks his head at her in the way that reminds her of a curious, confused dog.

“It doesn’t translate super well,” Robin says. “So it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

Steve shakes his head. “No, I think it does.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, if you love someone, you want them to be happy and healthy,” Steve explains. “You want things to be good for them. You want them well.”

And Steve says he isn’t smart.

“It makes a lot of sense when you say it like that,” Robin says.

Steve cracks a small smile. “Can you teach me how to say it?”

“What, ti voglio bene?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” Robin says. She reminds herself to not get too excited because that’s weird, then promptly throws that thought out of her head.

She’s with Steve, and she can be as weird and excited as she wants.

“Repeat after me. Tea.”

“Tea.”

“Vole.”

“Vole.”

“Yee.”

“Yee.”

“Oh.”

“Oh.”

“Ben.”

“Ben.”

“Ay.”

“Ay.”

“Okay, ti voglio bene,” Robin says.

“Tea vole-yee-oh ben-ay,” Steve says, awkward and stilted.

Robin itches to correct his pronunciation, but she stops herself. She remembers that it’s really hard for native English speakers to get from the “vole” to the “yee” and have it sound correct unless they grew up speaking those sounds.

Mentally, she thanks her nonna for insisting on correct pronunciation.

“Not bad,” she says honestly.

Steve picks at the cuff of his light wash jeans. “It wasn’t great.”

“It wasn’t bad,” she argues.

“I think I’ll stick to English,” Steve says.

“Okay,” Robin says. “But you’ve got potential.”

 “I want you well, Robin,” he says, and then he grimaces. “That sounds prettier in Italian.”

“Everything sounds prettier in Italian. Even insults.”

Steve laughs, and Robin nudges his leg with her foot.

“I want you well, too,” she says, and she thinks that it might actually sound better in the language they both understand.

[that-ari-blogger]

An Interesting Character

Usually, when character is brought up in discussion, it is in reference to the people. If you think of the characters of The Owl House for example, you probably think of Luz, Eda, Bellos, Hunter, and Principal Bump.

But, by pure mechanics, a character is just a force at work in a story. One with personality, and agency, sure, but it's just a force.

This means that, if you squint a little, the Boiling Isles itself is a character, and the Wild Magic is an extension of that. It certainly gets treated like a character by the story, especially in Adventures In Elements.

Let me explain.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Before I start, let me give one attempt to argue with the pedants. By definition, a character is a person. So, hear me out, the Boiling Isles is literally the body of a titan, who actively talks to Luz later on in the series. That is my justification.

So... why is wild magic a thing?

I'm not asking for an in-universe answer, because that is multifaceted and not really the point. I'm asking why the writers decided to include this idea, and what effect it has on the story?

The phrase "magic is..." is used four times in this episode. Once by Eda, and thrice in quick succession by Luz. And it is worth taking a look at these statements.

"I know my lessons seem weird, but this is what wild magic is all about! Making a connection with nature. The earliest witches understood that. Human witches need to understand it, too. You wanna learn a second spell? ... Then you have to learn from the island."

There is a lot going on with Eda's guidance. First up is the small detail about the tense. The earliest witches knew that magic is about nature, implying now it is different. But mainly, this is an explanation of the nitty gritty of The Owl House's magic system. It's about two things, nature and connection. And I want to delve into that a little bit.

There is something fascinating about Bellos and his roots in witch-hunting. Because that was specifically defined by an opposition to things, rather than any actual views of its own.

Malleus Maleficarum, the book that kicked off the witch-hunts is a fascinating read, as long as you understand what it is that you are reading and don't use it as a set of instructions. Internet Archive has a translated version by Prof. Christopher S. Mackay, complete with commentary from latter authors that I highly recommend.

This single book caused a ton of harm to people, and you can examine it from almost any angle you like. The original was written by a terrible person with terrible intentions, and I also recommend Overly Sarcastic Productions' video on Werewolves for more information on that section of history.

What I want to focus on is the vernacular. References "devils" about 400 times and namedrops "witches" with similar regularity. The word "demon" comes up over 1000 times, and the word "pagan" comes up about 40 times. Specifically in reference to "pagan nations" which is about as racist as it sounds, as well as a ton of using the word as a catch all insult ("x type of person is worse than a pagan", etc. etc.). I don't want to get into the theology and history of this word, because it's a complicated minefield. But in this context, specifically around Europe in this time period, it means just about all regional faiths and mythologies. Celtic, Norse, Germanic, and several others.

Fun fact about me, I am Welsh, which means is that I have a connection to Welsh mythology, and so my analysis of wild magic is through that lens. If you have an understanding of other similar cultures, let me know, I'm fascinated to learn how that affects the reading of the Owl House.

Now, Modern Druidism is a living religion that I am not well versed in and want to treat with the respect befitting any living faith. So, I am sticking to what I know about the history and mythology and trying to make the differentiation between those two and Modern Druidism clear.

So, Druids in Celtic mythology are religious leaders, and peacekeepers. But what is possibly the most famous thing about them is their connection to nature. And here is where the analysis of The Owl House comes into play. Because the Owl House takes great care to associate magic with the natural, and Bellos with the unnatural.

"It means magic is a gift from the island. It means magic is everywhere. Magic is everywhere!"

Bellos creates artificial magic through his artificial staff and the destruction of the Palismen to fuel his life. Hunter wields an artificial staff, and in Adventures In Elements, Amity trains with an artificial training wand, which is linked to Bellos through the coven system.

But you would think that Luz's runes would also count as artificial. So what gives?

This episode shows them as part of nature more than the more refined spell circles. Luz's magic is that connection to the island in its purest, rawest form, and as I have said before, Luz's greatest strength is her ability to connect.

The dynamic between Wild Magic and Coven Magic isn't a dynamic between the artificial and the natural, it's a dynamic between empathy and utilitarianism. Wild Magic borrows, or is gifted, Coven magic takes and uses for its own ends. They are similar concepts, but it's in the minutia that the meaning comes out.

Final Thoughts

There is one final thing that Wild Magic reminds me of, and its off on a limb a bit. I currently live in Australia, and while Aboriginal spirituality is varied and complex and not my story to tell, I have been gifted this piece of advice that I would like to share: Humans don't own the land, we are a part of it, just as the trees and the beasts and the storms and the fires. Humans are mere custodians, our duty is to watch over and protect, and to connect.

I thought that was relevant.

I am away next week, but I'll be back in the new year with some analysis of The First Day, so stick around if that interests you.

Previous - Next

[withnofreetime]

Hetalia ☆ World Stars (512, main story) (1/2)

5 days later, I finished. And because it was the 10 most hard-work hours of the week I share it.

Translation notes at the end: ‘cuz I took a lot of “creative freedoms(?)”. Warning: I don’t know Italian, German (my sister know) and Chinese.

Next (2/2) T/N:

Page 1. (Warning: Rough translations)

“Distretto Italia”, this one is obvious “Distric Italy”

“Fratellone” is an informal way to say “big brother”, the formal and literal word is “maggiore fratello” but they’re gangsta.

“Pezzi di merda” is “pieces of sh*t”.

Page 2.

“Chūgoku District”, its name of an island in Japan, but it’s also used to refer to China.

The bad quality in the name of China, so I just invented it: “Great Dinasty”, because the Great Wall and nth dynasties.

“Ya dig?” I’m not British and I don’t know anyone who is, so… sorry.

Page 3.

“Parrain”. Wikipedia has a lot of information about the hierarchy in the French Mafia and they said: “Godfather” like the movie but French (?). Apparently “Parrain” is not as important as “Caïd” who is the “Big Boss” but that changes from family to family.

“Король” means “King”, and has nothing to do with “Tsar”, but it’s also related to the monarchy.

Page 4.

“Amici” the plural way of “friend”, hence “friends”.

“Homo Homini Lupus”, again Wikipedia, is a Latin proverb, “Homo/Homini” is “Human”, and “Lupus” is “Wolf”. It can be translated to “Man is wolf to man”. In other words: “Don’t trust (talk) to strangers, because they can be dangerous”, just thinks about “Little Red Riding Hood”.

“Fratelli d’ Italia” is “Italian Brothers”

“Stahl in unserer Seele” is “Steel in our soul”. I couldn’t find any current or old usage of the phrase, but I didn’t look very hard…

“Rising Sun”, again the quality. But in my country, Japan is the “Country of the Rising Sun” and I REALLY like the name, better Japan than Spain :)

“Grand Master”, I think in Japanese is used to name the Master of the family/house.

Page 6.

“Evviva!” Is like a “Hooray!” But it’s a shout of enthusiasm.

“Figlio di puttana” is “son of a b*tch”.

Page 7.

The “ranks”, not sure about that. I know it’s now about them as players tho (Germany was more lost…).

“Chi trova un amico, trova un tesoro”, an Italian proverb, “who finds a friend, finds a treasure”. The Centro Virtual Cervantes said its usage is very common.

“Grazie!”, “Thanks”.

“Cari tesori”, “dear treasures”, let’s pretend that Japan and Germany don’t know Italian.

Page 9.

“Chi la fa, l’aspetti”, depending on the context (and the person) the proverb can be negative or positive, literal tl: “who makes it, waits for it”, like karma but Italy made it positive. It’s very used.

“Caro amico” is “dear friend”.

Page 10.

“Cost” it’s real money lol. And, uh, please notice the wallet with a rose embroidery from China and ignore what France does.

If you notice an error (most likely), please don’t doubt to say it.

[room-surprise]

do you know or have thoughts on why the dm characters sometimes reference ‘hell’ (as in ‘what the hell?’) given how the series handles religion? is that an anime thing or translation thing or…???

This is such a great question, and fun to answer, so thank you for writing to me!!! I think there's two things happening at the same time: What does hell really mean in English, and what are the characters actually saying in the original Japanese?

If the characters say hell in the original manga or in any translations, I think it is pretty safe to assume that they aren't referring to the Christian hell specifically, since it doesn't appear to exist in the Dungeon Meshi world. They are instead referring to the generic concept of a hell.

NON-CHRISTIAN HELLS

Hell is a word that can refer to a "bad afterlife" in many different world cultures. Obviously all of these cultures have their own names for these places, but when they are translated into English they are frequently referred to as "Buddhist hell", "Hindu hell", "Nordic hell", etc.

The word "hell" was adopted by Christians to describe something in their religion, but does not originate with them.

The modern English word hell is derived from Old English hel, to refer to a nether world of the dead. The word has cognates in all branches of the Germanic languages, and they all ultimately derive from the reconstructed Proto-Germanic feminine noun xaljō or haljō ('concealed place, the underworld'), and can be traced back even further to Proto-Indo European.

When the Germanic peoples were converted to Christianity, the word "hell" was adopted to refer to the Christian underworld. Before that time, hell was called many different things by the Christians, including "Sheol" (grave, death, pit, underworld), "Gehenna" (valley of wailing), "Hades" or "Tartarus." (The first two are Hebrew words, and the latter two are Ancient Greek. All of these words are attempting to describe similar things, a bad afterlife.) These Germanic cultures (most of Northern, Western and Central Europe) are the primary cultural influence of Dungeon Meshi's Eastern and Northern Continents, where the story takes place, and where most of the characters are from. So the word hel/hell would be native to the region, and logical for the characters to use both as a swear word, and also as a reference to whatever afterlife they might believe in.

WHAT ARE THE CHARACTERS ACTUALLY SAYING THOUGH?

Dungeon Meshi is, for better or for worse, written in standard, contemporary Japanese, without any particular emphasis or attempt to sound "old fashioned" or like it is "fantasy", so any changes or additions made in translation to make the dialog or narration sound that way are just that: additions and changes. The changes made during translation aren't inherently bad, but the original text is very neutral, and open to interpretation. For example, Yaad calls Laios "tono/dono" in Japanese, which is an honorific that has no direct English equivalent, but is used between two people of similar social status, when one wants to be extra polite to the other. It does not imply nobility, but respect higher than "mister" and lower than "lord." Most English translations have rendered this as "Sir Laios" which isn't literally what Yaad says, but conveys the idea with something that "feels right" for the setting. It may be that in Dungeon Meshi the characters are literally saying the English word "hell/heru" in Japanese (ヘル), the word jigoku (地獄), which is the Japanese word for Buddhist hell, another word for a specific different underworld or afterlife, they are saying a Japanese swear word, or just using casual/impolite language that doesn't have a direct translation into English, and so needs to be localized into something that will make sense in English.

The last one is most likely what is happening, and I can think of a couple of common phrases that would most likely be translated into "What the hell?":

The polite, neutral way to say "What's that?" or "What [should I] do?" is "Nan-darou? (なんだろう?) or "Nani?" (何), which just means "What?"

The more casual, aggressive, masculine way of saying it is "Nani-kore?" (なにこれ？) which doesn't mention hell in any way, but translates to something like "What the hell?" or "What the fuck?" It's more rude because it's casual speech, but doesn't literally use words for hell or fuck in it. It technically means the same thing as "Nan-darou?" or "Nani?" But translating it the same way would be ignoring the context and tone of the words.

Another thing that's often said in Japanese is "Uso!" (うそ！) Which literally means "lie" or "not true", but in conversation it’s often used to say things like "you're lying!", "For real?!", "really?", or "No way!"

Often these exclamations of "Uso!" don't have anything to do with lying or untruths, they are meant to express surprise (this can't be happening!) or a response to someone talking about an outrageous and terrible event they experienced, like saying "No way! I can't believe that happened to you!" It's also sometimes translated as "What the hell…" or "Unbelievable…"

If the translators tried to keep this sort of thing literal, the manga would be full of lines like:

CHILCHUCK, running for his life from a mimic: What's this?! (Nani-kore?!) (He isn't literally asking what the mimic is, he is expressing surprise, so he should shout some curse words in English like hell, fuck, shit, etc.)

MARCILLE, horrified by the chimera: Lie! (Uso!) (She isn't just saying the word "lie" with no context, she is expressing shock, horror and disbelief at what she sees, so she should say something like "No, that can't be..." or "Impossible...")

I am not an expert in Japanese, but I hope that all of this is helpful to you, anon, and anyone else that's interested in this sort of thing!

[vikinglanguage]

An assortment of more or less ridiculous Danish phrases to incorporate into your day-to-day life! (part the 2nd)

strømpesokker (noun, fk. pl.) – socksocks Or stockingsocks, if you will. It's socks either way.

(hjemme)futter (noun, fk. pl.) – (home)choos I literally had no idea how to translate this, but basically futter (fut in singular) are like slippers or any kind of cozy, comfortable shoes you'd wear indoors. I don't know why we sometimes call them that, but fut is also the sound a train makes. Thus: choos.

blamsefi (noun, fk.) – blasmephy Blasphemy, but wrong because it sounds funnier like this

idyd (interj.) – indeed This is what we in Danish tend to call an undersættelse (see below) of the English indeed. I 'in' and dyd 'virtue', but it kind of sounds like deed. Again, I don't know anyone who uses this except from my immediate family

undersætte (verb) – transearly (extremely not literally) Allow me to explain: in Danish translate is oversætte (lit. over + set, likely a calque of Latin trādūcō via German übersetzen). When you underdo the act of oversætte, so when you translate something badly, especially if you do it too literally, you have not translated it – you have transearlied it (excuse my creative liberties here)

hils (verb, imperative) – tell them I said hello You can use this in literally any situation when someone announces they are going anywhere at all. To Austria? Hils! Grandpa's uncle's dog's funeral? Hils! The restroom? Hils! (even better if it's not a public restroom). However, this is traditionally used to tell someone to tell the person on the other end of a phone call hello from you

knep (interj.) – fuck (literally) Literal translation of English fuck. This is considered extremely vulgar in the same way that I think fuck is to especially older speakers of English (?)

stande (verb, dialect) – refurb An alternate way to say istandsætte (long, boring, standard Danish) in the dialect of the area of Jylland where I'm from (Salling). It means to fix, repair or refurbish

slo (adj., dialect) – stale Literally means the same as stale, which (imo) doesn't have an actual word in standard Danish. Your crisps got old and soft? Slo. Bread old and dry? Slo. Straw wet and moldy? Slo. Soda lost all its fizz? Slo. Again, this is sallingbomål <3

goddawsbjerg (interj.) – g'day-hill Say this when it is clear someone has not been following what has been said or has happened around them, kind of as to say "thrilled you decided to join us mentally as well as physically". As for the prevalence, I literally don't know anyone outside of my immediate family who uses this

idyllerisk (adj.) – idyllicish Literally just idyllic but funnier

bajselademad (noun, fk.) – pinchocowich Bajselademad is a portmanteau of the words bajer/bajser 'beer' (slang, so I used pint instead of beer) and chokoladelademad 'chocolate sandwich' (open faced, obviously). It literally just means a beer

puttesove (verb) – tucky-sleep A sorta cutesy, joking way to say sleep. Putte is the word for tucking someone in, as well as just chilling in bed – with at least a blanket or duvet if not several in addition to pillows

diskodaskoluderbenzin (noun, uncountable) – disco dasco whore gasoline Excuse the misogynistic overtones, but I just genuinely think this is a very funny was of describing low percentage vodka- or rum-basesd drinks (for example Bacardi Breezer)

kodyl (adj.) – aspirin Kodyl means great or exaggerated, and you can also use it as an interjection kodylt! like you would use 'swell!', because it is pretty outdated. Kodyl was originally a brand of painkiller

hurtigkneppersko (noun, fk. pl.) – fast-fucker shoes Expensive men's shoes, usually of some kind of skin, be it leather or snake. It implies the wearer of the shoes is a braggart with nothing to really brag about. This was added to the dictionary fairly recently, to the great amusement of many Danes

slam! (onomatopoeia) – whack! An onomatopoetic word imitating the sound of being hit. Used not unlike the (now somewhat outdated) English "oooh, burn!" or just "ouch!" to indicate that something said to someone in your company was (perhaps unnecessarily) blunt, rude, or just shut them down really quickly – like a slap to the face

hjemmebragt (adj.) – home mrade Or, more accurately, home brought. Most commonly used for baked goods (originating from hjemmebagt 'baked at home') that you intended to make yourself, but you just didn't have time, so you bought it at the corner store instead. Its use has, however, in my experience been extended to include most anything that """should've""" been homemade, but isn't

konge (adj.) – king When something is really good, it's konge. Anything can be konge, from a chair to the meal your mother cooked you on your bi-annual visit at home.

brugsvildledning (noun, fk.) – user misleader · deceptions for use A play on the word for 'user guide', brugsvejledning, swapping out the nominalised form of the verb vejlede 'guide, lead' for that of vildlede ' 'mislead, decive'

ork (noun, fk.) – bear An ork is something that you just really cannot be bothered to do, because it would require some kind of effort. Doesn't matter how much effort, as it could be anything from getting your drink that you forgot in your kitchen, only realising this after you sat down, to explaining to your homophobic uncle why it's not acceptable to call gay people slurs, even if it is "just a joke". Most often, it is the former of those two scenarios

dak (noun, uncountable) – boom* Short for dakkedak, which is an onomatopoetic name for music with a strong, repetitive bass rhythm. *this is a bad translation, but it's the best I could come up with

gråssenollike (noun, fk.) – greyish feather-brain A joke-y name for a house sparrow, gråspurv. Gråsse is presumed to either originate from plain gråspurv or gråsset 'grey-ish', and nollike is a word that can mean fool, but also be used about animals or women in jest.

skemad (noun, uncountable) – spoon food Literally anything you can eat with a spoon. I believe its most common use is for the food you first give babies when they are moving on from nursing to real food, but I know quite a few people who use it for cereal because we literally only have the word “morgenmadsprodukter” for it, which is a mouthful to say.

[ganondoodle]

genuine genuine genuine question- wwwhy do you not like the zonai? (zonau? not sure if thats like. the worlds coolest plural or a translation difference) given your content with more monstery designs i would have thought they'd be up your alley!! however. i have also not played skyward sword (as much as id like to) and i know most of peoples upset with their existence and the totk storyline is because of its conflicts with that plot? i'm very excited to see what you do with your rewrite/botw2!! given their slight presence in faron in botw, it would be cool to see you repurpose the zonai in some way that doesn't conflict with the plot you're going for, something that makes more sense with the cryptic kinda bare minimum we had in botw? sorry if you've explained your stance on the zonai before <3

hhhhhhhh i had ranted alot about it but i hope you are prepared- (also "zonai" is sonau in german but im choosing to write it with a z so people recognize it at least, im pretty sure zonau is also the orignal japanese word for them)

i am fine with their design, in fact, i LIKE their character designs, however i dont like everything else about them.

and no its also not bc it affects skyward sword bc it doesnt affect ANYTHING in skyward sword, bc skyward sword is the VERY FIRST zelda game in the timeline and totk is nowhere near it, totk draws several paralels towards skysw bc its meant a sort of soft reset for this new era but its really just thematic overlap and references bc those are cool (i know alot of people are trying to convince the entire fandom that totk somehow is crammed into the old timeline but trust me its never anywhere near confirmed nor does it make any sense, heres the lil graphic i made last month to clarify how i think its meant to be understood .. quite obviously even -

i dont mean to sound .. mean, but some people read too much into little phrases or references to older titles (like first king of hyrule .. doesnt have to mean the literal firstest of the first ones in all of forgotten history ever, just the first of THIS hyrule for example), and while im not against theories i am very annoyed when people try to say its somehow canon when its NOT)

with that out of the way;

i dont like how they are 'integrated' into botws world, they feel unnatural and shoved in everywhere, they have been everywhere and did everythign better and cooler and no part of (this) hyrule was untouched by them their architecture feels not integrated well either and design wise its rather bland, while the sheikah shrines for example while obviously not natural and very 'techy' they still build a harmonizing contrast while the totk shrines are pretty laughably unfitting compared to them the basically complete disappearance of all sheikah tech related stuff bothers me immensely bc why would you just get rid of it istead of developing it further (i know about purahs towers and think they are just like a worse version of the previous ones; and before this argument comes up again, them destryoing it all -somehow- bc they were afraid of it being taken over again is a dumb excuse bc then they should be even more scared of zonau tech- even MORE unknown and advanced tech literally falling from the sky) you could have done SO MUCH with the ancient shiekah tech it drives me nuts

i also think it tipped the delicate balance of the kinda medival setting + high tech that botw had set up compeltely over, the zonau tech just .. is so painfully obviously only the way it is to give you little lego parts to glue together (i know its a focus of the game ... or at least the gamePLAY but it could have been done better, again i think they managed the balance perfectly with shiekah tech, its weird and isnt natural but doesnt endanger the believability of it ... the zonau tech just throws that out the window rly ... how cool would it have been if you could built lil guardian walk thingies djknhfkd )

in general they just feel like a complete replacement for the ancient shiekah and are so SO desperately trying to make the zonau the COOLER and BETTER versions of what the shiekah were (you COULD have connected them in a cool way, like there being ancient shiekah labs build in the old zonau mining facilities bc they used zonau tech as basis for their own tech etc)

like instead of building on the set up and potential botw had prepared, they just scrambled to make a 'better' version of botw, like oh no forget THAT ancient civilization we have an EVEN MORE ancient, and EVEN MORE highly developed peoples there that were also everywhere before you but also were never really hinted at- and then repeat botws structure .__.

having an old and forgotten civilization of whom only some withered ruins remain gave botw a much more real feeling, a world with a history that you will never know (you know, bc that makes it intriguing and is just .. a good choice of worldbuilding imo)- and then totk comes along and reveals everything and also nothing, we know too much of them to be intrigued by their mystery and also not enough to actually care about them (also them beign presented as the good perfectly perfectestest kingdom of light that can do no wrong other than underestimate the eeeevil guy while they also had their hands on every part of the land and made all other races be their face and nameless servants just ... thats weird man!! i know its a game, even if its only aimed at kids my god they arent stupid either!! you really present me with that and expect me to take it at face value what argh)

again i think they COULD have been integrated into it, but the way it was done completely threw me off, im not mad about them EXISTING but about how it was DONE in the game

the way they were done robs not just totk but also botw of mystery and intrigue, for example i much rather had them stay a mystery, only ever talked about in some text and some old and almost completely withered ruins left, you never get so see what happened there in the past, you can only guess, but you have to deal with the fallout anyway and thats just ONE possibility, there are so many and it feels like they chose the most boring one every single time

sometimes knowing less is better than knowing half

(maybe i can make it clearer when .. or if i can get to illustrate what could have worked -in my opinion- better .... sorry for ranting again ;__; )

[indristian]

More weirdly specific König Headcanons

By an austrian for an austrian character

He can hide how drunk he is pretty well, doesn't really start slurring his words and can hold deep conversations, the gig is over as soon as he stands up tho. He starts swaying pretty badly and has walked into more than one lamppost while intoxicated. Has apologized to every lamppost so far much to the amusement of everyone watching.

He isn't very religious but if someone starts praying the rosary in German his autopilot kicks in and he joins in. Same with certain church songs.

Started smoking at age 16 (don't worry, that was the legal age for smoking until like 5 years ago, then the gov changed it to 18) and regularly tries to quit. Nowadays he mostly smokes when stressed or drunk.

Tries to make everyone on his team say "Oachkatzlschwoaf" (means tail of a squirrel in an austrian dialect), refuses to tell anyone the English meaning bc he can't pronounce the word squirrel.

He's kinda choosy about the water he drinks. Water quality in austria is really good, so you can drink the tap water in the whole country. So when he's somewhere where the water is "technically" drinkable, but has a chlorine taste he prefers drinking bottled water.

Every new years eve at midnight he listens to the blue danube waltz, as is tradition in Austria.

There's a pocket in his tac vest that's reserved for Manner Schnitten. The people that saw something pink sticking out of his vest and made fun of him for it never get offered any when he opens a pack.

(Thanks to @court-of-fairytales for reminding me the Sissi movies exist) He has seen all of the movies, in theory, but the only times he has really seen them when he and his friends/teammates were "Sissi saufen" (saufen meaning drinking/binge drinking). It's a drinking game, mostly played around Christmas and new year, where you watch the 3 movies back to back and everytime someone in the movie says "your majesty" everyone has to stand up, say "long live the empress" and take a shot. Last man standing is the winner.

Has no visible tattoos but there's an AMA Gütesiegel stamp on his right buttcheek.

Kinds nsfw: Has absolutely quoted the "Ich will hinten rein!" ("I want in the back!" just with a lot more homoerotic implications) line when asked where he wanted to sit in a car and has gotten strange looks every time. (The movie this reference is from: (T)Raumschiff Surprise)

Kinda nsfw: He really likes talking to people in German (even if they don't really understand him) or teaching someone german words or phrases. The only thing he really hates is dirty talk in german, he'll do it if someone he's sleeping with requests it but he'll keep his face out of their sight bc he'll be 1000% be cringing.

Translates a lot of phrases literally bc the English equivalent "just doesn't have the right feel". Ends up saying things like "They look like a parcel someone ordered but never picked up", "They look like Bambi on stilts", "They have to pay attention like a clothes/shoe maker" ("aufpassen wie ein Haftelmacher", I know it as "aufpassen wie ein Haftelpitscher" but Google doesn't know it 😔) or "It's raining like the sky/like heaven is open".

Every time he sees someone with a Red Bull in their hand he has to resist the urge to say "You know, that's an austrian brand!"

The headcanons just keep coming!

And tbh after the last part I'm really tempted to make a playlist or a post compiling german songs König would get stuck in his head/would listen to. If anyone's interested please tell me!

Part one

Part two

Part four

Part five

Part six

[cadmusfly]

The One Time Marshal Soult Called Thiers A Little Pissant And Then It Got Into A Dictionary

Happy birthday, you grumpy asshole curmudgeon military man who I'd probably hate if I lived at the same time as you (for I am a modern day leftist) but with the distance of time I'm utterly fascinated by what is wrong with you! I'll post a weird drawing/animation of you later probably.

So I've been perusing a 1870s biography of Soult written by someone who met him with the help of very dodgy AI machine translation, getting through a chapter or two per night, and I got to this chapter called

So that translates to "A WORD ABOUT A WORD". It's about 500 words long, not a long chapter, but I laughed so hard when I discovered it's entirely and literally about one word.

And the worst part is that the author refuses to write what the word actually is.

On the occasion of dissent, real or supposed, which had determined Marshal Soult to leave the Ministry, the press hastened to indulge in the most hazardous conjectures. According to some, Mr. Thiers and his adversary had come to the most lively explanations, the most personal recriminations, the most incisive reproaches; according to others, everything would have been limited to a single word from the mouth of the old soldier, a word to which his young opponent would not have known how to respond. This word is not that of Cambronne, but it is of an origin just as abject. Therefore, I will not write it. Its origin is linked to a low phrase, whose root is a verb not listed in the dictionary, and which has very little time. In the present indicative it serves to say: I don't care; in the future: I will put my hand on your face; in the infinitive it is only a swear word; in the past participle it energetically replaces an adjective always expressing an idea of loss, or a feeling of bad mood. This word is familiar, trivial, dirty, common, vulgar; and if, for some time, it has been introduced into conversation, it is with the help of a Germanic ending which almost completely distorts it.

More quotation from the chapter under the cut, as well as what the word actually is.

Was this word, in the beginning, Romance, Gallic or French? One could easily attribute this first character to it, if one paid attention to the quantity of applications that have come from it. Thus, with a completely patois ending, it means simpleton, dullard, deceived husband, etc.; welded to a very respectable first name, since it appears twice each year among the saints of the Gregorian Calendar, it becomes French and applies to a man who deceives, by not keeping his promise; finally in the southern countries where the Romance language is still spoken, it produces an epithet very accurate by its expression, but very difficult to define in any other language. This very euphonic epithet, very easy to pronounce, very expressive in its meaning, applies to any individual endowed with a certain natural wit, but using it badly, always talking a lot, but often saying very little, not fearing difficulties, but creating them, calling for the help of others, but hindering them in their exercise by a multitude of objections, having more thoughtlessness than malice, more malice than wickedness; this spirit denotes a man always ready to have his say on any question, penetrating enough to grasp its form whatever it may be, except sometimes to make light of the substance; not very moral, moreover, that is to say not attaching his feelings, his ideas, his conduct to any superior belief, to any religious dogma, to any philosophical principle; this is the developed explanation of this word attributed to Marshal Soult, and which he obviously never pronounced with the spelling and accent that disfigure it, if tradition is to be believed. Indeed, he would never have substituted the letter r, inappropriately inserted in the second syllable, for the letter s, which ends the second syllable; above all, he would never have given the French sound to the final vowel, he who was so accustomed to expressing another sound quite particular to the patois idiom.

(1) Here, moreover, as to the authenticity of the word attributed to the Marshal, is how tradition tends to establish it. We read in fact in a newspaper of September 13, 1869: "It was told, last night, in a circle where one likes to politicize between two cigars, that, under the July government, when a fiery Marshal of France treated Mr. Thiers as a 'little f.... iquet', Mrs. Dosne asked, the same day, to the statesman, her son-in-law: -- 'Well! what do you intend to do?' -- 'That's fine! but.... revenge? What do you want me to do to that animal? He is Marshal, Duke and Peer of France; he has everything he could dream of and even more....' -- 'Well! write the history of the conquest of Algeria, and don't put his name in it once: he will burst with spite! ' Did Mr. Thiers ever begin this history-vendetta?"

It took me a little bit to find out what the word was with all this word charades and me not knowing French, but I found it in the end:

"foutriquet"

I don't need to speak french to know what that second definition is referring to. And that second screenshot is from a French dictionary website, so this word is in the dictionary, take that, biographer writer who also trips balls about Soult's daughter!

Wiktionary claims it means "weedy man", which is also very funny. I'm guessing that it used to be a much ruder word but now probably just sounds quaint/historical/dated. I'm curious about the "s" form that the author alludes to, it seems that might have been supplanted by Soult's usage of the word.

Anyway yeah, I'm still cracking up that Soult dunked on Thiers so hard it ended up in a dictionary. Happy birthday you fuckin asshole, I might bake a cake in your honour or something.

[dailydemonspotlight]

Sandman - Day 132

Race: Night Arcana: Strength Alignment: Neutral-Chaos October 22nd, 2024

Mr Sandman, sand me a man. Make him the cutest man car door hook hand.

Dreams have always been an incredibly curious part of human existence as a whole, and many different cultures around the world have looked for ways to explain the phenomenon, one that we, even now, don't fully understand. After all, even with our relative understanding of why they form and how they work, dreams are still a bit of a mystery in the terms of their purpose. This brings us to back in the day, however, when we knew even less- dreams were even more obscure in their origins and their role, and as such, like many things, people looked to folkloric explanations. Case in point, our subject, the Sandman: the bringer of dreams in traditional European folklore.

Traditionally a Scandinavian being, though one that spread throughout much of Europe, the Sandman was a popular figure that existed to help people fall asleep and grant them dreams. One of the earliest accounts we're aware of, being an 18th century German dictionary of the supernatural, speaks of just this, as 'der Sandmann kommt' (literally 'the Sandman comes') was an idiom used to refer to someone who looked like they were just about to sleep. The phrase was also typically used to refer to a child who would rub their eyes, or alternatively had rheum under their eyes upon waking up, and essentially was a joke about the fact that the Sandman had thrown sand in their eyes while they were asleep/to make them fall asleep.

However, as time went on, the Sandman began to take on a far more literal role, solidified in the famous 1817 story 'Der Sandmann,' which paints the figure in a far more antagonistic light; as the story goes, a young boy is told of the story of a 'Sandman' who would throw sand in the eyes of anybody awake in the wee hours of the night to make their eyes fall out, after which he'd steal their eyes and bag them up to feed to his children back home. This eventually ended up inspiring the story Ole Lukøie, which was a far less horror-focused fairy tale. The 1841 story speaks of the eponymous Ole Lukøie, roughly translating to 'Mr. Shut-eye,' who would be a fairy-like figure who brought a carton of milk to pour in people's eyes to let them sleep.

However, with the strange translations of the story early in its lifespan afoot, Ole Lukøie would be described as 'throwing a powder' into people's eyes instead, and somewhere down the road, someone decided to call him the Sandman instead. As time went on and the concept evolved, the Sandman became detached from Der Sandmann and more associated with Ole Lukøie. Now, with the myriad of poems and stories about him being related to him bringing good sleep instead of, well, stealing the eyes of children, the Sandman became a far more friendly figure who brought good dreams and inspired imagination far and wide. He was said to have told stories in the night, bringing about what dreams were, bringing this all full circle.

Shin Megami Tensei takes the theme of sleep and night to a head with the design of the Sandman, as his head is literally a moon, and the sack he carries is filled with the sand that the Sandman would toss into the eyes of children to put them to sleep. I'm not sure why his preset dialogue in most games is on the older side, though, as several interpretations of the Sandman show him as a child- it might just be a translation thing, might be connected to his general race as a Night (which is a fun nod, honestly,) or it could even draw connection between him and the original story. I'm not sure, but still, it's a fun and memorable design in the series that has barely changed over the years for good reason.