#the grammarians

[sesame-sim]

BOOK - The Grammarians by Cathleen Schine

QUICK SYNOPSIS - Laurel and Daphne Wolfe, a pair of red-headed twin sisters, get in an almost lifelong rift over who gets to keep the family dictionary.

IMAGE 1 - A couple years after first-born son Don Wolfe went off to university to study psychiatry, younger brother Arthur enrolled to study economics. This was purely to satisfy his father. Words had always been held in high esteem in Arthur's eyes far more than numbers ever were so he spent much of his time holed up in the library reading. One afternoon he aided a female student with finding the poetry section and got to talking about the beauty of words. She asked him if he was a Simlish major.

ARTHUR: (bitterly) No, I'm in economics. In a few years I"ll be counting the coins of others, piling it up, hiding it in safe, filthy little bundles. That'll be my profession. SALLY: Don't be such a snob about money! Lawyers make money. Doctors make money too. ARTHUR: But their days aren't spent COUNTING money. SALLY: (laughing) I wonder. (Then, slyly) I understand your point that numbers aren't as noble as words. Numbers are quite useless. By the way, we had SIX inches of snow but it's above THIRTY-TWO degrees so it won't stick for long. But the ground is still treacherous and I've got to make my way to a THREE o'clock lecture in FIFTEEN minutes without breaking my FOUR limbs or my grade is going to plummet to ZERO."

IMAGE 2 - Arthur blinked at her. Then he walked and talked with her straight out of the library doors after she had checked out her book. He reasoned he had to make sure she didn't take a tumble.

BOOK TIME/PLACE - 1950, their university was not mentioned in the book

MY SAVE TIME/PLACE - Sim Year 50 / Sim Day 5694 / Winter D9 / MON / Britechester

SONG PAIRING - From 1950, Bewitched by Bill Snyder

[notaplaceofhonour]

wishing everyone a happy new year but spelling it differently every time like shana tova shanah tovah shana tovah shanah tova l’shanah tova

[flyingpurplepeopleprogrammer]

Sure. I get it. You want to be brainwashed. You've been very clear about that.

But I want you to be a little less ambiguous.

It's not your fault, actually. It's the language itself that's unclear - a noisome contrivance of language that one can only "be brainwashed" in the passive voice.

So what I want to know is how you feel about two different things:

The first "being brainwashed" is the "becoming" part of being brainwashed. What do you think that's like? Is it something you want? How does it feel?

The second "being brainwashed" is the "being" part of being brainwashed. The brainwashing has happened. You're better now. And you get to notice - or maybe not - the difference between the old and the new you. How does that feel? Is it different? Should we fix that?

[cosmogyros]

Thirteen Untranslatable Words

(by Michael Covarrubias)

I’ve been doing some research […] and I’ve found some of the most amazing untranslatable words in the non-American speaking world. Here they are, in no spectacular order.

1. Mamihlapinatapei

This is one of the first words I learned about as an untranslatable word. It’s spoken by using an ancient and primitive language from Chile, in Tierra del Fuego. (Tierra del Fuego, by the way, means “Fire, Having Land/Earth/Dirt, Which Land/Earth/Dirt Is Being This Land/Earth/Dirt”.) The word, mamihlapinatapei, is unfortunately untranslatable.

2. Toska

This is a Russian word. It means… uhhh… it’s sort of like… hm. Well it’s a cool meaning, but you have to know Russian to understand it.

3. Iktsuarpok

The Inuits only have one word for this, and therefore although we can’t know what this word means, we do know that iktsuarpok is neither important nor familiar to the Inuits, otherwise they would have 231 words for it.

4. Shlimazl

This Yiddish word is often used next to schlemiel, both of them meaning something related to each other. The meaning is something close to… uhhhh… dammit this article is hard to write.

5. Friolero

No idea. Looks Spanish.

6. The

You might recognize this word, but there is no English translation of it. It is similar to a and an but it has a nuanced meaning that those two words just don’t quite capture.

7. Tartle

Scots talk funny, don’t they?

8. Torschlusspanik

Germans use this word. You might notice it has the word panik in it which is close to English panic but those other parts mean some other sorts of things.

9. Wabi-Sabi

In Japanese culture, you have… there are these… ummm… It rhymes with itself. Like that other untranslatable word Oingo Boingo.

10. Hwæt

This Old English word used to be English when English wasn’t yet old. Once it became old, hwæt became impossible to use.

11. Cafuné

Not even speakers of Portuguese from Portugal can understand this word. Only speakers of Portuguese from Brazil know what it means.

12. L’appel du vide

There’s no single English word that captures the full meaning of this French phrase. The French have one translation of it that they have shared with us (the call of the void), but they have recently given it another more interesting meaning that they are keeping from us.

13. Schadenfreude

This weird German word roughly translates into the English word, schadenfreude.

(source)

[consanguinitatum]

Having a Tennant sorting Saturday....

So this is how a David Tennant researcher like myself spends her Saturday: organizing all my research into a new content management system, so I can make sense of the reams of information I have. Here are but a few of the thousands of images and files I'm working with today....

Of course, much of this will eventually show up on either A Tennantcy To Act or on its companion podcast...or both!

Join me! - Subscribe!

[haveyouheardthispodcast]

[specgram]

The October 2024 Issue of Speculative Grammarian

The editors and publishers of Speculative Grammarian are pleased to announce that another issue of our esteemed journal is now available. This issue offers many excellent articles, including our unprecedented endorsement for president, an informative enumeration of widely-held but unsubstantiated claims, and the revelation of a fairly screwed-up potential new linguistic (non-)universal—along with the usual collection of letters from our readers, breaking news, a Linguimerick Centenary, serendipitous fieldwork, linguistickish puzzles, and more…

[infirmux]

you people want toxic lesbian romance but will not even watch la morte vivante AFTER LOUS EXCEEDINGLY POLITE REQUEST TO THAT EFFECT

[eizneckam]

sukinako wo possum ga wasureta

[sixbucks]

[katzenklavierr]

Discussion about neopronouns is all in good fun so I'm not about to Well Actually any memes about it but I'm starting to think people don't actually know the difference between pronouns and vocatives or what constitutes a "standard"/neo distinction to begin with

[sesame-sim]

Books I'm Currently Playing

Click for tagged posts

Unmarriageable by Soniah Kamal

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

The Grammarians by Cathleen Schine

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain along with Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever

Wild Game by Adrienne Brodeur

Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choi

The Color of Water by James McBride

Will update this whenever any books are added in or retired from the lineup. FYI I add a new book in after every 5 sim years in my save.)

[fierceawakening]

I am probably the only person who even cares but someone please give that sentence a mood marker it’s so pretty but then it just looks wrong

[doccywhomst]

a great example is “disaster,” from the italian word disastro, the root word aster (star); the ‘dis’ prefix implies moving the stars out of place - probably because heavenly bodies that are out of alignment are associated with misfortune.

‘dis’ seems to imply that something has always been whole, or organized in one way, then is broken. ‘mis’ seems to imply human causality. this might be why ‘dis’ words carrier a stronger implication, because they suggest that nature created something, then took it apart. large scale.

fascinated by how "dislocate" seems to be a word used almost exclusively to refer to the misalignment of bodies, or parts of the body, from their proper place. it's distinctly anatomical. you don't say "i dislocated my keys" for instance, even though that's technically a correct and coherent sentence.

[arabicfornerds]

How the Broken Plural Helps Classify Arabic

The Arabic broken plural has the effect that scholars still debate how to properly classify the several branches of Semitic languages.

[specgram]

The January 2024 Issue of Speculative Grammarian

The editors and publishers of Speculative Grammarian are pleased to announce that another issue of our esteemed journal is now available. This issue offers many excellent articles, including a look into the shallowly cute yet deeply unsavory nature of a well-known “educational” children’s song; a view of the future of linguistics as seen from the past (part, the first); and an excerpt on the Effolk dialect from the not-entirely-reliable Jimmypedia—along with the usual collection of letters from our readers, breaking news, limericks, serendipitous fieldwork, book announcements, linguistickish puzzles, and more...