Can you see the little boids? My wife thinks they are thrushes, though they look more like blackbirds to me; they’re eating the remaining apples.
It snowed another eighteen inches or so (45 cm) in the night. But now it’s stopped and as you can see below, the sky is clear.
While some were breaking out their skis, I was breaking out the snow blower. My wife had been out at three o’clock this morning telling the council snowplough not to spit his damp, council snow in the direction of our driveway. The driver cleared the drive as an apology, but then came another foot of the stuff. It’s beautiful snow, though. Dry powder, very good for skiing and beautiful for snowblowing.
A Bad Guide 
I don’t see them eating apples. They’re just sitting there – possibly quite indifferent to the apples, after having consumed too much plum pudding down the road. I wonder how much you know about the subjectivity of thrushes.
There’s a nice bit about the subjectivity of fishes in The Mill on the Floss. Mr. Tulliver, out of pig-headedness and litigiousness, sues someone and loses the case, which had been defended by the lawyer Mr. Wakem, whom Mr. Tulliver irrationally hates. Tulliver will go bankrupt as a result, and his mill will be up for sale. Mrs. Tulliver hears that Wakem might buy the mill. She wants to convince him not to do so, because her husband would be crushed by this extra humiliation. The worried but rather weakheaded Mrs. Tulliver humbles herself before lawyer Wakem in a private interview. But by bringing up the subject of his buying the mill, she actually puts it into his head, because it had not yet occurred to him to do so. Eliot writes about Wakem:
Prosperous men take a little vengeance now and then, as they take a diversion, when it comes easily in their way, and is no hindrance to business: and such small unimpassioned revenges have an enormous effect in life, running through all degrees of pleasant infliction, blocking the fit men out of places, and blackening characters in unpremeditated talk. Still more, to see people who have been only insignificantly offensive to us, reduced in life and humiliated without any special efforts of ours, is apt to have a soothing, flattering influence: Providence, or some other prince of this world, it appears, has undertaken the taks of retribution for us: and really, by an agreeable constitution of things, our enemies, somehow, *don’t* prosper.
Wakem was not without this parenthetic vindictiveness towards the uncomplimentary miller; and now Mrs. Tulliver had put the notion into his head, it presented itself to him as a pleasure to do the very thing that would cause Mr. Tulliver the most dreadly mortification – and a pleasure of a complex kind, not made up of crude malice, but mingling with it the relish of self-approbation. To see an enemy humiliated gives a certain contentment, but this is jejune compared with the highly blent satisfaction of seeing him humiliated by your benevolent action or concession on his behalf. That is a sort of revenge which falls into the scale of virtue, and Wakem was not without an intention of keeping that scale respectably filled …
These were the mental conditions in which Mrs. Tulliver had undertaken to act persuasively, and had failed: a fact which may receive some illustration from the remark of a great philosopher, that fly-fishers fail in preparing their bait so as to make it alluring in the right quarter, for want of a due acquaintance with the subjectivity of fishes.
Blent means blended?
I don’t understand. Mrs Tulliver is supposed to dissuade Mr Wakem from buying the mill, but instead puts the idea into his head. How is that comparable to a flyfisher-person not knowing the likes and dislikes of fishes?
Thank you very much for the excerpt, Grumbly. I enjoyed reading it even if I couldn’t quite see where she was going with the subjectivity. This is, in fact, the reason why I have to hang around with you people, so you’ll explain.
We did get a white Christmas within the meaning of the act, so I suppose I mustn’t complain, but I wish we had a foot and a half of new snow. Today it’s above the freezing point, and raining a bit.
Still, it was a good day for sticking snow together. My daughter and I made a couple of snowmen. We started out to make just one, but (like an omnipotent deity in a hypothetical question) I made the second ball too heavy for me to lift, so I changed plans and declared it to be the second snowperson’s first ball. It’s just as well; if we had made just one, my daughter would probably have felt that it was lonely without a companion. Their eyeballs are homemade pretzel nuggets. My niece made them and she was disappointed by how hard they got. They should hold up well.
You’re lucky she wasn’t disappointed that her pretzels got used for snowman eyes. I don’t know how old she is, but I’ve seen that kind of thing cause a LOT of trouble. We always used stones, and a carrot for the nose, in this household.
I don’t understand. Mrs Tulliver is supposed to dissuade Mr Wakem from buying the mill, but instead puts the idea into his head. How is that comparable to a flyfisher-person not knowing the likes and dislikes of fishes?
Mrs. Tulliver wanted to catch the fish Wakem with pity bait – but she had no idea of the likes and dislikes of Wakem. She did not know him personally, or by reputation – that is, apart from her husband’s ranting and raving.
She put the idea into his head merely by mentioning it. She had assumed that a rumor she had heard – that Wakem was considering buying the mill – was true. In fact the idea had not been in his head, until she brought it up.
In other words, it is not necessarily a good idea to assume that someone who seems to be your enemy may in fact be amenable to pity. This would be to ignore the phenomenon of “parenthetic vindictiveness”.
I’ve got it. Thank you. It’s a good thing to remember. I’m fairly sure the birds were after the apples, though. Birds are keen on food and there’s little else for them to eat in that apple tree.
I just remembered that the fish metaphor is introduced a page before the page I quoted from. I didn’t want to quote so much, but your fishy questions leave me no choice.
Mrs. Tulliver has just left Wakem’s office:
Although, when Mr. Wakem entered his office that morning, he had had no intention of purchasing Dorlcote Mill, his mind was already made up: Mrs. Tulliver had suggested to him several determining motives, and his mental glance was very rapid: he was one of those men who can be prompt without being rash, because their motives run in fixed tracks, and they have no need to reconcile conflicting aims.
To suppose that Wakem had the same sort of inveterate hatred towards Tulliver, that Tulliver had towards him, would be like supposing that a pike and a roach can look at each other from a similar point of view. The roach necessarily abhors the mode in which the pike gets his living, and the pike is likely to think nothing further even of the most indignant roach than that he is excellent good eating: it could only be when the roach choked him that the pike could entertain a strong personal animosity. If Mr. Tulliver had ever seriously injured or thwarted the attorney, Wakem would not have refused him the distinction of being a special object of his vindictiveness. But when Mr. Tulliver called Wakem a rascal at the market dinner-table, the attorney’s clients were not a whit inclined to withdraw their business from him; and if, when Wakem himself happened to be present, some jocose cattle-feeder, stimulated by opportunity and brandy, made a thrust at him by alluding to old ladies’ wills, he maintained perfect sang froid, and knew quite well that the majority of substantial men then present were perfectly contented with the fact that “Wakem was Wakem”; that is to say, a man who always knew the stepping-stones that would carry him through very muddy bits of practice. A man who had made a large fortune, had a handsome house among the trees at Tofton, and decidely the finest stock of port-wine in the neighbourhood of St. Ogg’s, was likely to feel himself on a level with public opinion. And I am not sure that even honest Mr. Tulliver himself, with his general view of law as a cockpit, might not, under opposite circumstances, have seen a fine appropriateness in the truth that “Wakem was Wakem”; since I have understood from persons versed in history, that mankind is not disposed to look narrowly into the conduct of great victors when their victory is on the right side. Tulliver, then, could be no obstruction to Wakem; on the contrary, he was a poor devil whom the lawyer had defeated several times – a hot-tempered fellow, who would always give you a handle against him. Wakem’s conscience was not uneasy because he had used a few tricks against the miller: why should he hate that unsuccessful plaintiff – that pitiable, furious bull entangled in the meshes of a net ?
Pike is a very unpleasant fish to eat; it’s dry and tasteless, like Mr Wakem. But Mr Wakem sounds more of a swine than a pike.
Ah, but pike made into quenelles de brochet, when properly made, is delicious. But the quenelles have to be light and fluffy – too often they are stodgy and taste and feel like wallpaper paste.
You’re lucky she wasn’t disappointed that her pretzels got used for snowman eyes. I don’t know how old she is, but I’ve seen that kind of thing cause a LOT of trouble. We always used stones, and a carrot for the nose, in this household.
We used sticks for arms, and then my son came along and started making mouths and noses out of smaller bits of wood, but when it came time for eyes I asked for something from the kitchen. It was my sister’s decision to bring us four of her 23-year-old daughter’s pretzels. Perhaps my niece will never find out about all of this, because she had already left us when all of this happened; she had to go home and go to work this morning.
AJP: Snow blowing, not gliding through the woods on skis, how disappointing …
But then you have months ahead of you to do that, I suppose, and I’m lucky to get a week or so every few years.
How does empty know so much about creating snowpersons? I thought he lived in Texas.
A few years ago some Norwegians came to visit my parents’ neighbors. They built a tower of snowballs with spaces between them and put a candle inside. Is that a common Norwegian thing?
No, no, I live near Boston. I’ve never been in Texas in my life except for two tedious airport experiences over the years.
A few years ago some Norwegians […] built a tower of snowballs with spaces between them and put a candle inside. Is that a common Norwegian thing?
A snølykt. Yes, it is.
So empty is a snowbird too. But I wonder if in his omnipotent deityness he might have created one of the snowpersons with two snowballs on the second tier….and eyelashes? (I think you use sticks for the eyelashes.)
And doesn’t it seem like a bit of a coincidink that just when everyone has their eyes peeled for snøK.A.O.S., this T.H.R.U.S.H. appears?
This has been an educational evening. I’ve learned the words “blent” and “dreadly”, and learned that the original or literal application of “stodgy” is to the consistency of food.
And candles in towers of snowballs, too. I’ll have to try that soon. Like this ?
Snølykt! YES!!!
Pronounced… snow-liked? snowlicked…?
Here is a little video:
I think a tea light might be a bit small. Maybe you could use the old girl scout trick of curling up a strip of corrugated cardboard in an empty tuna can, then filling it up with melted wax.
The link that I provided gives step by step instructions. (There is a second page.) They use an ordinary taper candle. Make too big a flame, girl-scout style, and I wonder if you might run the risk of melting the carefully built up snow structure.
My daughter informed me that one of the two snowpeople we made was a girl, but you would never guess which from their physiques or their clothing. As it happens, the female is the taller one and wears a hat; the shorter male has a sort of tiara of leaves.
empty, you’re going to have to unlearn “dreadly” in “dreadly mortification”. That was a typo for “deadly”, made by me. But “blent” is in Eliot’s text.
I find in the OED that there is a word “dreadly”. So you won’t have to unlearn it after all. But what appears in the Modern Library edition of the novel, that I’m now reading, is “deadly mortification”.
Snølykt! pronounced (nonrhotically) snerlicked.
Don’t believe empty. They live in west Texas, and put their snowmen in glass-fronted beer refrigerators.
Trond’s snølykt link is full of reminders about fire: Husk å blåse ut lyset før du går fra det Remember to blow out the candle before you go away from it.
Snølykt! YES!!! Pronounced… snow-liked? snowlicked…?
The vowel of ‘fur’ or ‘sir’ is a good approximation of the long ø of ‘snø’. Y is almost impossible for English speakers, so ‘licked’ maybe the best available pronunciation. The vowel here is short and will in many dialects be pronounced with an ø (even written in many cases, as in ‘nøkkel’ “key” and ‘løkke’ “loop”), so maybe you could say ‘lucked’, too, but that depends on your dialect.
so maybe you could say ‘lucked’, too, but that depends on your dialect.
Unfortunately, I think it only works if your dialect is Norwegian.
AJP: Snow blowing, not gliding through the woods on skis, how disappointing
Not when you’re trying to get your car out.
I heard from some visitors that there’s snøkaos in Oslo, with people having to dig their cars out from underneath where the ploughs have piled the snow. Once their car had been dug out, our visitors were reluctant to leave their newly-accessible parking spot.
“It’s beautiful snow, though. Dry powder” – is it anything like the “fluffy” froggy snow that has sabotaged the Eurostar trains?
Oh, I can take care of myself. I didn’t just take anyone’s word for dreadly, blent, and the older sense of stodgy; I looked them all up.
Is the lykt vowel anything like the short ü of German?
We had a rainy night, and very little of our snow statuary is still standing.
Is the lykt vowel anything like the short ü of German?
Yes, it’s exactly like that.
Unfortunately, I think it only works if your dialect is Norwegian.
Yeah. I don’t mean to say that it works well in the other direction. But the sad fact that we tend to reproduce that vowel as an ø, and especially in naturalized loanwords like ‘pub’ /pøb/ and ‘tøff’ (‘tough’) /tøf/, shows that we tend to hear it as an ø, and since we tend to hear it as an ø, (for some English speakers) that may be the best approximation of a (short) ø.
In other words, it is not necessarily a good idea to assume that someone who seems to be your enemy may in fact be amenable to pity.
As an archaic Bosnian prayer says in Ivo Andrić’s Omer Pasha Latas: “Let us keep far from evil and let us fear God. Let us commit no sins, let us care for the living and remember the dead. Let us not do anything we will be hated for. And let us not beg for mercy of our enemies.” In a region where practically everyone was enemy to everyone else, they just knew better.
What an astute prayer ! Before you made the connection with vindictiveness, I would probably have taken “And let us not beg
for mercy of our enemies” as asking God to help us maintain our pride – something rather incongruous in a prayer, at least a Christian one. You don’t say whether it is Christian, Muslim or of some other religion.
I conceive of an addition to the Lord’s prayer: “And lead us not into temptation, nor into suicidal wussiness”.
What, actually, is wussiness?
The quality of being a wuss.
According to the Urban Dictionary, a wuss is someone who is both a wimp and a pussy.
A person who is physically weak and ineffectual. Often a male person with low courage factor
The New International Bible translates that part of the Lord’s prayer in this way:
And lead us not into temptation, nor into self-destructive naiveté
A perfect translation indeed. Should be introduced in the ecumenic services, or at least in the Catholic catechism which badly needs a memento like this.
The prayer is a Christian one, either Catholic or Orthodox. For the sake of more interculturality, in the novel it is recited by a renegade Muslim who, when drunken, recalls the Christian prayers of his childhood.
I find that the novel has been translated into German, English, and French at the very least. Then I discovered that Andric received the Nobel prize for literature in 1961.
Yes, for another brilliant novel, The Bridge on the Drina. Both are extremely great novels, together with all the rest of Andrić’s writings.
For even more interculturality, he was a Croatian born in Bosnia who confessed himself to be a Serbian author and writing all his works about Bosnians. Or rather about humanity in general as embodied by Bosnians. Very perspicacious and sensitive writings.
humanity=mankind, I mean
I wish someone would consider womankind noble enough to include in books.
What about La città delle donne or Merle’s The protected men?
Yes, The Bridge on the Drina is a great novel, but a harrowing one, and once you read the impalement scene it will be with you for the rest of your life. You have been warned.
LH: Agreed. I very much enjoyed the novel up to that moment, and as you say, it is literally unforgettable.
How strange. I swear to have forgotten it, although I do remember very well the rest of the novel, and I have just recalled this scene as you reminded me of it. Perhaps because this is an often recurrent motif in the historical novels of the period in the region (as it must have been a recurrent event in the reality). I also have some obscure (and quite vulgar) etymologies connected with this sort of execution. Only for linguists and only if required.
I’m not a linguist, but I wouldn’t pass up a chance to hear a good etymology story. I do not object to vulgarity at all.
We welcome obscure vulgarity.
But only when it knows its place. I have always been partial to downstairs personnel.
Well, the vulgarity in this case is quite plain and obvious. What is obscure is that once it was absolutely not vulgar, but something gruesomely ordinary. In Hungarian there is this quite vulgar imperative: “lófasz a seggedbe”, “horse’s prick into your ass”. The image is satisfyingly graphic to make believe that this is an ancient Magyar curse (perhaps from the centuries of nomadization), but in fact it is not. The original sounded some five-four hundred years ago like “lopat a seggedbe”, “lopat into your bottom” (as at that time even “segg” was a non-vulgar name for ‘bottom’), where “lopat” was the Turkish name for the stake of impalement.
An interesting story, but Google gives me only Hungarian sources for it, and I can find no evidence for a Turkish word lopat.
Well, this is what the Történeti-Etimológiai Kéziszótár (Historical-Etymological Reader’s Dictionary) says under “lófasz”. It is not online, but a number of pages rely on it. Check for example this one.
On the other hand, although I read Turkish and had also searched for the word “lopat”, I have never encountered it either in modern or in Ottoman dictionaries. Nevertheless, it might be a dialectal form belonging to that “lingua turca” which, compiled of Southern Slavic, Vlach, Hungarian and Turkish roots, was used in the occupied territories of Northern Balkans and Hungary until the end of the 17th century.
A similar story is connected with another curse from the same period: “az Isten bassza meg”, “may God fuck him/her/it”. Here, too, the original verb is Turkish: “bas-” (e. g. ‘basiyorum’). However, in Turkish it simply means ‘press’ or ‘beat’, so that the curse was originally used in the meaning “may God beat him”. Only later was the meaning of the loan word specified to ‘pressing’ in a sexual sense, so that today it is the most widely used vulgar term for sexual intercourse in Hungarian, making obsolete its medieval/early modern taxonomic equivalent “gyak”.
humanity=mankind
I guess I was trying to figure out why the second was a preferred word choice. The only thing I could figure out was that it excluded women, being a more common generic term for “people” at the time in history when apparently women were not considered to be fully human people (along with blacks, native Americans, Roman Catholics, and no doubt many others), and not permitted to be in public life.
[‘Man’] being a more common generic term for “people” at the time in history when apparently women were not considered to be fully human people […]
This is a common misconception. The generic term for ‘human’ was specialized to the one gender that most often took part in public life and thus most often was subject to laws and statements using the generic for “human”. I think what happened was that it became useful to occasionally specify whether women were included in or excluded from a certain law or statement using the generic ‘man’. As time went by this became a requirement rather than an option and ‘man’ was reinterpreted as high register for “male person” except in older compounds and a few set phrases. That may also be stocked as ancient sexism, by all means, but the continuous use of ‘man’ for ‘man or woman’ is simply an inherited neutral usage.
There’s been several pairs of words denoting “man” and “woman”. They all tend to drift off semantically, but it’s no rule that words for “woman” fare worse than those for “man”. E.g. the generic Icelandic words are cognates of churl and queen. In English the male word came to mean “commoner” and then “rude character” while the female word came to mean “nobleman’s wife” and then “king’s wife” or “female monarch”.
I guess I was trying to figure out why the second was a preferred word choice.
Simply because I am more at home in Neo-Latin languages than in English, and there “humanity” (humanitas, humanité, umanità) has a quite positive connotation, inherited from… the age of Humanism which I found absurd to evoke in this inhuman context by saying “humanity in general as embodied by Bosnians”. I had not suspected that “mankind” would trap me too. The more so as my language does not make any difference between genders, so that any collective noun, even if technically masculine, is automatically perceived by me as neutral (that is, including both genders).
And rightly so. Words like “mankind” have in the recent past taken on a … oh, never mind, I can’t rehash all this. It’s dinner time and I’m sure everyone knows.
I am not a Man, neither am I Neutral, and I rather like being that way.
http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/xmeter.html
I love their example:
I am not a Man, neither am I Neutral, and I rather like being that way.
I understand your point. It is a good point. I hope you also understand mine.
Studiolum, the only reason I mentioned it was because I assumed from your website that even though you come off as a native speaker your first language is not English and that this cultural aspect of code-switching is something you would want to know about.
It is possible to use the word “man” to slam the door in someone’s face very subtly, then claim not to have done it. Since gender neutrality is now taught in university level English courses (not sure about high school) I would assume any educated native English speaker below a certain age who uses it now is aware of the message it can send, and is sending the message deliberately.
Sorry, nobody seems to have said:
Tiddly pom.
The word “humankind” is one way to avoid this minefield.
Nijma, at the risk of setting off more explosions at this time of peace and siblingly love, may I suggest that if your desire to help a non-native user of English avoid offending people had really been “the only reason [you] mentioned it” then you probably would not have mentioned it in a playfully petulant way or a petulantly sarcastic way or a sarcastically playful way or whatever that was.
The only reason I mention that is to help you see yourself as others see you, and also to …
The only two reasons I mention that are to help you see yourself as others see you, and to give some support to Studiolum, and also to …
The only three reasons I mention it are to help you see yourself as others see you, and to give some support to Studiolum, and to showcase my own cleverness, and also …
Oh, forget it. A Happy Space Yule to all!
The only reason I mention that is…
So what you’re saying is that if someone uses non-inclusive language or racial or ethnic slurs on a blog where the topic of language is frequently discussed, anyone of that ethnicity should not get uppity by doing anything that might lead to clarification, but should realize that because they are not allowed to point out the elephant in the room, a door has been slammed in their face and just quietly tiptoe away for fear of upsetting someone who really counts.
If you want to see how others see you, that is.
Boom.
Nijma, no, that’s not what I’m saying.
I didn’t say that nobody in such circumstances should ever bring up such a point. I didn’t say that you shouldn’t have brought it up. I just quibbled a little about how you brought it up, about a discrepancy between your stated reason and your manner of expressing yourself.
Nijma, really thank you for calling my attention to this minefield. Although I knew about the double code, but as someone who never lived in English-speaking societies, I was not aware that it has become such a hot issue and that technically masculine collective nouns could be used in such an offensive way.
then you probably would not have mentioned it in a playfully petulant way or a petulantly sarcastic way or a sarcastically playful way
You see my benevolent ignorance or ignorant naiveté in the matter of the abuse of grammatical genders: as I was not aware of the possibly offensive nature of my distinction between humanity and mankind (what’s more, I considered humanity more inappropriate than mankind in this context), therefore I have not grasped the petulantly sarcastic tone of Nijma’s comment either. I just considered it a fine linguistic pun.
You see how much more comfortable it is to speak a language without absolutely any grammatical genders. But don’t be afraid, there are enough linguistic tools left to subtly humiliate our beloved neighbors/MitbrüderInnen.
It was the cognitive dissonance between what I already thought of him and what the word choice was leading me to think. I didn’t want to think he was like that. (“He” is correct, isn’t it?)
Cultural politics. Tapping into anger, resentment and fear. The leaky faucet of feminism. Will it wear down men first, or women ? Tap, tap, tap, tap … Only a Celestial Plumber could deal with this one.
petulantly sarcastic
No, it wasn’t meant to be. It’s a habit from my classroom error correction method of repeating what the student said up to the point I want them to think about more. If they still don’t get it I give the whole class a two minute mini-grammar lesson, assuming, often incorrectly, that if one student didn’t get it, they all didn’t get it. For some reason I don’t like to correct people directly.
Spanish is not completely free of gender forms, though. For example, I was taught that girl is niña, plural niñas; boy is niño, plural niños. However children is also niños. So the default child is male. Something like la gente or las personas (los personas?) I’m not quite sure how to think about.
I was not aware that it has become such a hot issue and that technically masculine collective nouns could be used in such an offensive way.
I wouldn’t say it was offensive as much as insensitive, or an indication of subconscious (or conscious) negative attitudes towards women. Or maybe the offensiveness is more of a continuum of marginalization, with “mankind” on the low side, and if that doesn’t work, on the high side, the b-word and more. All of them have been used to try to keep “the girls” out of the tree house, which in the adult world ultimately comes down to groceries.
I didn’t want to think he was like that. (“He” is correct, isn’t it?)
Yes, it is. And I’m grateful for the positive expectations.
Spanish is not completely free of gender forms, though.
Surely. On the contrary, it is an absolutely genderized language. But my first language is Hungarian, a language devoid of any grammatical genders whatsoever. And even in Spanish, Italian, French or Rumanian, when one uses collective nouns, their gender is automatically “switched out”. They say “la gente”, “le persone” o “l’umanità”, but it does not occur to anyone that the feminine gender of these nouns would exclude the male representatives of these groups. The subtle linguistic offense/marginalization you have described with reference to “mankind” is absolutely impossible in these languages. That’s why I’m grateful to you for having called my attention that it is more than possible in such an apparently undergenderized language as English.
It’s possible to go around and around about this.
As far as I’m concerned, when someone who has no excuse not to know that “mankind” is a minefield word goes a head and uses it anyway, that does not demonstrate to me that that person has even the slightest negative attitude toward women. It suggests that as a strong possibility, but there are other possibilities, too, such as: a negative attitude toward this kind of readiness to take offense at a word; or a stubborn insistence on using a word in one sense without worrying about another possible sense; or a desire to provoke a particular person. I’m not saying that any of these is a very attractive or creditable reason to use the word.
One can also shift the emphasis in how one responds to words that give offense in this sort of way, and say that the point is not to impute motives to the speaker (or writer), but rather to respect the feelings of the offended group.
There is a very wise and effective (in my opinion) video clip about this, which I unfortunately don’t have at my fingertips. This one is about racism, but it applies just as well to sexism. I will try to provide a link later, when I find it. The main point is that when you go to confront someone about using language that is offensive to a group, it’s a waste of effort and a distraction from the real issue to try to brand the speaker as a bad person; you should tell them what they did wrong, not what supposed flaw of theirs caused them to do wrong.
Nijma, I was following along until you got to the word “groceries”. What was that about, exactly.
Sorry, nobody seems to have said:
Tiddly pom.
A very appropriate observation.
So let me say it first (the observer not counted), as it stands in the Hungarian translation of Pooh:
Zik, zik.
Here’s that link.
(Nijma, I hope you understand that in sharing this link I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just passing along some ideas that I find interesting and well-expressed — passing them on to whoever happens to be in the Christmas tree house, to do what they want with.)
My favorite part of that scene is the bit where Piglet, asked what he thinks of this new poem that Pooh is so proud of, disappoints him by commenting on the content rather than the artistic merit, saying solemnly “It isn’t the toes so much as the ears.”
Studiolum,
Hungarian, cool. I’m glad I was right about you. It would have been embarrassing for me to misunderstand something like that. Anyhow, I’m in love with Poemas del río Wang, and have even posted links to it on other people’s blogs when I sense a resonance.
Ø,
“Groceries”– access to resources; for instance, women make 71 cents on the dollar compared to what men with the same qualifications make. No one really believes anything interesting is going on in the male clubhouse with the “no girls allowed” sign on it, but that’s where the cookies are passed out. And I don’t agree with your little video. I don’t have the patience to teach “How to Be Decent Human Being 101”. The world is never going to run out of idiots and jerks, but life is too short to waste time on them. I only hope to identify them quickly so I can move on to something interesting.
Also: Zik, zik.
Zik, zik.
Zik, zik.
Somebody please save me from ignorance. I haven’t been able to figure out what “zik” means in the Hungarian version of the Disney-film “The Winnie-the-Pooh” song. At least it seems to come from that song, which I don’t know and can’t find in a version that would let me compare it with the Hungarian.
It has nothing to do with Walt so-called Disney.
“Zik” means tiddly, and “zik” means pom.
The more it snows
(Tiddly Pom)
The more it goes
(Tiddly Pom)
The more it goes
(Tiddly Pom)
On snowing.
And nobody knows
(Tiddly Pom)
How cold my toes
(Tiddly Pom)
How cold my toes
(Tiddly Pom)
Are growing.
Thanx. I like the original better.
I mean the original makes more sense.
You’re welcome. We’ve gone on to Haikus.
Haipooh
Snow goes on and on.
How cold my toes are growing.
Tiddly-pom, tiddly.
Zik.
The more it snows
(Tiddly Pom)
The more it goes
(Tiddly Pom)
The more it goes
(Tiddly Pom)
On snowing.
And nobody knows
(Tiddly Pom)
How cold my toes
(Tiddly Pom)
How cold my toes
(Tiddly Pom)
Are growing.
A verbatim translation.
Minél inkább havazik
(Zik zik)
Annál inkább hull a hó.
És minél inkább hull a hó,
annál inkább havazik
(Zik zik)
Hull a hó és hózik
(Zik zik)
Micimackó fázik
(Zik zik)
Hull a hó és hózik
(Zik zik)
Micimackó fázik
(Zik zik).
Quod erat demonstrandum.
See also this video with the idol of our childhood Zsuzsa Koncz. Some twenty or thirty years after her idolship, but the same song.
Listen to it carefully. Learn at least the melody so you can hum it by heart. It will come in very, very, very handy when you will wish to seduce a young Hungarian lady.
I had just finished posting the Hungarian lyrics, and was trying to decide how many ziks to put in when Studiolum’s video came to the rescue.
[…] From Studiolum we now have the definitive YouTube, sung by Zsuzsa Koncz, two ziks at 3:37: […]
A great research, Nijma. I have added there in comment whatever I knew about the Hungarian version. Here I only want to include its text once more from the original Hungarian translation as I appear to have forgotten two halihó!s:
Minél inkább havazik
(Zik-zik!)
annál inkább hull a hó.
(Halihó!)
Minél inkább hull a hó,
(Halihó!)
annál inkább havazik.
(Zik-zik!)
Hull a hó és hózik,
(Zik-zik!)
Micimackó fázik.
What a pity that The House at Pooh Corner was not translated into Latin by the genial Alexander Lénárd (see this as well), the Latin translator of Winnie The Pooh (Winnie ille Pu). Then we would have an authentically Martialian version of this versiculus, like that of Pu’s poem written on their search of the Northern Pole:
Bubo et Ior et Canga et Ru
Atque Porcellus et egomet Pu
Cuncti rogamus, non ego solus
Ubi sit pilus aut palus aut polus?
Heu pilus ubi? O polus qualis?
Polus septemtrionalis.
Too bad that Alexander Lénárd gets only two lines in the English-language Wikipedia, he seems like a fascinating character. I liked his drawings in The Valley Of The Latin Bear & I’ll see if I can’t get hold of a copy. It doesn’t say in which language it was written; probably Hungarian, I suppose.
See also this video with the idol of our childhood Zsuzsa Koncz.
Thanks so much for that; it made me so happy I may keep it around to cheer me on bleak days. Zik zik!
Like Nij, I noticed she says “Zik, zik, zik” — which I found kind of confusing, having only just learnt zik, zik.
It is very nice, and she looks a lot like my wife, but could anyone really seduce young ladies with songs from Pooh? They must be awfully young.
Try it and you will see. That’s all can I say. You won’t be disappointed. Although if one’s wife is like Zsuzsa Koncz, he has absolutely no reason to try it.
This song is like a key to a secret door. All of us have it inside since our childhood, and a foreigner, by displaying its knowledge, gets into such an unexpected intimacy to a Hungarian like jumping from box thirty to box sixty in the Goose Game. Of course other people also have their similar key songs, like Russians between twenty and forty this one by Aleksandr Sukhanov (here with English subtitles, while here you have also the Russian lyrics). I myself had some, ehm, success with it when I was… younger.
Yes, in fact she says “Zik, zik, zik”, but I considered this grammatically too complicated for a first lesson. I preferred to start with a plain “zik, zik”, and to step forward only when you can already use it with confidence even in the most unexpected situations.
The Valley of the Latin Bear was, incredibly, written in three languages consecutively by Alexander Lénárd. First in German, then in Hungarian, and then, on the request of Dutton & Co. Publisher, in English. They are not translations of each other, but in fact three different original works. By the way, this was his first book written in Hungarian, published in 1968. Until then he only published in German, English, Italian, Portuguese and Latin.
If you listen carefully, what she says is “hózik, zik, zik” and “fázik, zik zik”. So there are three ziks but only one zik, zik. The website where I found the lyrics is in the U.K., so maybe they were confused by it too.
Too bad that Alexander Lénárd gets only two lines in the English-language Wikipedia
I know that Hat as well as some of the Hattians sometimes edit Wikipedia articles. Anyone can do it, but I don’t know how. I suppose you could run some of the sentences from the magyar wiki through google’s Hungarian translator, but I wouldn’t be confident enough of the meaning to try it myself.
The problem is that the Hungarian Wiki is also quite short and superficial concerning Lénárd. I will try to write a post on him in the near future, and then transform it into an English Wikipedia article.
I have been thinking about writing a wiki about someone I tried to look up once but found no article. I haven’t done anything about it yet, mostly because I don’t want to do it with the Nijma name, and probably not with my real name either.
Also, for anyone who wants more information about gender neutral language in English, there is a useful discussion in the Wikipedia Manual of Style.
Zik, zik, zik
Now that finally makes sense ! To the modern analytical mind it may seem complex. But the grammatico-musical Tiefenstruktur identifies it as the long-conjectured Ur-zik, or zik à trois in the terminology of Humboldt. I have been able to identify a congeneric German folk song, whose words I unfortunately can’t remember, but here is the melody in C major([ indicates a half-beat pause, [] a full-beat pause. The last three notes in each line are stressed evenly, like three stamps of the feet left-right-left):
G – C – E – C – G – G – G – []
G – C – E – C – A – A – A – []
F – D – B – [] – G – E – C2 – []
B – [A – G – F – E – D – C
Zik, zik, zik
Google translate renders this as
So I suspect the –zik ending must be some sort of participle that just happens to have a satisfying sound.
Stu,
I recognize that tune. I was humming it today as I stamped my boots to get the snow off. The version that I know goes:
Fällt der Schnee auf mich mich mich!
Fällt der Schnee auf dich dich dich!
F¨sse kalt! Ei Gewalt!
Dieser Schnee gefällt uns nicht!
Füsse, dammit.
I woke in the middle of the night to the horrible memory that the tune probably comes from The Sound of Music.
Nij: I don’t want to do it with the Nijma name, and probably not with my real name either
You can use whatever name strikes your fancy. I write things in Wikipedia all the time, under an assumed name that has nothing to do with AJP.
I don’t think so. My real opinion is, you’ve grafted the fourth line of “I’m a Little Teapot” onto the first three lines of something else. Maybe the something else is a Texan folk dance? No, because I find it maddeningly familiar.
I could imagine that songwriters as a class are subject to middle-of-the-night worries about whether their latest catchy tune is in fact original or not.
The dubious philosophical stance of a Sound of Music song, the one with the lines
Nothing comes from nothing,
Nothing ever could
may be relevant here.
Believe me, this tune does not come from The Sound of Music, and I would know, having spent the better part of my childhood memorizing songs from musicals turned into films.
It just came to me that the rhythm, if not the melody, is that of this (probably faux) classic:
Ist das nicht ein [zik zik zik]?
Ja, das ist ein [zik zik zik]!
…
Ist das nicht ein [zik zik zik]?
Ja, das ist ein [zik zik zik]!
That is the schematics of something called the “Schnitzelbank song” in this comment thread. The first line of the melody sketched there by someone is the first line of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. That’s not the melody I gave above.
Come on, Grumbly: can’t you sing it on Youtube for us?
I don’t have a microphone and/or web cam. Really !
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I found Studiolum’s Aleksandr Sukhanov video [31 December 2009 at 10:08 pm] to be strangely relaxing. Maybe it’s the way the minor key keeps trying to resolve into a major one and never quite does. At the very least it can transport you away from everyday worries for a few moments.
Although if one’s wife is like Zsuzsa Koncz, he has absolutely no reason to try it.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with trying to seduce your own wife, although there will always be procrastinators who prefer to wait for someone else to do it.
I write things in Wikipedia all the time
Maybe now we will see some improvement in the quality of wiki’s architecture essays.
The first line of the melody sketched there by someone is the first line of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. That’s not the melody I gave above.
In fact, they’re all different:
Stu’s melody is drastically different from the Hungarian Pooh song in that it has 1-2-3-4-zik-zik-zik-[rest] while the other has 1-2-3-4-5-zik-zik-zik.
Stu’s Lied von der Ur-zik has (as he points out) little in common with the Schnitzelbank song other than the 1-2-3-4-stamp-stamp-stamp rhythm.
And the melody of the first line of “Twinkle Twinkle …” is not the same as the one given for “Schnitzelbank”: CCGGAAG vs CEGGAAG.
However, that reminds me to say that Twinkle Twinkle Little Star does share a melody with Baa Baa Black Sheep and also with what is generally known in the US as The Alphabet Song. For a pleasant mental challenge I recommend mixing the three up, for example like this:
Twinkle twinkle, little star,
Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.
Q R S, T U V,
Like a diamond* in the sky.
Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool,
Next time won’t you sing with me.
No fair working from written notes, though; the point is to stay alert. When you’ve mastered that, you might move on to:
Twinkle, twinkle, have you any wool?
H I J K, what you are.
One for my master, T U V,
Like a diamond*, lives in the lane.
A B C D, little star,
Yes sir, yes, sir, sing with me.
* UK: tea-tray
I have not tried doing this barefoot in the snow.
Maybe it’s “Brother come and dance with me” from the opera “Hansel and Gretel”, oder, auf Deutch, Bruederchen Komm Tanz Mit Mir.
.
But really G.S., even the cheapest camera these days has a video setting. All you have to do is point it out the window at some snøkaos, turn it on, and hum a few bars. Then no one has to try to guess whether it’s a high E or a low E or what a C2 could possibly be. You could probably even get a friend with a camera to do it for you, then drag and drop the file to your flash drive, or whatever it is that Mac users do.
Hey, this blog is eating my comments!!!1!
Well, that one went through at least. Must be set for one link per comment.
Once Kron has had his morning coffee, he will probably fish it out of the moderation queue.
“Twinkle twinkle little star” always sounds silly to me next to the musically identical French song “Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman” (from which Mozart wrote a set of variations for the piano):
Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman,
Ce qui cause mon tourment?
Depuis que j’ai vu Silvandre
Me regarder d’un oeil tendre,
Je me dis à chaque instant:
Peut-on vivre sans amant?
Thanks, I didn’t know that, I always thought it was from Twinkle Twinkle.
One reason, I think, the French is much better is that it has an extra beat at the end of each line:
Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman–boom
Ce qui cause mon tourment–boom
Etc.
I’ve just been reading about that “boom” phenomenon in Nicholson Baker’s wonderful The Anthologist.
Once Kron has had his morning coffee
Pot of tea.
Ø: * UK: tea-tray
Yes, that’s very peculiar, isn’t it? How do you know of it?
an extra beat at the end of each line:
Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman–boom
Ce qui cause mon tourment–boom
Etc.
This is a silent “boom”, I take it; you don’t beat a drum, or detonate something? Is it an extra fifth (long) beat, then, taking as much time as two typical syllables? Or an extra ninth (short, one-syllable) beat?
The tea-tray I got from “Alice in Wonderland”. I was guessing that, while the Mad Hatter’s “bat” was an innovation, the “tea-tray” was standard for Alice’s time and place.
But now I’m wondering …
It’s a silent beat that he compares to the tap of one’s foot to music. He says that metre in poetry should be treated no differently than beats to the bar in music and that you really ought to tap your thumb & fingers on the table as you read the words. Apparently the “boom” thing was only discovered in poetry fairly recently. If it were ten degrees warmer here I’d go across and get the book; as it is, I’ll have to type it out properly in his own words later on.
Hmm. I’d forgotten that the tea tray was from Alice. It’s always struck me as rather silly, I expect that was the intension.
Yes, wiki says the tea-tray was Lewis Carroll’s.
Oh, that kind of boom. But Twinkle Twinkle has that kind of silent boom at the end of each line. Do the French pronounce the silent beat in some special way? I wouldn’t put it past them.
You’re right. But I think the French version, because it has two-syllable words at the ends of the lines, somehow helps me to hear the boom. If they wanted you to hear it in a specially French way they’d probably add a couple of ^^`´s.
(Ah vous dirai-je Maman)
Each musical phrase has two bars, each with 4 beats, which normally correspond to syllables (including the words with “e” as the vowel, which is not pronounced in normal speech but takes up a full beat in classical poetry and in most songs).
The first and the last two lines end in a long vowel, which takes up the last two beats: there is no “boom”, unless you mean the accompanying chord that might take up the last beat while the voice just holds the vowel (as in English). The middle two lines end in the vowel “e”, which takes up the final beat.
(Twinkle twinkle): “little bat” and the “tea-tray in the sky” are from Lewis Carroll’s parody. In order to resolve her identity crisis, Alice is trying to remember the songs and rhymes that she has learned, but the words which come out of her mouth turn out to be quite different. The version published as “The Annotated Alice” provides the original words of those songs, which are mostly pious or sentimental Victorian doggerel (ed. Martin Gardner, Penguin 1960, 1970).
I mean:
Ah-vous dir-ai je-Mam an–boom
Ce-qui cau-se mon-tour ment–boom
or
Twin-kle twin-kle lit-tle bat-boom
How-I won-der what-you’re at-boom
The boom is silent.
mon-tour ment–boom works better than what-you’re at-boom, because of the final 2-syllable French word being divided between two beats. It’s less chopped up, more musical.
1 2 3 4 1 2 3 (4)
Ah – vous – di – rai – je – Ma – man – (length)
Ce – qui – cau – se – mon – tour – ment – (length)
De – puis – que – j’ai – vu – Sil – van – dre
Me – re – gar – der – d’un – (n) oeil – ten – dre
…..
(I meant for the numbers to be each on top of a syllable to correspond to the beats, but they bunched up together instead)
I find this “boom” terminology odd when what we’re talking about is a pause or beat.
I don’t hear any boom at all. It’s ordinary 4/4 time (four beats to a measure, a quarter note gets one beat) and the notes are either quarter notes or half notes. Maybe this is supposed to refer to what is called in musical terminology either a half note (sustained through the fourth beat of the measure) or a quarter rest (a rest, or silence, the length of a quarter note). Saying there is a “boom” on the fourth beat of a measure is counterintuitive since the accent usually falls on the first and sometimes third beat of a measure.
A lot of Baker’s prosody comes from this book. Which is excellent, though my memory of it isn’t good enough to separate Attridge’s theory from Baker’s riffing.
Part of the fun of The Anthologist is trying to figure out how much Baker believes the stuff about poetry he has his narrator expound.
Yes. It’s written in the first person; and because it’s a poet writing about poetry and his life, it sounds as if Baker himself is saying all this. I should have said that I received this wonderful book, The Anthologist, from Jamessal, for Christmas.
Baker’s character, Chowder, says that all this pause /boom /rest was worked out by Attridge. In the middle of his discussion, he switches from BOOMs to calling them “rests” without saying if there’s a difference. I’ll have to buy the Attridge book now.
I haven’t found any of what he says to be unbelievable except that Chowder makes a big deal of disliking iambic pentameter, because, he says, amongst other things, it’s French and it doesn’t fit the English language as well as four beats does; perhaps that’s what you’re talking about, I still haven’t read very far. Even so, I highly recommend it to all of you: The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker.
iambic pentameter, which he says is French
Chowder is wrong. Iambs, trochees and anapests originated in Greek, a language which has long and short vowels and distinctions of stress, as in English. There are no such things in French, because the nature of the language is unsuited to making such distinctions. In French classical poetry you count syllables, not “feet” as in Greek, Latin or English where different types of “feet” depend on the placement of stress. A Greek or English pentameter has five “feet”, but those feet can each have from one to three syllables, each with a single stress. This means that each pentameter takes as long to say as another, regardless of the number of syllables in it, because the rhythm depends on the number of stresses, not the number of syllables. This is not possible in French, where syllables tend to be equal in length (and similarly in Japanese, for instance – haiku would be OK in French but is really unsuitable for English because it does not take stress into account).
The closest equivalent to the iambic pentameter in French (iambs having two syllables) is the décasyllabe of ten syllables, but that meter is not the most common in French. The most common classical French meter is the alexandrin which has twelve syllables. There are examples of English alexandrines but they are not very common.
those feet can each have from one to three syllables, each with a single stress
I mean that each “foot” has a single stress.
Oh boy, although it’s very interesting I’m getting way out of my depth here. This is what Wikipedia says, m-l:
Obviously it’s nuts to say iambic pentameter doesn’t work in English; though I’ll have to check that I haven’t misquoted Chowder, who’s in the other building at the moment.
I want to make a pun involving “foot” and “metric system”.
Have all of those been made before, or have we somehow missed ’em?
I think that the early poets in the vernacular just followed the Latin convention with the pentameter. Stress was also more important in the oldest versions of French than in the modern language (and stress patterns in Occitan – then called Provençal – are similar to the Spanish and Italian ones). Later the most common poetic pattern, especially for longer works (but also for sonnets) was the twelve-syllable alexandrin, usually divided into two equal parts, although yet later poets played around with less strict divisions of the verse.
a pun involving “foot” and “metric system”
It’s not pun material, but in Europe we now measure large weights in metric tonnes, which I believe are 1000 kg. (I’m sure someone can correct me if it’s not.)
A metric tonne is indeed 1000 kg. Not something you want dropped on your foot.
Thanks. I have to go back to cooking the turkey now. (We’re having Anarchist’s Christmas, for my daughter.)
tonne
In the US we know about the metric ton (1000 kg), not to be confused with the old kind of ton (2000 lb). To avoid confusion, we have to say “metric ton” when that’s the kind of ton we mean. I have the impression that the Brits make that distinction more briefly, by using “tonne” and “ton” and never having to say “metric”. But how does that work out in spoken English?
Anachristmas, the mass for *anakhristos “the one anointed against the hairs”.
Oh dear, anarchy is one of those things I always meant to study up on, but unfortunately there is very little written about it. I hope I’m not missing an important chocolate holiday.
Actually, there’s a tremendous amount written about it.
…. and we take no holidays from chocolate over here.
Ø: But how does that work out in spoken English?
When you hear a British person talking about tons, these days, they are sure to be metric ones; it’s the Common Market.
Just the common market form being the common unmarked form. Happens all the time.
That makes a tonne of sense.
A tremendous amount written about anarchy? Who’s being silly now? If you google it you will find no one can really seem to say what it is, except that it’s about not liking the government. I don’t know anyone who likes government. Even the wikipedia piece about anarchism hems and haws, saying some people think it’s this and some people think it’s that. Then the wiki degenerates into pages and pages of densely packed dictionary definitions and lists of dead anarchists. I have never seen such anarchy in my life. Apparently history is all they can agree on.
After wasting some time following all the dead end and inappropriately commercial links in the wiki, if you’re lucky you might remember seeing something like this once upon a time, but by the time you find it, you will have spent way too much time on the internet for one day and it will be time to make cookies. Oh, and there are Norwegian anarchists, but their website hurts my eyes with its huge bold face font and random underlinings and italicizations. They describe themselves as libertarians, but it’s hard to imagine a Norwegian who has anything in common with Ron Paul.
I guess if Wikipedia is the limit of your research, you’re out of luck. Libraries have shelves of books on the subject; even I have a fair number.
Here — don’t say I never gave you anything.
Thanks, Hat, and a Merry Anarchist Christmas to you too. I’ll look at it if and when I ever finish the cookies. Shall I save you some?
I find anarchism attractive in some ways, especially in its vagueness, but I could never become an anarchist myself without finding out their position on snøkaos.
Oh, and the Anarchist so-called Cookbook doesn’t say boo about either turkey or chocolate, so I’m looking forward to AJP’s culinary descriptions of the event, if any are forthcoming.
We couldn’t get any Ocean Spray* cranberries, but we made do with tyttebær. I thought I did a good job with the turkey and roast potatoes and sage-based stuffing. I would have made chestnut stuffing, but my daughter’s allergic to nuts. She & I really enjoyed the bread sauce more than the turkey, though.
BREAD SAUCE.
Let’s see if I can remember:
Stick 6 or 8 cloves into a small to medium onion.
Whack it in a saucepan.
Fill it to the equator of the onion with milk. Simmer until the onion is soft (3/4 hr, or so).
Add salt & pepper & some butter and 3/4 cup of breadcrumbs (from stale cheap white bread).
Mix up well, stirring, etc.
Serve as a sauce with your turkey (or with sausages = “bangers & bread sauce”)**. Some of us like it best cold, the next day, when you can have it with cold turkey or even on its own. My wife doesn’t like it, (but she’s from Barcelona). She thought the turkey was excellent.
* I believe Ocean Spray is some sort of cooperative of cranberry farmers.
** I’m very surprised to find there are zero ghits for “bangers & bread sauce”; I thought everybody in England ate them together.
Does your wife speak Catalan, then?
Who knows, we only have dogs.
I would have made chestnut stuffing, but my daughter’s allergic to nuts.
Chestnuts are not the usual kind of nuts like walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, etc. They are fleshy rather than oily and their covering is not a woody shell. I could imagine that people allergic to most nuts might be able to tolerate chestnuts. Or am I totally wrong about that? (Of course you wouldn’t want to take chances, just in case).
In discussion of nut allergies you often hear the distinction peanut vs tree nut. Peanuts are not, by most standards, true nuts; anyway, they are not taxonomically close to the various arboreal foods called nuts.
I now learn (from a quick look at a few wiki articles) that botanists have a strict definition of “nut” which includes, for example, hazel, pecan, chestnut (!) and acorn but not almond, walnut or cashew. Whether this has any relevance to allergies, I don’t know.
I assume that the French noix is cognate with English “nut”, and I believe that in addition to cover the same semantic ground as “nut” it also specifically means walnut, tight? Too bad!
Noix by itself means ‘nut’ in general, and more specifically ‘walnut’, but peanuts, chestnuts, acorns or even almonds would not be called noix. A hazelnut is noisette which means ‘little nut’. Noix is used with a complement in noix de coco ‘coconut’ and noix d’acajou ‘cashew (nut)’, but there is also noix de galle, an inedible round excrescence about the size of a hazelnut, caused by a parasite on the leaves of some trees.
(cover –> covering, tight –> right)
I think I got almost enough of squirrels and acorns when they took over a Language Hat thread a while back, but I want to mention that according to wiki the Latin Juglans, genus name for the walnuts, is from a phrase meaning “Jupiter’s acorn”.
It appears that fruits à coques or fruits à écale are broader terms, better synonyms for “nuts”.
écale;
Sheesh. I should go to bed.
Sheesh! I give up.
My daughter can eat coconut, but none of the rest. She is also allergic (but less violently so) to stone fruits and apple cores and peel; if there’s a substance in common, I don’t know what it is.
écale
Ø , remember that you can preview comments with Hat’s preview mechanism. Crown has stinted on one. I think he’s saving towards the goats’ dowries, as well as his daughter’s education of course. Considering all those mouths he has to feed, and heads and trousseaus to fill, I don’t begrudge him economizing on a preview.
Have to take your comments elsewhere for previewing is like having to take your clothes to the laundromat. What a drag, especially in the winter.
What, you keep it in your hat? For God’s sake. What will they think of next! So how much would this gizmo cost me?
The only thing worse than laundromats is no laundromats.
Laundramats and laundermats are worse.
But no laundermats are worser. Actually in England they are called laundrettes — sort of female laundries.
Yes, as in the film title My Beautiful Laundrette. I only watched part of the film – too melodramatic and spaced-out, as I remember. The film, I mean.
For a few weeks after I changed apartments just over a year ago, I had to reacquaint myself with laundromats. I hadn’t been inside one in decades. Talk about a panorama of humankind – it was like something out of a Bosch or Bruegel painting, or perhaps a Manual of Dermatology with color prints. There was no point in squeamishness, so I took an art critic’s view of the whole business.
I did derive a certain satisfaction from observing that no one in Cologne but me knows how to wash clothes – if I may be allowed this extrapolation from what I saw in those laundromats to all of Cologne. Not a Männlein nor a Weiblein but stuffed the washers too full, and the driers as well. So nothing got clean, and much of the loads coming out of the driers were still damp in the middle, with only the outside dry, like a baked Alaska. The damp middle ends up mildewing, but folks never seem to notice.
Add to this the fact that I am the only person in Cologne who knows how to iron shirts properly, and you end up marvelling at one cool dude. To think that nobody taught me all this ! I derived it all from First Principles.
Unfortunately, it may just be that I’m the best washer and ironer on the wrong side of the tracks. Clean-living folks have a washing machine at home, and have their shirts ironed by illegal immigrants.
I quite liked My Beautiful Laundrette. Funnily enough, all my laundromat experience was acquired in Hamburg and I support what you say — in fact, I was one of the Bruegel characters overstuffing the absurdly small chambers. Each washer in a Hamburg laundramat can take no more than one day’s change of clothing, so for the price of one trip I could have bought my own washing machine (in small shiny coins).
I was taught to iron a shirt by my mother, who learnt it in Australia washing and starching all the men’s shirts on a sheep station. Her sequence is collar & cuffs, arms, shoulders, back, fronts. I sometimes wonder these days, here in Norway, where there are no servants and there don’t seem to be too many Chinese laundries, how certain men have managed to arrive at work in a freshly-ironed shirt.
Her sequence is collar & cuffs, arms, back, fronts.
By golly, that’s right ! For some reason, many German women don’t iron the fronts last – so the fronts tend to get creased when the rest is ironed. This is irrational.
The First Principle is: iron in such a sequence that shirt parts first seen by others are as smooth as possible for as long as possible. This implies
1) iron shirt fronts last
Since collars and cuffs have small area and tend to be thicker that the rest of the shirt, you might as well
2) iron collars and cuffs first.
They won’t get creased when you move the shirt around the around while ironing the rest.
Arms are going to get creased anyway the instant you put the shirt on, so
3) iron arms after collars and cuffs
This leaves
4) iron back after arms, but before fronts, which must be ironed last.
Solving this is like solving one of those puzzles with a fox, a goose and a head of cabbage, all of which have to cross the river in a boat which only holds two at a time. The fox can’t be in the same boat with the goose etc. Also, I think it is often assumed that the cabbage can’t row, but this may be a case of blatant vegetarianism.
If a cabbage can iron your shirt, it can sure as hell row across a river.
Or maybe it’s the other way round.
The cabbage merely has to be capable of thinking logically. Then it can iron shirts and leap rivers at a single bound.
Like us, you mean.
Exakt.
Indeed, cabbage rows.
I googled iron shirt, too, just for the hell of it. Wow!
Iron shirt, that goes with exploding underpants.
Well, it makes sense: Shènzi bādà Qígōng (Chinese: 肾子八大奇功 – “Testicle Eight Outstanding Techniques”) […] became a “hereditary style”, taught only to close family members.
Stu is self-taught, though.
empty, are you sure those plants are cabbages (Weißkohl) ? They look more like cauliflower (Blumenkohl) to me.
Hitherto, of 183 comments the first starts out “I don’t see them eating apples” and the last ends “They look more like cauliflower (Blumenkohl) to me.” Both are from the same sauce; are you eating properly, Stew?
It says cabbage rows, but they look more like lettuce (Salat) to me.
What could be healthier than apples and cauliflower ? Surely you don’t intend to promote roasted goat ? Or roasted-goat-flavored tofu ?
I’m not a big fan of Blumenkohl, though it’s pretty in flower beds.
No. That would be killing the goat that lays the golden eggs.
I don’t think it’s cauliflower, but it doesn’t look like any of the familiar everyday sorts of edible cabbage, either.
Very well, pink cabbage rose, then.
My mother refuses to eat flowers. We gave her borage in a salad (it grew in the garden), and she thought it was a very bad idea.