If you walk by the goathouse in the morning, before we let them out, Vesla is often at the window on the left.
She looks as if she’s in her office, working. The window is right next to her hay bag, so that may be partly why she spends so much time there. She’s standing on a raised platform which gives her a good view. She often spends the whole morning there.
A Bad Guide 
Or she looks as a damsel waiting for her suitor…
I’d rather say that she looks like an old lady in Fowey, gazing through the window while having tea and scones.
How old is she?
I think she’s six.
I fear that may be very much how I look when I’m in my office “working” (actually, gazing with goaty abstraction out the window at the lawn and street).
That’s so clever, Language hat!
I think we all look like melancholic goats in our studies… longing for greener grass, perhaps?
Has she got a clock to watch?
Language, don’t you have a goatee? I think I saw a picture of you thus.
I will buy the goats a clock next time I’m at IKEA, you never know what they’re going to like. You can get a very nice one for Kr.15 (about one pound fifty or two dollars & fifty cents).
I could see her as a functionary in some slow-paced job. Drawbridge operator? Toll collector? Or am I thinking of trolls? No, but then it should be the goats (longing for greener grass) trying to get past the troll, not the other way round …
You’re dead right. She looks like a drawbridge operator, happy in her work.
I think she looks like a maiden in her tower, waiting for a swanky swain.
I sometimes think she’s acting as a lookout for the others.
Some sort of malfunction here. It looks like mab posted two comments, one at 6:22 and one at 6:25 (the second contradicting the first), while RECENT COMMENTS shows a comment from mab followed by one from AJP.
I was switching them round so they were conversationally sequential.
Perhaps Vesla is pretending to be a schoolmarm, waiting for passersby engaged in a non-sequential conversation. Then she can correct the order of their sentences.
Like Lucy in Peanuts, with her sign: “The doctor is in, 5 cents”.
Grumbly, where have you been? I was getting worried you had emigrated.
I bolted into my programmer’s hole and got stuck, like Pooh.
Did people dry their washing on your legs?
Liberties were taken, I believe
And no doubt you’re a few pounds thinner.
Thinner and wiser. And nicer, if you can credit that. I’m even putting out new shoots (spring was late a-comin’ this year). Has it been so cold and wet up there as well recently?
Beastly. We had three lovely weeks in June, but since then lots of rain. All in all it’s been very good for the fruit and berries.
While you were gone, I learned about Rennie Mackintosh in a Radio 4 broadcast. It was rather hagiographic, but my land! what wonderful designs and aquarelles.
I’m going to do a photo series on buildings and bridges in Cologne.
Rennie Mac was so good I even visited Glasgow (urgh!) to look at some of his stuff.
Glad GS is back. The whole friggin’ world was worrying about you, man!
And I think we all agree: Vesla is incredibly adorable, looking out her window.
a photo series on buildings and bridges in Cologne
Oh, do Grumbly! That would be just great.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh was a very unusual talent, I love the Hill House which is jugendstil meets Adolf Loos (but look at the weather in the photographs, I couldn’t live in such a rainy climate) and Glasgow School of Art. My mother recently gave me a small book of his watercolours and textiles, it must have been an exhibition they were having in New York.
dearie: I even visited Glasgow (urgh!)
But dearie, being Scottish, visiting Glasgow was always on the cards, wasn’t it?
We have a Scottish detective programme on the telly which is set in Glasgow. It’s the longest running detective show known to man, it’s called Taggart. Absolute crap.
Yesterday there was a play on Radio 4, set in Glasgow, called Flesh and Blood – it can be heard for anothzer 6 days. It’s about a grandfather, father and son who “fail to communicate”. I found it scary and convincing. Since I could (just barely) understand the Glaswegian spoken by the characters, I wonder if it had been smoothed out in the blender for general consumption. Back in the 70s, I had a brief non-conversation with two Glaswegian guys in Cologne – couldn’t understand a word they were saying.
couldn’t understand a word they were saying
I remember getting off a train somewhere in Scotland and wanting supper. A guy getting off the train at the same time showed me the local pub where they eat, and I sat with him and his buddies. I couldn’t understand anything they were saying either. Then my guide said something to his friends and they all started speaking so I could understand (barely). I was also in Edinburgh overnight and had no communication problems there. So I think they change the way they speak depending on the audience.
I love Glasgow dialect. Anyone interested should locate a copy of The Patter; it’s a terrifically entertaining lexicon/phrasebook.
Thank you, I’ve ordered that (though from Amazon UK, where it’s half the price).
Goat saved from football-related slaughter!
I don’t really follow football of any kind, but I know one thing about Brett Favre other than that he is a famous quarterback: his name is pronounced “Farve”. I kid you not.
I just thought I’d mention this, since the baseball name Buehrle some time ago led right away to some interest in the origin and pronunciation of his name.
Well done tyre man and what an appalling woman. It’s good to know they have foster care for goats in Minnesota, though. It all reminds me of Robert Rauschenberg’s goat, that you can see (next picture from the bottom) here. While you’re at it, on that page you can see some pictures of Lars Vilks’s Nimis, on the coast of Sweden that he’s been making for (I think) about thirty years now…
Although I have long suspected that the Bouguereau represents much of the interest shown in goats at this site – as well as the outrage certain persons have affected at the very idea of goats participating in such goings-on.
Poor old Vesla! No wonder she prefers the dignified safety of her office.
You’re referring to this?
(Crazy world, where an art know-nothing like me can go from “What’s a Bouguereau?” to “Oh, he was a painter and this must be the painting in question” in a few strokes of the keyboard.)
And of course it’s not just this site. Everybody “knows” that goats are — what? Randy, sneaky, smelly? Also indiscriminate eaters.
What is it about goats, that people project so much on them? There’s satyrs and fauns and Pan. There’s also separating the sheep from the goats on Judgement Day. It brings to mind the cliche about Milton’s fallen angel Lucifer being more interesting or appealing to him (and his) readers than the loyalists on high ever were.
Also scapegoating.
Crown, it’s a pleasure to get to know your little flock a bit, to try to see them for who they are and go beyond all that. You have said that, being female goats, they even smell nice?
Hmm. It’s not so much that they’re female, it’s more that they’re Angoras and so have a lovely wooly smell. On the other hand a friend of mine in New York (but she used to live on a farm in California) said that goats have a bad reputation because the males are really like the devil (smell bad etc.). I have no experience with billy goats, so I don’t know if that’s true of all male goats or just Eliza’s.
As for Milton, he was rammed down my throat at school and I’ve never been able to get on with him since. I’m sorry to be such an ignoramus, but I simply cannot connect with the guy. Give me Dante any day.
Don’t be “offended” and don’t think you have to defend the goats: it’s bad reputation is only a matter of ancient occidental symbolism that, unfortunately for them, has its influence in our minds.
(I can’t explain further… my poor English forbids me to do so)
The great thing about a decent schooling is that you meet not only the great writers – as might be, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Burns – but you can put them into perspective because you also meet the duds such as Milton and Dickens.
I don’t want the language to be a reason to stop you writing, though, Julia. Do feel free to write in Spanish; most people can speak it and the rest of us can make a translation.
… Except it is so much also a matter of personal taste, because I’d have said ‘Milton and the man who wrote Moby Dick, whose name has escaped me … Herman Melville’. I rather like Dickens. And I know lots of people swear by Moby Dick.
Thank you A.J.P.!
(Aunque es abuso de mi parte)
Sólo quería comentar sobre las valoraciones negativas que pesan sobre algunos animales como resabios de ciertas simbologías originadas en la Antigüedad o en la Edad Media, sin que realmente tengan un fundamento lógico, por supuesto. Las pobres cabras son de aquellos animales que siguen hasta ahora estigmatizadas por una mirada negativa. En cambio, en otros el simbolismo antiguo se ha olvidado y su valoración se ha invertido por completo: las ballenas –recién mencionadas a propósito de Moby Dick– son un ejemplo perfecto de esto. De monstruos infernales y temibles, pasaron a ser la representación misma de todo lo ecológico y grandioso de la naturaleza (aunque por más que me encanten las ballenas, estoy segura de que si me encontrara con una estando yo sola en medio del mar comprendería bien la mirada de Jonás…)
After all these so many words, I promise to be quiet for a long time!
No, don’t be quiet!
De monstruos infernales y temibles, pasaron a ser la representación misma de todo lo ecológico y grandioso de la naturaleza
Yes, I hadn’t thought of that before. It seems that we see most animals as a reflection of ourselves or a metaphor, and pigs come out worst from that of course (at least in European culture, perhaps there are other places that revere the pig, I hope so). I was talking to a man the other day who had a pet pig. He said they are so intelligent and show all sorts of human emotions, like jealousy. He said he’s had to give up eating them.
sin que realmente tengan un fundamento lógico
Y si los “fundamentos lógicos” son otras meras valoraciones? Modernas, pero no menos simbólicas y aptas a consolar á nosotros que nos gustamos ver como los seres más avanzados en la historia del mundo.
pasaron a ser la representación misma de todo lo ecológico y grandioso de la naturaleza
Aun representaciones, pues, y egalmente exageradas.
He said he’s had to give up eating them
I’d rather eat pork than be eaten up by jealousy. Did you see the film Hannibal?
Bueno… abuso un poquito más del uso del castellano…
Sí, las valoraciones modernas pueden ser tan ilógicas como las anteriores, porque son también simbolizaciones, claro.
De hecho aún en los tiempos en que el mundo era leído a la luz de los símbolos en lugar de con nuestra all mighty science & rational thinking, era común observar los objetos simbolizados desde sus características negativas o positivas (aut bonam partem aut malam partem), porque todo símbolo suele ser doble.
Yo tampoco podría comer chancho si tuviera uno de mascota… Somos injustos con algunos animales: los creemos tontos y sin sentimientos cuando forman parte of a flock pero descubrimos sus virtudes cuando los tratamos como mascotas. Los hombres también podemos parecer idiotas cuando nos movemos en manadas…
Is that the cannibal one?
It’s the one where the rich bad guy that Lecter as a psychiatrist had tricked into punishing himself – Mason Verger – tries to revenge himself by arranging for Lecter to be eaten by wild boars trained for that purpose. Verger himself gets et. The film is described here.
I don’t know what “the cannibal one” is, unless you are referring to one of the late scenes in the film where the FBI creep gets fried in the best butter? I wouldn’t call that cannibalism exactly. For that you need two. I see it more as a natural extension of his being gobbled up by himself,
When I was a child, some members of my family overheard a conversation among strangers that went something like this:
Child [pointing at actual pigs]: Ooh, Mommy, look! They’re so dirty!
Parent: Yes, dear, that’s why we call them pigs.
The expression “That’s why we call them _____”
now functions as a snowclone in our family.
That was the scene I saw, I don’t think I saw the whole film.
I wouldn’t call that cannibalism exactly. For that you need two.
Is there a word for people who eat themselves?
Parent: Yes, dear, that’s why we call them pigs.
When I see what some children have had to endure I realise how lucky I was.
“Parent: Yes, dear, that’s why we call them pigs.”
The scene is fantastic! they put the name before the metaphor or symbolism …
I mean:
Presentan el nombre como la explicación de la metáfora con que se carga a los chanchos. Nominalismo puro!
“Nominalism” is one of those terms in philosophy which have had various uses and meanings. I’ve not yet succeeded in associating each in my mind firmly with its historical period. Are you thinking of a particular use? (It may well be that the Castellano nominalismo has different associations than nominalism does in American or British English, due to the different intellectual and conceptual traditions).
The nominalism/realism dispute in the Middle Ages was a dispute about the reality of universals. I don’t quite see what
1) “pigs are called pigs because they’re dirty”
could have to do with universals. 1) is a funny statement, but I’m not sure why, and would like to think it through. I am definitely not a friend of terminology for the sake of terminology, but it might help to throw in a few terms here. To be honest, I’ve long held the view that this whole business of nominalism/realism is a 13th century constructivist chiste (to put it anachronistically). Not the less interesting for all that, but still …
The so-called Catholic Encyclopedia has this to say on nominalism:
“Nominalism” in this sense seems to have nothing to do with the pigs. On the other hand, 1) seems to be not a million miles away from what the Wikipedia on nominalism calls “predicate nominalism”.
In our case, this would be saying that “pig” means “dirty” because “dirty” is part of what it is to be a “pig”. Now, in a sense, this is very true. Pigs like wallowing in wet stuff, like elephants etc. Pigs can’t sweat, as I recall, they need a way to cool off, and wallowing in wet stuff is one way to do that. What’s funny about 1), it seems to me now, is merely the anthopomorphic misinterpretation, the muddying together of pig and human behavior. We wouldn’t take issue with the purely descriptive (definitional ?)
2) Pigs are called pigs because they wallow in mud
or
3) People are called people because they can’t imagine what it’s like to be a pig
Sorry, sorry my mistake…!
I should have said “realism”.
I was thinking indeed in the dispute of the universals but (paradoxically) mixed the terminology! :-()
De hecho lo primero que vino a mi mente fueron unos versos de Jorge Luis Borges donde discute la teoría de los arquetipos platónicos:
“Si (como afirma el griego en el Cratilo)
el nombre es arquetipo de la cosa
en las letras de ‘rosa’ está la rosa
y todo el Nilo en la palabra ‘Nilo’.”
Al decir que llamamos a los chanchos “chanchos ” porque son sucios, me parecía descubrir que se pensaba en que había un arquetipo de la “chanchedad” (being a pig) que estaba por delante o por encima de los animales particulares y que por eso a esos animales sucios se les daba el nombre de “chanchos”.
En castellano, como en inglés “chancho” es sinónimo de sucio (también de gordo), pero evidentemente es una metáfora que surge de extraer UNA característica de esos animales para aplicarla en 0tras circunstancias parecidas. La frase del padre a su hijo, hace el camino contrario, olvidando el poder metaforizador del lenguaje: se los llama chanchos porque eso es lo que son (sucios). Y por eso me resultaba curioso y gracioso a la luz de lo que había estado comentando antes.
(Perdón, Grumbly Stu, por mi absurda confusión que te dio tanto trabajo!!)
Pues no, Julia, unos ejercicios en argumentación cautelosa no me dañan de ningún modo! No soy reconocido como experto en eso … No te parece también que los versos de Borges expresan sucintamente lo necesario, es decir lo que conduce a pensar, en lugar de dar respuestas – el fin de las quales es precisamente poner fin al pensar?
las cuales …
Of course!
Las respuestas unívocas y monolíticas anulan el pensamiento. Lo interesante son las preguntas… y las respuestas tentativas, tal vez.
Los versos de Borges muestran el encanto poético de esa idea platónica (se la acepte como verdadera o no)
I’m so glad that my little story provided food for such a lot of thought!
Stu, I would like to distinguish between two meanings of “that’s why we call them pigs”
(a) That’s why “pig” is our word for this kind of animal.
(b) That’s our criterion for labeling particular animals as belonging to this kind.
I have always thought of it as (a), so that the humor is about either (i) someone’s almost unimaginable ignorance of the history of the word “pig” — does she imagine that dirty people were called pigs before the word was extended to those wallowing animals? or (ii) the astounding belief that the meanings and implications of a word live in the word before people put them there.
You seem to be thinking more along the lines of (b). I find that interpretation less plausible for the overheard conversational exchange, or at any rate less funny.
‘Pig’ means dirty. These animals are dirty, so we call them pigs.
The joke is in the emotion we feel (powerlessness, probably) at hearing someone spreading a dim, made-up explanation that is the exact opposite of the truth.
Empty, I don’t know that I’m thinking along any lines at all. There were two issues for me: what did Julia mean by “nominalism”, and why is
1) “pigs are called pigs because they’re dirty”
a funny thing to say. My musings meandered, and I ended up saying it was funny because “mud for pigs” is being confused with “dirt for humans”. But I knew that was unsatisfactory, and you have now exposed the paucity of my comment for all to see. It’s dangerous to be nice – you tend not to care that much that you’re waffling. Well, it’s back to grumbling for me!!
It seems to me that your (a) and (b) mean pretty much the same thing. But I’m not sure what “that” refers to in (a) and (b).
(a) That’s why “pig” is our word for this kind of animal.
(b) That’s our criterion for labeling particular animals as belonging to this kind
Would
(a)* The fact that they’re dirty is why “pig” is our word for this kind of animal.
(b)* “Being dirty” is our criterion for labeling particular animals as belonging to this kind
be statements equivalent to (a) and b()? I don’t see the difference between (a)* and (b)*.
(ii) the astounding belief that the meanings and implications of a word live in the word before people put them there.
Of course meanings do live in words “before” people put them there – for the simple reason that meanings are never put into words. There is never a before, there is only after (that’s what Heidegger is getting at with his little phrase “immer schon”).
You sound as if you believed that words were once lying around devoid of meaning, like empty parking spaces in the celestial void – then man was created, and parked his meanings in the spaces. On the contrary, the meanings of a word are inseparable from the word. Change the meaning, and you have a different word. Change the word, and you have a different meaning. How such an apparently simple view could turn into a dispute about the “reality” of “universals”, is hard to credit, i.e. to reconstruct historically.
Borges, in the verses quoted by Julia, makes the platonic idea sounds more magical and thought-provoking than wrong-headed.
By the way, “immer schon” is everyday German for “always”. “Immer” is just as good. Heidegger managed to turn it into a term of philosophical art.
Just like Hegel did with “an und für sich” (“in and of itself”, more or less). I don’t know the origin of the expression before Hegel (and a few predecessors) got their hands on it. “An und für sich” is now everyday German meaning “essentially” or “for all practical purposes”. I think it may have arisen as translations of Medieval Latin “per se” and “in se”.
I agree with Crown about what makes the story funny. The mother is engaging in what is essentially some spectacularly false folk etymology. Maybe the other funny part is that she appears to be using the pigs to improve her children: don’t be like the pigs, children, or people will call you pigs.
Yes. The more you think about it, the scarier it gets.
Stu,
I think that you are capable of grumbling and being nice at the same time. In fact, I think that you are doing so now.
I don’t see the difference between (a)* and (b)*.
I see a big difference. It’s the difference between
(a)** The reason why speakers of English use this string of sounds rather than some other to denote this kind of animal is that on the one hand this is a dirty kind of animal (or kind of dirty animal, if you prefer) and on the other hand this string of letters connotes or denotes dirtiness.
and
(b)** There is a kind of animal called “pig”. I say that the animals before us are pigs because on the one hand the animals before us are dirty and on the other hand dirtiness is my usual test for pigness.
You sound as if you believed that words were once lying around devoid of meaning, like empty parking spaces in the celestial void – then man was created, and parked his meanings in the spaces.
I like that. And no doubt whoever created man had also created both those rows and rows of empty woids and all the meanings, too, so that man’s role in this was purely that of a parking attendant.
Seriously, I think that our failure to communicate about (a) vs (b) can be chalked up to a conflict between two perfectly acceptable meanings of the word “word”.
I agree that a word, in the most interesting sense of the word “word”, is inseparable from its meaning. But that’s not the sense in which I was using it.
I’ll start by saying that a word (in the most interesting sense) consists of a string of sounds and an associated collection (or better yet cloud) of senses. The senses may overlap.
I will add the complication that over time the string of sounds will change and the cloud of senses will also change.
Things become both fuzzier and more accurate when we recognize that the string of sounds is a bit different for different speakers, as is also the cloud of senses.
Furthermore, to be honest, the very notion of a string of sounds is an oversimplification — reality is more blurred than that — where does one sound end and another begin? Likewise the cloud of senses is so cloudy that it is an oversimplification to try to list the senses of the word.
So a word is both blurry and changing.
For convenience we talk about these things in simpler ways, though — just as we give a lasting name to a river even though it is constantly flowing and even though the line between river and land or between river and sea is our own idea and hard to pin down; and just as we give a lasting name to a person even though [fill in the blank].
So much for the deep and interesting sense of the word “word”.
Note, however, that if I say, as I might, “What’s the German word for that kind of shrub over there? The English word is ‘yew’,” I am using it in a different sense. I am not merely taking the simplified view that a word consists of a definite string of sounds and an associated set of senses. I am in fact using the word “word” to mean the string of sounds alone.
Oh, I’m not exactly saying that the string of sounds rendered Eibe was once sitting in some word factory waiting for someone to decide which plant or animal or article of clothing to match it up with, but I don’t see any harm in thinking of that string as having been available for use as a string-of-sounds-with-a-meaning before it actually was used as such.
Yes, the mother is forgetting that language is metaphoric. We say that “someone is a pig” using a metaphor (someone is dirty LIKE a pig is dirty).
Se conectan dos entidades por una característica que se descubre semejante entre ellos.
But being a pig implies so many other things. “Pig” isn’t an adjective, as she appears to think.
Anyway, all the discussion was really entertaining (no matter who’s ideas were “wrong” or “right” … even though I was certainly wrong saying “nominalismo” instead of “realism” as I’ve already mentioned).