I had started sending email cards but it seems the picture isn’t going through for some reason, probably my fault, so I’ve had to abandon it. Anyway, have a good time!
From Holly, Vesla & Misty and the Crown family.
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A Bad Guide 
Hahahahahahaha!
Great.
I really thought there were some goats in there…horses, cloud formations…
Happy Christmas to you all, bipeds and quadrupeds! (I can see how it would be unsatisfying if the picture wouldn’t go…).
x
I love it! Merry Christmas, Mr Crown, and wishing you and your extended family the best new year!
“Not About Goats”: Well, that’s not exactly what I see there.
In any case, goats or not, have a good time too (but not with some of Father Christmas’s lightly-dressed staff, please).
Many thanks for drawing my attention to this. I don’t know what I was thinking. It is of course “Partly About Goats”.
Those are not Santa’s helpers, they are innocent victims of dark forces. Father Christmas seems to have taken Wotan’s or Sigurd’s place as leader of Oskoreia, The Wild Hunt, the horde of trolls and demons being unleashed in the lawless romjul days.
That wild hunt is interesting. I’d forgotten my Space Christmas card. Thanks.
I don’t believe I have shared this before, but over the last eleven months my 85-year-old mother has developed big health problems, and in September she ended up permanently in a nursing home. Mentally she is very much herself except for many memory lapses; physically she is incapable of walking safely on her own. It’s been a very sad and difficult year for the family. It has felt a little odd not to mention it here, but on the other hand it would have felt a little odd to randomly introduce such a somber personal note. Maybe Space Christmas is as good a time as any.
After years of gathering every year at Mom’s house for Christmas for several days — my sisters and I and our spouses and children and dogs, and my uncle and my cousin — in what was always a high point of the year, especially for Mom, this year we found ourselves trying to reinvent/preserve the family traditions, with my own family’s house as the center of it all. It was Mom’s first overnight outing from the nursing home, and I’m happy to say that it went very well (for everyone except possibly the cat).
A few days before Christmas my daughter and I went to visit Mom. The scheduled Activity for that afternoon was an accordion performance in the dining room, which did not sound like our cup of tea, so we decided to skip it and take her out somewhere in the car. We drove along country roads, talking and listening to music. When we brought her back we could hear the accordion at the other end of the hall, echoing its joyous strains. I took Mom to her room, then went to get her a glass of water. Just as I walked into the dining room, the musician finished a tune and said to his audience “That was ‘Here Comes Santa Claus’ “. Then he looked up at me in my big red coat and bushy grey beard and said excitedly “Hey, look, here he is!” It made my day.
It seems to say here that Space Christmas is a time for going Christmas goat.
What would the accordionist have said if I had looked like this?
I’m very sorry to hear your mother’s been ill. I know there was a hospital incident a while ago that required your sister the lawyer and your wife to intervene on her behalf, but my own memory is far from perfect and I can’t recall all the details. I do think your mom’s very lucky having so many of you around; I’m sure having people to discuss things with must make all the difference when you’re confined to one spot like a hospital or nursing home. My mother’s 85 too (and I think you & I are the same age); mine suffers a bit from memory loss and seems to get tired a lot, though on the whole she’s doing very well. But I do wish she had more relatives at hand to talk to; more children, for instance. I must remember to complain to her about that.
If I’ve seen the Norwegian Xmas Goat before I’d forgotten about it, so thanks for that picture. Needless to say I’m not crazy about animal sacrifices but the idea of other people making an inanimate sacrifice – burying their car in their garden, say – is quite appealing.
I do recall now that back around February or March I wrote something about having family members who know how to speak up and act the right questions and so on when you are at the mercy of a hospital system.
And I remember being aware, when confronting pinhut around that time, that my bitterness about my mother’s problems had to be influencing to my behavior.
Returning to Space Christmas: Is there some animal sacrifice involved in julbukking? Anglophone WiPe makes it sound like a jolly custom of visiting the neighbors while dressed as a goat. Norwegian WiPe seems to hint at something darker, but I can’t read the language; and Google Translate just makes it worse. What is fruentimmere? Is it anything like Frauenzimmer? If so, how could you do it without knowing?
On another subject, I was charmed to learn today that the French word for slam is chelem.
I managed to close down my reader and lose my comment while trying to look for the Dutch word for slam. Here we call it slem (storeslem and lilleslem), pronounced like German Schlemm. I’d suspect that the French form came through German too.
Julebukk is the jolly custom of visiting neighbours in costume. No goat or other animal sacrifice involved. Like Halloween, it’s about overcoming the forces of darkness by having fun with them on their very own day. Bukk “he-goat” could be because at one time the leader of the pack would be dressed up as the devil depicted as a goat.
Fruentimmer is a loan of the Low German form of Frauenzimmer “womanfolk”. It’s not quite as derogative in Norwegian as in German. I was about to run wild with the deviating meaning of zimmer here, evoking English timber to render a meaning “woman material”, but apparently it’s formed from the plural in an original meaning “women’s quarter’s” -> “the women as a group” -> “women” -> Sg. “woman”.
Thank you, Trond. So in this paragraph (1) what does Thor have to do with the sun, (2) who prohibited the keeping of goats, and (3) what does it mean to do Frauenzimmer to children?
(That was from here.)
(1) Nothing but a strange mistranslation.
(2) It says hold av geitebukker, i.e. keeping of he-goats, but I’ve never heard of a prohibition.
(3) Now it says do fruentimmere with children. Make women pregnant.
The banner at the bottom of the Norwegian WP page translates as
Oh, and I let the greengrocer into the women’s quarter’s.
Oh, of course, that kind of “with children”! Thank you.
Thanks, Trond.
Not that this interests anyone but me, but today I happened to read about another Norwegian word for romjul: lofrao. It’s a dialect word from Western Norway of obscure etymology, but the author explains it as a backformation from something like lofredag. i.e. lovfridag “law-freeday” = “mandatory holiday”. I like that, even if lov is the Danish form and the Norwegian counterpart log survived into the 20th century in the conservative western dialects. But I suppose it might have been formed in exactly the same way from the homonymous lov “permisson; leave (n.)” and fredag “Friday”.
The traditional “Have a nice weekend” greeting on Fridays in Norway is “God Helg”. God Elg, which is pronounced the same, means “Good elk” (moose). I’ve probably mentioned this before.
I just played with Google Translate to find some words for “weekend”. Some European languages just borrow the English word; others say “end of the week” in their own words; the Scandinavian languages, with the possible exception of Danish, have their own word, approximately “helg”.
But can anyone figure out why GT gives me “auctor” as the Latin for “weekend”?
And happy moose to you all.
>Empty
In a dictionary Spanish-Latin for modern use of Latin I just looked up our “fin de semana” and I found these translations: “fin de -, septimana vergens; éxiens hebdómada; hebdómadae éxitus; extrema hebdómada feriata;”
The accents are only for help the pronunciation.
>Empty
I just saw in GT your “weekend” as “auctor” in Latin but this word is obviously translated as “autor” in Spanish (and in English, of course). However, when you put the cursor in “auctor” you read +/- :“click you to get other possible translations. Then you can also read other expression: “volutpat vestibulum” , that is translated as “the weekend” and “el fin de semana”. I didn’t know that so I looked for on the internet: that belongs to a Cicero’s text (“Lorem Ipsum”?) used in publishing and graphic design! I don’t understand anything.
I wonder if there’s an English version of your dictionary for modern Latin.
Here’s one, but it seems a bit literal (I supposed it has to):
>A.J.P. Crown
I’m sorry. I only know this dictionary made by an Italian salesian priest who works in Argentina. In this file there is a PDF version: http://www.juan23.edu.ar/latin/autor.html
I’ll try to wrap my brain around all that soon; but for now, Happy 2012 to all fellow followers of A Bad Guide, from Oxford, at the moment. And to the Guide himself, of course.
¡Feliz año nuevo para todos ustedes!
Happy New Year to you all!
Bonne Année, Gutes Neues Jahr, Happy New Year to all of you here!
But can anyone figure out why GT gives me “auctor” as the Latin for “weekend”? … Lorem ipsum ??
There may be interference from internet litter, say from the Lorem ipsum generator, which produces something like this. Or from Peano’s conlang Interlingua, which is supposed to be uninflected Latin. Here is the previous link in Interlingua.
Here’s some background to “lorem ipsum”. It is part of a mangled text thrown together by “some printer in the 1500s” as part of a type specimen book. The text is from Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum: Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit . . . (“There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain …”).
Why is my comment (the last one) not appearing ?
Maybe it was suppressed because I wrote more than one sentence, but forgot to add “Happy New Year”. OK then, if those are the conditions, then I wish y’all a Happy New Year.
Sorry, Stu. I’ve fished it out of the trash, but the blog has some kind of master plan that doesn’t include answering our questions or accommodating our wishes.
Happy New Year Ø, Catanea, Bruessel, Julia and everyone.
Thanks, Crown. You say the blog has some kind of master plan – like one of those five-year plans in the Soviet Union that you couldn’t refuse ? Harking back to an unanswered question of yours at languagehat: does the blogserver at least issue a State of the Bunion message around this time of year ?
Such as: “Step cautiously into the new year, and eschew tight shoes.”
Gesundheit.
State of the bunion is Ø’s department.
How was I to know ? The inset pic shows only twinkly, avuncular crow’s feet.
empty, have you ever read Pilgrim’s Painful Progress, by John Bunion ? It is an allegory of the search for Tenure while departmental colleagues are stepping on one’s toes.
From your experience, which would you say are more excruciating: bunions or punions ?
Aren’t you a funion!
>A.J.P. Crown
Do you know there is a Finnish radio station that use Latin? For example, here you can read the news about the terrorist attack in Oslo:
http://www.yle.fi/radio1/tiede/nuntii_latini/de_duabus_stragibus_osloae_31278.html
Oh yes, that’s interesting. I never know what’s going on in Finland, we never hear their news and I don’t understand the language. Apparently it was hot there last summer.
I got your card in the mail and enjoyed it greatly. Also, happy new year to one and all!