bloodyrosemccoy | Entries tagged with wordses

Those of you who have been with me for a while may know that I’m an absolute fan of swear words. They are one of my favorite areas of linguistic and anthropological study. I maintain that you can learn a lot about a culture by what they find taboo. And there is no more interesting outlet for linguistic creativity than the cuss.

Naturally, a lot of my conlangs have some fun swear words, and recently I started thinking about them again after demanding that

ysabetwordsmith post some of hers. So I thought I’d highlight one of my favorite curse conlangs here—Rredrra, the language of arhods (like Ghil, in my Doctors! stories, but he’s too classy to use most of these words). So I present to you: Rredrra swearing!

I wanted to give you the unusual stuff, so I left out most of the scatological swears, but rest assured that Rredrra has a lot of ’em. They’re mostly the usual kind, though, so who cares?

The odd thing about Rredrra curses is that they do not wax very creative with sexual vituperation. This can tell you a little more about them, as well—arhodes have an annual mating season,* and it’s not long enough for them to get creative with their sexual antics before they stop thinking about it. But they have other, sometimes odd, ideas of what’s nasty, including:

Hygiene deficiency

Hesh ka!

“Soak me!”

Meaning: Interjection like “My god!” or “Good grief!”

Strength: mild

Explanation: Arhods are not really meant to be based on cats. They do have some things in common with various cat species, but from a a mishmash of types, and these common elements are only superficial.** But there is one thing I based very much on all the cats I’ve known: arhods absolutely hate being wet. Really hate it. Obsessive-compulsive ones even have trouble with their bimonthly shower, although most feel dirtier without it. But most arhods get to the point where they dislike thinking or talking about it and find it a mildly unpleasant subject, enough so that it’s made its way into the lexicon of curses.

Some arhods don’t mind it; and of course some find it necessary in their jobs. They’re regarded as “strong-stomached” individuals, the kind an arhode version of Mike Rowe would have on his show. But it confuses Galactic citizens to see a happy, wet arhod in much the same way it confuses me to see a cat that does not rise straight up in the air when placed in contact with water . I thought that was a law of physics.

( And That's Only The Tip Of The Iceberg ... )

Current Mood: crazy
Current Music: Huey Lewis & The News ~ Hip to be Square

World Peace Day/Winter Solstice
Winter Begins (Northern Hemisphere)
Summer Begins (Southern Hemisphere)
Abilities Day
Capricorn Begins
National Haiku Poetry Day
Yule (Wiccan)

Over the last four months, I’ve been pondering what makes a geek a geek. I’ve pondered this before, but there were some interesting circumstances that brought it to the foreground recently:

-The moment I stepped off the plane on my way to Africa, I had a bit of an epiphany. I realized that I was in for a shocking cultural experience with people wildly different from myself.

This was in JFK Airport. I had just met the other students going on the trip.

It seems that geeks do not really go to Africa, because none of them was. I had some conscientious world-savers, but no one who understood my geekness. It was surprisingly hard.

-Last night, Mom told me she’s always amazed that I like Star Trek and stuff like that. “It seems so out-of-character,” she said. “You’re so … no-nonsense, and here you like all this stuff.”

-Today,

kittikattie linked to an older article that has the dumbest explanation of nerdiness ever.*

And after talking with some nerdy friends through the years and considering what makes me interested in what I’m interested in, I’ve come up with a certain explanation of much of geek/nerd behavior. Since you’re all geeks and nerds, I’m sure you’ll have something to add to the analysis, but from my brother (a Mines geek, no less!) and my friends and myself, this is what I have:

( ... Was, Do I like Kirk? Or do I like Picard? )

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: The Eagles ~ Take It Easy

Or: Try To Keep Up With The Acronyms

Scene: The office. MOM is taking a look at AMELIA'S blog, and gets to the entry titled "I Has a Hank."

MOM: I'll bet people get annoyed when you write "I has."

AMELIA: ... What?

MOM: You did it again here. "I also has a book." People will think you mean "I have" and it's a typo.

AMELIA: They won't. It's ... it's something you say on the internet. It's netspeak.

MOM: They won't think you're stupid and that you can't use your own language properly?

AMELIA: On the internet, "proper use of language" has an entirely different meaning.

I'm glad she dropped it at that. I was worried she'd ask what that meaning was, and then I'd have to delve into a long explanation of macro-inspired internet idioms and lolcats and I'm in ur [noun], [verb]in ur [noun]z, and finally I was going to have to break it to her that OMGWTFBBQBACONZORS!!11!1! is a recognizable interjection as far as the internet is concerned. My mom is cool, but I don't think she's ready for that yet.

She'd be all, O_o.

And she wouldn't have any idea how to express that, either.

Current Mood: quixotic

Disability Independence Day
Anniversary - Americans With Disabilities Act
Birthday - Aldous Huxley (author)
Birthday - George Bernard Shaw (playwright)
Ratification Day (New York)
Curacao Day (Curacao)
Independence Day (Liberia)
Independence Day (Maldives)
National Day (Cuba)

Conversation with Mom about the American Girl dolls:

Amelia: And they’re making a new historical. Apparently, the 1970s is now historical.

Mom: … Those were my college years.

Amelia: Although I must admit, a lot of interesting social change happened then. She lives in San Francisco, and is gonna deal with things like environmentalism, civil rights, and feminism. Oh, and her parents are getting divorced.

Mom: Does her mom leave her dad for another woman?

Amelia: …

Mom: That would be awesome.

It’s things like this that make me realize that Mom and I are on the same wavelength.

And now it’s time for Vocabulary Lessons With Dad:

“Now, ‘sabotage’ is when you’re sneaking around the balcony unscrewing the screws that hold the railing down. ‘Subterfuge’ is when you’re doing that, only you’re Cary Grant in a catsuit, and people are looking up but they don’t notice you.”

Fortunately for all of us, Dad isn’t an English teacher.

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: The Beatles ~ It Won't Be Long

National Tailors Day
Anniversary - D-Day
Flag Day (Sweden)
Memorial Day (Korea)

So last month I started naming planets after jewels, and found that it was absolutely necessary to include one whose name translated to ‘garnet.’ This was imperative, because while I like a lot of jewels, only garnet has the perfect name.

I’ve mentioned before that some words that shouldn’t be onomatopoeic are to me—bottle, swelter, crystal, and shit all sound like what they describe to me. And garnet is definitely in that category—it sounds exactly like a frozen droplet of dark red,* something that its etymology reflects. But somehow it exceeds even the usual tendencies of my onomatopoeia words. Garnet is one of very few words I assign tone to, so that whenever I think it it sounds singsong.** I always get a little sense of pleasure when I say it, or even think it. It’s got a special place in my head, in the small category of Absolutely Spot-On Perfect Words.

That got me thinking of my other favorite words. You saw a few above (I like words that sound like what they are). But it’s not just those. Some words just sound or look cool without being attached to anything—astroblastoma, or photophosphorylation. Some words have great definitions, like defenestrate.*** And some are just funny—for some reason, I believe that toast is the single funniest word in the English language.

I’ve got favorites in other languages, too. Being a linguist has its perks.

Spanish: murcielago, ‘bat.’ It’s just got such a great rhythm to it, although I’m guessing that they don’t translate ‘Batman’ because Hombremurcielago—or worse, el Hombre de los Murcielagos—would be hard to say.
Swahili: Hands down, kiboko, ‘hippopotamus.’ Fun to say, but even better, the ki- at the beginning puts it in the noun class of tiny things.
Japanese: atatakakatta, ‘warm (in the past).’ This is the hardest word to say in the world. The root, atatakai, ‘warm,’ is bad enough, but when you add that bit that makes it past tense, it’s damn near impossible.
Hawaiian: Any word. The more syllables, the better. For an example, I give you ho’okalakupua, ‘to do magic,’ but pretty much any word in it is awesome and fun to say.
ASL: The word for Coca-Cola, which in Utah is still done by faking shooting yourself up with cocaine. Also the generic word for soda, which is just fun to do.

What about you? What’s your favorite word?

*Weirdly, none of the letters in the word is red. I guess it’s the sound all put together.

**Since you ask, it is exactly the tone of the sound effect they play in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island when you pick up a red coin. That sound is, for me, the exact sonic reflection of garnet—both the word and the object itself.

***Here’s one for you. Everyone always laughs about that word, but did you ever wonder whether that de- is a morpheme, and that you should be asking yourself what fenestrate means? I did. But I’m not gonna do all the work for you. You can go look it up yourself.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Mithril ~ Lord of the Rings Set

Library of Congress Day
National Teach Children to Save Day
Birthday - Barbra Streisand (singer, actress)

It may have to do with the fact that I started drinking my caffeinated tea right then, but today I perked up in linguistics and gender class right as we got to swear words.

Okay, it wasn’t the caffeine. I’m just a big fan of swear words.

Now this might seem odd for a girl from the white side of Salt Lake, a city so pasty that baby turtles on coasts hundreds of miles away mistake its light for the moon and move inland, a city where one of the biggest scandals during the Olympics was when Mitt Romney said The H-Word.* Or it might seem perfectly reasonable, in a forbidden fruit sort of way—but that’s not true either, because while Utah itself might cuss like Playhouse Disney, my family is full of old pros at it,** and I do not lack experience.

The thing is, I just find every aspect of swearing cool.

You can learn a lot about a culture by what it considers Taboo Language—look at the Victorian fears of the word “pants” or “leg,” or some languages’ words for certain relatives, and one I’ve heard of where the world for “left hand” is bad but don’t quote me on that. I love making up swears for my conlangs from this principle—basing curses on certain fun aspects of the societies, such as the arhode’s distaste for getting wet resulting in “go soak yourself” being a lot more vulgar than it is in English, or the sprites’ equivalent of “son of a bitch” meaning something along the lines of “black personality.”***

The sound of swear words can be fun, too. They’re often words that get spat out, so they slur if they’re polysyllabic. “Shit” is the most evocative of its literal description for me, but “damn” and “fuck” and their various forms are more fun to say.

Profanity is neurologically interesting, as well. Such interjections are actually stored in a different part of your brain, which is why it’s so easy to access “God dammit sonuvabitch” when you bang your shin. That’s also an explanation for the more well-known (but, might I add, least common) form of Tourette’s syndrome, when the tics include uncontrolled swearing or repetition of a phrase such as “you know,” and why people with various aphasias can still swear. (That’s also where you store song lyrics or poems you “know by heart,” and why after fifteen years I can still sing the entirety of “Yakko’s World.”) Once again, This Is Your Brain On Language is awesome.

I also like creative swearing, like they do on Firefly, which doesn’t seem like something you store but that you have time to think about. Favorites from that show include (translated from Mandarin), “Holy mother of god and all her wacky nephews!” and “Explosive diarrhea of an elephant!” It’s nasty, but funny.

And, of course, there’s the naughty rebellious feeling you get when you do swear. Street cred. Acceptable badness. It’s fun to play with the taboo. Even telling people that swearing is interesting sounds slightly rebellious, and you’re delighted with that.

I am, anyway. “Damn,” I seemed to be saying in class, “this shit is fanfuckintastic.”

*I am not making this Olympic scandal up.

**Slam. “God dammit sonuvabitch!” “Hey, everybody, Dad’s home!”

***The actual phrase is “Fulo vetuk!” If you think you know why that’s a joke, then present yourself to Ian McKellen for your prize. If you know why that’s a joke, then there is no hope for you.

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: Mannheim Steamroller ~ G Major Toccata

Read Across America Day
Birthday - Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel (author)
World Day Of Prayer
Independence Day (Texas)

I’ve started like six different thoughtful entries here, entries of substance that would express some deep thoughts about culture and beliefs and thought processes, about gender studies and relations and how I was misled* by a class title, but I can’t keep a coherent thought in my head at the moment, so instead here’s a video of a kitten that fits in a shoe.

I would not want to be a Scottish Fold. Can you imagine the social repercussions of having permanently scrunched up ears in a species that uses them so expressively? It would be like a human having a thick, low-hanging unibrow and a permanent squint. I’ll bet Folds get into a lot of misunderstandings in bars—“Hey, buddy, are youse lookin’ for a fight?” “What?” “I don’t like the way yer lookin’ at me! Bring it!” and the next thing the Fold remembers is waking up in the alley with a bite out of his side and four claw marks on his nose.

But it sure is cute.

*Does anybody else ever read this word as if it were the regular inflection of a verb whose infinitive would be ‘to misle’? I can’t help doing it.

Current Mood: still punchy
Current Music: Talking Heads ~ Swamp

Hoodie-Hoo Day (Northern Hemisphere)
International Pancake Day
Mardi Gras
Paczki Day
Pisces Begins
Shrove Tuesday

Today’s linguistics question: How many of y’all use “I’ma” as a contraction of “I’m gonna”? As in “I’ma go to the store tomorrow” or “I’ma bake some cookies later.”

We were talking today about linguistic change and brought up the fossilization of linguistic forms, and I brought this one up. I wasn’t sure if it was an idiosyncrasy of myself and a few of my friends or a larger phenomenon, but apparently a few others in class used it, too. So I got curious. Is this a widespread phenomenon? Is “gonna” the new formal? And where in the world did I pick up “y’all,” anyway?

These are the questions which need to be answered, folks.

Current Mood: damp

Four Chaplains Memorial Day
Tu B'Shvat (Jewish)
Anniversary - "The Day the Music Died"
Birthday - Norman Rockwell (artist)
Bean Throwing Festival (Setsubun - Japan)
Heroes' Day (Mozambique)

One of my favorite words in Spanish is bambolearse, which means to sway, wobble, or lose your balance.* Ever since I started taking Fukitol, I’ve found this to be a highly useful word to describe my state when I have withdrawal.

The website for the drug lists “dizziness or vertigo” as a possible side effect of the withdrawal, along with about twenty other symptoms.** Since I’ve got such a messy endocrine system anyway, I often give no notice to the others (and yes, I get a whole bunch of ’em) until I stand up and the floor slides out from under me, at which point I think to myself, “Aha! I am not nauseated because of something I ate, or because of angry hormones! I am nauseated because I forgot the Fukitol! And now, because of that, me estoy bamboleando!”

But there is one more symptom that always precedes this phase by about twelve hours. Unfortunately, I never remember it because of its very nature—instead I think “Hmm, that was weird” and then have to wait until me bamboleo. The website also lists this other symptom under the dry category of “nightmares,” which is a clinical approach to saying “you will spend the entire night on a yellow submarine, only it will be evil.”

I got that one yesterday.

These are not your ordinary nightmares, with the vague “My plane leaves in ten minutes and I haven’t packed yet!” or “It’s coming to get me!” plotlines. These are epic, mindblowing, emotionally charged dreams with a pervading sense that DOOM is behind every corner of everything, even if the dream is set at Nanny Smoochums’ Gingerbread Shelter for Dolls and Bunnies. (It never is, though. It’s either a library or a museum, or the place I call the Glass Ocean.) They have no real symbolism except to show what images have been lying around in my head. They are dreams Peter Jackson would be proud to direct.

The thing is, I wake up with residual emotions from them, something I don’t do with normal dreams. I woke up generally pissed at the world yesterday, and it took me a few minutes to remember that none of my friends had ever actually kidnapped anyone,*** so they didn’t deserve the blame.

At least I didn’t wake up with the vague notion that evil gods were out to get me. That’s usually the sign of a bad day ahead.

*Another is the word for ‘bat,’ murcielago, because it’s so much fun to say. However, I hope that they don’t translate Batman’s name in the Spanish-language comics, because while I enjoy the enormous amount of syllables of the word, el Hombre de los Murcielagos would take up a lot of text, and even Hombre-Murcielago is kind of a mouthful.

**For those of you who are interested, there is a difference between dizziness and vertigo when you’re reporting medical symptoms. Dizziness is when you feel lightheaded or faint; vertigo is when your equilibrium is off. I get both, but mostly vertigo.

***We’re not counting the time the carpet guy kidnapped me. That was only for about five minutes, and he was actually trying to help. It merely demonstrated that at seven years old I failed at Stranger Danger—but in my defense, he wasn’t a stranger, and in fact he’s a very nice guy and still cleans our carpets.

Current Mood: content
Current Music: James Taylor ~ Sun on the Moon

New Years Day
Circumcision of Christ (Christian)
New Year's Dishonor List
St. Basil's Day (E. Orthodox)
Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God (Roman Catholic)
Z Day
Anniversary - Birth of First Baby Boomer
Mummers Parade (Pa, US)
Tournament of Roses Parade (Ca, US)
Rose Bowl Game (Pasadena, Ca)
Liberation Day (Cuba)
Independence Day (Haiti)
New Year (1st-3rd -Japan)
Independence Day (Sudan)

All right, I have one last question for the holidays: what in the bloody blue blazes is up with ballet, anyway?

Heather, Aunt, and I went to see The Nutcracker a few days ago. I dunno what Tchaikovsky’s problem was with his music, because that, at least, is gorgeous. But good lord on a cracker, the dancing is just bizarre.

There is one thing I can say for it, and that is that it’s a hell of a study in endurance athletics. But it’s not very exciting to watch, if you want the truth. It’s all sort of slow and trippy, and some of the dancers scare the hell out of me. Heather and I think the women should do more lifting of partners, just so that they pay some attention to their upper bodies and don’t wind up looking like somebody mismatched a torso from a Holocaust photograph with legs sculpted by Michelangelo. The main dancer (prima donna?) in the Arabian dance had countable ribs, as did many others—perhaps to give the guys who lift them something to grip. So you’ve got all these weirdly proportioned people nancing and fluttering about the stage to magnificent music, and you wonder why you don’t just buy the CD, because that’s all you need.

What bothers me about is how it’s supposed to be some sort of high class and cultured thing to watch, and that somehow you’re edified by doing so. What it looked like to me was a load of people parading around the stage. It is more than understandable to admire what years of hard work will allow a dancer to stand en pointe or whatever. But to say to yourself that you are somehow becoming a more sophisticated person by watching it is just silly. It’s really the same as any other type of dance, but for some reason it gets the glory of being fancy. I never could figure that out.

Discussion Question: does anybody else think that Clara’s just acting like she likes that ugly nutcracker doll to be polite? I mean, that thing’s pretty stupid looking. If I were her, I’d have kind of wished he’d gotten me a nice doll, or an iPod. Who the hell wants a big fugly wooden utensil for Christmas, anyway?

Also: ‘Mirliton’ means all sorts of things, apparently, so my guess of ‘something sort of like panpipes’ wasn’t far off. It’s got enough meanings to be a little like one of those words you just toss in when you can’t think of something to say, like 'doohickey’ or “thingumabob.’ “Hand me that there … uh … mirliton.” I think I’ll start using that.

Current Mood: bitchy
Current Music: Waltz of the Flowers

Kids, the word of the day is:

Fantastamazing!

Today's word is brought to you by 妹, whose mutant powers include the power to portmanteau, and the Dude, whose mutant powers have yet to be discovered but who is fantastamazing! anyway.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Annie Lennox ~ Precious

“You just got Strunked!”

Today’s quote brought to you by Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, which expressly forbids verbing nouns and would probably burst into flames in the presence of someone verbing one of its authors’ names to mean “called on a flagrant grammatical error.”

Delicious, ain’t it?

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: CCR ~ Down on the Corner

Girlfriend's Day
Lughnasadh (Wiccan)
National Night Out
Respect for Parents Day
Rounds Resounding Day
Anniversary - MTV
Anniversary - World Wide Web (Amelia Sez: Happy birthday, internet!)
Birthday - Jerry Garcia (musician)
Birthday - Francis Scott Key (writer US National Anthem) (Amelia sez: Thanks a lot, Frank.)
Birthday - Herman Melville (writer) (Amelia sez: Have you ever read about this guy? His life was like the most swashbuckling sailor story ever written. They should totally base movies on Herman Melville's life, not just his epic tales.)
Admission Day (Colorado)
Emancipation Day (Trinidad, Tobago)
Abolition of Slavery Day (Jamaica)
Independence Day (Benin)

I learned about this first back when my friend and her mother took me shopping for suitable bridesmaid stuff for the friend’s wedding.

We were at some department store or other when her mother decided she wanted a new outfit and began to wonder where they kept the “women’s sizes.” “Let’s go see if they have women’s sizes,” she said, and began to wander the store. I followed, confused; there were a great many women’s clothes nearby. But as I listened it gradually dawned upon me that “women’s sizes” was not referring to “sizes for persons of the female sex,” but rather to “sizes for substantial persons of the female sex.”

First I thought it was just my friend’s mother’s peculiarity, but now that I work at a clothing store I have had a few customers come in inquiring as to where we keep our women’s sizes, so apparently that’s what they’re calling it now.

Because I am not nearly as rude outside of my head as I am in it, I generally reply with “I am sorry; our sizes run from zero to sixteen.” Then I will suggest a couple of stores for people with their specific size in mind.

What I do not do is stare at them in disbelief and go, “Of course! You will notice that four-fifths of our store is taken up with women’s clothing. Or did you mean particularly large women?”

Please understand. I have nothing against large women. What I have a problem with is that using the phrase “women’s sizes” for only large sizes excludes all the other women in the world who are not large and yet are still, you know, technically women. Me, for instance. I realize that marketers are forever struggling to come up with inoffensive phrases to describe sizes beyond 16,* but d’you think they could come up with one that doesn't exclude so many of their other consumers?

The very delicacy irks me. I myself have to buy what they call, last I checked anyway, which was a while ago, “petite,” which makes me sound like a waifish little pixie when in fact I look more like a Chris Sanders drawing than anything. I am not particularly small; I am on the short, curvy side of normal-sized, but the thing is that my ratio of torso-to-leg length is rather high, so that I have to hem all the pants I buy and I can’t wear capris because they make me look about two feet tall.** I would be totally fine going into a store and saying, “Do you have a section for people with stubby legs?” Which is probably some gross breach of etiquette, and they would have to come up with some genius codeword for those sizes. But it means that I often wonder why people don’t just say what they mean, and quit coming up with all these ridiculous euphemisms.

It never did cause me as much annoyance as now, though. I think this just went too far—there’s something so obnoxious about the new phrase. I mean, if they’re women, what are the rest of us?

In a related story, my siblings have gone down a different route for size euphemisms. They suggested the following:

Small

Medium

Large

Conservative

Patriot

All-American

My siblings are cynical bastards.

*Hell, they have a hard enough time getting women to buy size 8s if the women are totally convinced that the 8 is a temporary phenomenon and by next week they WILL be a 6 again because they are ALWAYS 6 GOD DAMMIT and they will NOT buy an 8 because they are NOT 8s and we must run small and there is NO WAY they are buying an 8 because they are a SIX FOR GOD’S SAKE. That sort of logic is hard to argue with.

**Which is actually a clever costuming strategy I noticed in the Lord of the Rings movies. One of the ploys they used to make the hobbits look diminutive was to give them all pants that were cut to exactly the length to make the wearers look like, well, hobbits.

Current Mood: grumpy
Current Music: djpretzel ~ Fortuna Favors the Funk (OC Remix; Star Fox)

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Kinda With 'Em On The Sticky
The Only Question I Ever Thought Was Hard ...
In Ur Blog, Strunkin Ur Grammar
My Parents Are Cool
Cellar Door
Say The Word And Be Like Me
I DARE You To Watch This Without Meeping
Audience Participation Time
Dream A Little Dream Of Me
And What The Hell Is A "Mirliton," Anyway?
Word Of The Day
Quote of the Day, Mister Language Person's Division
Short Pants Touch My Feet, Okay?

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The Desert Mermaid

I Am The Boss Princess

Entries tagged with wordses

Kinda With 'Em On The Sticky

The Only Question I Ever Thought Was Hard ...

In Ur Blog, Strunkin Ur Grammar

My Parents Are Cool

Cellar Door

Say The Word And Be Like Me

I DARE You To Watch This Without Meeping

Audience Participation Time

Dream A Little Dream Of Me

And What The Hell Is A "Mirliton," Anyway?

Word Of The Day

Quote of the Day, Mister Language Person's Division

Short Pants Touch My Feet, Okay?