The Desert Mermaid

Trying to do a real honest-to-god diachronic language and getting TOTALLY ENTHRALLED by the etymology of every single word I come across. Complete fascination with the way rooms and their defining features ("stove" refers to both the room and the object! And don't get me started on the shifting semantic categories of bathroom words!) probably makes me a colossal nerd. But hey, who says that's a bad thing?

Nobody ever gets to bitch about how the latest generation is Ruining English again.



The Fife, Lute, and Drum Edition of "You're the One That I Want" is a particularly hilarious touch.

Today's horrible realization: the maddening pronunciation of 'escape' as 'excape' is actually etymologically sound.

I mean, I will still fire several rounds of Nerf darts at you if you pronounce it that way, because if you want to get into that wasps' nest then you could also argue that it's LATINIST, and by damn I DESPISE Latinism. And also, it's really goddamn obnoxious. But I will admit there is some history to it.

You all will be happy to hear that I now know the correct pronunciation of Daja's name. All these years I've been using an affricate for the j, and it turns out it's a straight fricative.* ALL THIS TIME I'VE BEEN LIVING A LIE.

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This revelation comes straight from a seemingly rather jet-lagged Tamora Pierce, who was the guest of honor at CONduit, Salt Lake City's slightly pathetic attempt at a big geek con. Normally I stay the hell away from cons, because I never have been able to grasp the fine art of milling around and am baffled by the format of panels.** But this was Tamora Pierce, so I put up with the milling so's I could ATTACH MYSELF TO HER LEG AND ASK IF SHE'D READ MY MANUSCRIPT urbanely say hello, show off Daja, ask a few writing questions, and listen to some panels. I even managed not to be the most obnoxious person at those panels! Good for me!

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So for years I've had this big ball of hemp twine sitting in my desk drawer next to a whole bunch of little rubber bouncy balls, for reasons unexplained. Finally I figured I might as well use them and did the only logical thing I could: learned how to braid a shepherd's sling. Now we'll see who's man enough to try stealing my radishes.***

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Been trying to create some more folktales for OGYAFEland. At the moment I'm working on their version of Santa Claus, because it's never too soon to start Christmas. It's been fun coming up with an origin story for him with folk elements, cultural assumptions, and of course bears. Everything's better with bears.

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My sister, the incomparable sunshine_shaman, has been posting a whole bunch of photos of her Euroventures. I must be hungry, because my favorite one at the moment is a photo of a bunch of cupcakes. You can't eat Notre Dame, after all.

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I have discovered that the most irritating thing about trying to get an agent isn't rejections. Everyone always tries to make me feel better when I get rejected, but I just think, "Oh, well, onto the next one!"

No, the obnoxious thing is just waiting for an answer. Rejections are responses. But no response? That way lies Dorothy Parkerian madness.


*For those of you who care, that means it sounds like the French j, or the s in vision.

**When I'm interested in a panel, I tend to just start conversing with the panelists like I'm one of them. I don't know how to help it. I had the same problem with interesting classes.

***Perhaps I could also do something about those goddamn barking dogs all over the neighborhood. Like, hypothetically, clocking their idiot owners upside the head with a rubber ball whenever the poor mutts start yapping their fool heads off.

So not too long ago I sent off an application for grad school because why the hell not, and among my linguistics credentials I explained about my conlanging hobby and that I've learned a lot.

Only today does it occur to me that I should've SENT them an outline of one of my conlangs.

Oh, well. Maybe next time.

Thanks, y'all, for the ghoul/ghost responses. I'm not sure what got me thinking about this, but realizing my own definitions made me wonder how much they matched up with others'.

Turns out there is some overlap. A lotta folks said that tbe big difference was corporeality--one of the two defining things for me, too. I'm a bit weird, though--my ghouls seem to be stuck halfway between ghosts and zombies. They may be able to hover and fly like ghosts, but like zombies they look like rotten corpses.

The other big thing is their attitude. That had some overlap, too--the term "soulless" was bandied about. Maybe that's why I consider ghosts to to be more like people in their emotional ranges. Ghouls are, well, ghoulish. They aren't human and never were, they have no empathy, but there's a spark of intelligence there (unlike with zombies) that gives them a nasty sense of humor.

So, yeah, basically all my ghouls are variations on the Crypt Keeper. I wanted to see if that was just me.

I’m not sure why, but this video absolutely mesmerizes me:



Do you remember learning how to dial a telephone? Yeah, neither do I.* Funny how cultures themselves have curricula. (So do TV shows: over the 20 years of Law’n’Order’s run, they went from carefully explaining how The D. N. A. works to assuming you know what it means when the lab reports that the perp and the victim have seven alleles in common. TV shows are still dumbed down, but notice what they dumb down.)

Also, I love the idea that wrong numbers would have caused people to panic in Ye Olde Dayes.** I don’t think she even uses the term “wrong number”—which makes me realize that at some point, the lexicon didn’t have a standard term for it. I love that, too—how language evolves. Makes living at the beginning of the Digital Age that much more fun.

And yes, I’m a complete dork watching vintage shorts without commentaries now. I can’t help it! They’re just so damn fascinating!


*Hell, I’m even past the Screaming Abuse At The Automated Voicemail Instructions Lady For Repeating Instructions EVERY DAMN TIME When EVERYBODY KNOWS THEM ALREADY (c’mon, who doesn’t know by now that “When you have finished recording, hang up”?) Stage. I’m on the stage where I’ve learned the combo hit that automatically KOs her.

Also: Dear phone companies, please hire Ellen McLain to do your future Automated Operator recordings. Take advantage of the Stockholm Syndrome so many gamers have developed!

**Nowatimes it's more a source of hilarity, like the time I kept getting calls from people asking for a guy named Juan. If you don't think I found it funny to tell them "There is no Juan at this number" or to hang up and explain to friends "It was a wrong number. They were looking for some Juan I don't know," then you haven't been paying attention.

Well, lately the most interesting thing in my life has been the weather. Fortunately, it's the kind of interesting that doesn't involve flooded basements or felled power lines; it's the kind of interesting that makes you scream "WHAT THE HELL IT IS MAY 24TH WHY DID TWO INCHES OF SNOW JUST SPLAT ONTO EVERYTHING OH GOD SOMEBODY KIDNAPPED SUMMER."

Today it's bright and sunny and warming up. Now, that's just not fair. Pick a season, Utah. We're at war.

In other news, this here Language Construction Kit is a ton of fun. It inspired me to finally get around to making relative clauses in Rredra, and caused me to have a double revelation when I realized that the structure I had come up with for relative clauses in this conlang mirror my own informal idiolect--and that my own informal idiolect is mutating relative clauses. For example, instead of saying "the doctor who is wearing a coat," I wind up saying "the coat-wearing doctor," or changing "it's a bakery that makes delicious English pastries" into "it's a delicious-English-pastry-making bakery." Not an unusual phenomenon, I suppose, but I think I've been doing it more now than I used to, and with a broader range of possible clauses that can be switched around this way.

It's making me wonder if I've seen it around. I can think of one person online who does this all the time, but I don't know if I just picked it up from him, if I had it before him, or if it's a broader phenomenon.

This book also allows me to feel terribly clever when it gives the basics of semantics and I realize I am quite savvy about how to make words that aren't all just English equivalents. I think Mark gets a little carried away at times with linguistic deconstruction, but then I've always been a bit impatient with some of the sub-fields of pragmatics.

Meanwhile, I'm also getting impatient with sitting around in Dad's office listening to the sounds of inactive phones and shrieking children discovering the joys of vaccination on the other side of the wall. I think I'll see if I can go home yet.

MOM: I had the strangest experience on Facebook recently.

AMELIA: Oh?

MOM: Yes, it was bizarre. You see, I am in a group with some of my old classmates from school, and I posted a long comment about my views on healthcare. I have to admit, I was doing it partly because the guy who runs the group is a die-hard conservative, and I may have been baiting him a little. But the rest of the group started commenting on it, too, and they were getting a pretty good debate going, along with some jerks who were simply throwing insults. But then, a day or two later, I got on and found that my comment had been deleted! The guy said it was “irrelevant.” You are laughing—why?

AMELIA: You were trolling?

MOM: What?

AMELIA: You were trolling! You posted a rant on a messageboard, wank ensued, and then the mod put on his Mod Hat and baleeted the thread, declaring it OT.

MOM: What the hell did you just say?

AMELIA: The same thing you just said, only in jargon.

MOM: You mean this happens a lot?

AMELIA: Enough that it’s got its own vocabulary, yes. Welcome to the internets.

MOM: Oh, god.


And this is why I’m an anthropological linguist—I find it fascinating how very much language can adapt to describe the remarkable breadth of human experience. Mom can describe things totally out of my depth (the Sixties, for example, or Catholicism); and I have simple terms for things new to her experience, like the internet. Language is wonderfully flexible, and the stuff we come up with is infinitely creative.

Plus, there’s just something hilarious about being able to yell, “HEY, GUYS, MOM STARTED A FLAMEWAR!” Gives you warm fuzzies all over.