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Fairy, infantry & professor

The word fairy is related to infantry and professor. And that's not all: these words are also related to fate, fatal, fame, fable, and to confess. They all come from Latin words derived from a stem meaning 'to speak'. Click the infographic to learn how.

life truly is about love and cats

Feuer & feu

The German word Feuer looks a bit like French feu and both mean 'fire'. That's a coincidence, because they're not etymologically related in any way. Feuer, like English fire, comes from West Germanic *fuir, while feu stems from the unrelated Latin word focus, 'hearth', which only later came to mean 'fire'. Focus was borrowed into English and many other languages as focus, its meaning 'focus (of a lens; of an ellipse)' created by Johannes Kepler. My new infographic tells you all about these words.

tone tags are such an interesting phenomenon linguistically. bc they're of course intended to add clarity to text communication, in a way that's more explicit than nonverbal signals, but they're also more removed from the message than verbal signals are -- arguably more removed than nonverbal signals are too, bc they're so constructed.

and that distance gets in the way of efficacy, from my perspective -- like there's a reason we spontaneously developed emoticons extremely early on in the internet days (and eventually latched onto emojis so hard), and ~*~wAyS tO eVOkE tOnE~*~, and the ones that caught on are the iconic [in the linguistic sense, ie resembling the concepts they evoke] ones bc they can be guessed.

and i think there's also a reason that when speaking out loud we don't just say what we want to say and then add "genuine" or "not mean" at the end as if speaking it makes it so -- we use full sentences like "I'm really not trying to be mean here." that's the part that really interests me, the abstraction of concepts that have never been just about tone, have always needed carefully chosen words to be expressed at least sometimes. that's where i think tone tags are distinctly less effective than just writing out the sentence for someone to read as part of the message and not as an abstracted layer on top of the message. (whereas with stuff like /lh for lighthearted i kinda get it -- i still find a well-chosen emoticon or emoji does a much better job at making me read a message in a lighthearted tone, but i get the desire to be explicit.)

ik this reads like a critique even though i started out saying it was just interesting, and idk it's both. i think the desire to implement a completely explicit tone layer on top of messages is fascinating, and i think its failure states are also fascinating, and im not about to grump at people for using an imperfect tool bc they're all imperfect.

“The worst thing in the world can happen, but the next day the sun will come up. And you will eat your toast. And you will drink your tea.”

— Rhian Ellis

Suddenly struck with a need to explain to you how boat pronouns work (I work in the marine industry).

When you're talking about the design of the boat, you say "it".

When the boat is still being built, your say "it".

When the boat is nearing completion, you can say "it" or "she".

When the boat is floating in the water you probably say "she", unless there is still a lot of work to be done (e.g. no engine yet) then you say "it".

When the boat is officially launched and operating, you say "she". If you continue to say "it" at this point you are not incorrect but suspiciously untraditional. You are not playing the game.

If you are referring to a boat you don't really know anything about you may say "it" ("there's a big boat, it's coming this way"). But if you know its name, it's probably "she" ("there's the Waverley, she's on her way to Greenock").

If you are talking about boats in general, you say "it" ("when a boat is hit by a wave it heels over")

If you speak about a boat in complimentary terms, it's "she" ("she's a grand boat"). If you are being disparaging it may be it, but not necessarily ("it's as ugly as sin", "she's a grotty old tub").

If she has a boy's name, she's still she. "Boy James", "King Edward", "Sir David Attenborough"? The pronoun is she.

If it's a dumb barge (no engine), you say it. But if it's a rowing boat (no engine), you say she.

I hope this has cleared things up so that you may not be in danger of misgendering floating objects.

“Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other.”

— Albert Camus, The Rebel

perhaps some will disagree, but i think the world got worse when we changed the colour of the night

i know it's been said many times before but i will never get over how jacob anderson, a british man with a british accent, not only nailed a louisiana creole accent but also developed a studiously (almost eerily) generic accent that louis uses in the present AND showed the first accent bleeding into the second accent at key moments as a way of aurally externalizing his character's inner journey. what did god put in this man when she created him.