both crapstone and blotusfleming are near where i grew up curry mallet is not far from where i went to school (there is also shepton mallet, helpfully known to my classmates as “shit’n’smell-it”, both near glastonbury) nether wallop is on the way through to my aunt’s old house and i used to force my family to drive through there (also upper and middle wallop) and i once met the girl whose family owned pretty much that entire area and her name was clementine wallop my grandmother grew up in wales and llanfairpwllgwyngyllogogerychwyrnrobwilllantysiliogogogoch is her party piece from where pity me is located i already do scotland’s lack of fucks can be seen from space
horrid hill is in, *squints*, kent? i bet it is
PENISTONE.
Curry Mallet’s barely even weird, although maybe I’m just used to it. Nempnett Thrubwell is much weirder. It made it into The Meaning of Liff as ‘The feeling experienced when driving off for the first time on a brand new motorbike.‘
there’s also a Pett Bottom in Kent.
May I add for consideration Keith Briggs’ map of place-names containing cunt? Yes? OK.
is “chai” a TYPE of tea??! bc in Hindi/Urdu, the word chai just means tea
its like spicy cinnamon tea instead of bland gross black tea
I think the chai that me and all other Muslims that I know drink is just black tea
i mean i always thought chai was just another word for tea?? in russian chai is tea
why don’t white people just say tea
do they mean it’s that spicy cinnamon tea
why don’t they just call it “spicy cinnamon tea”
the spicy cinnamon one is actually masala chai specifically so like
there’s literally no reason to just say chai or chai
They don’t know better. To them “chai tea” IS that specific kind of like, creamy cinnamony tea. They think “chai” is an adjective describing “tea”.
What English sometimes does when it encounters words in other languages that it already has a word for is to use that word to refer to a specific type of that thing. It’s like distinguishing between what English speakers consider the prototype of the word in English from what we consider non-prototypical.
(Sidenote: prototype theory means that people think of the most prototypical instances of a thing before they think of weirder types. For example: list four kinds of birds to yourself right now. You probably started with local songbirds, which for me is robins, blue birds, cardinals, starlings. If I had you list three more, you might say pigeons or eagles or falcons. It would probably take you a while to get to penguins and emus and ducks, even though those are all birds too. A duck or a penguin, however, is not a prototypical bird.)
“Chai” means tea in Hindi-Urdu, but “chai tea” in English means “tea prepared like masala chai” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish “the kind of tea we make here” from “the kind of tea they make somewhere else”.
“Naan” may mean bread, but “naan bread” means specifically “bread prepared like this” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish between “bread made how we make it” and “bread how other people make it”.
We also sometimes say “liege lord” when talking about feudal homage, even though “liege” is just “lord” in French, or “flower blossom” to describe the part of the flower that opens, even though when “flower” was borrowed from French it meant the same thing as blossom.
We also do this with place names: “brea” means tar in Spanish, but when we came across a place where Spanish-speakers were like “there’s tar here”, we took that and said “Okay, here’s the La Brea tar pits”.
Or “Sahara”. Sahara already meant “giant desert,” but we call it the Sahara desert to distinguish it from other giant deserts, like the Gobi desert (Gobi also means desert btw).
Languages tend to use a lot of repetition to make sure that things are clear. English says “John walks”, and the -s on walks means “one person is doing this” even though we know “John” is one person. Spanish puts tense markers on every instance of a verb in a sentence, even when it’s abundantly clear that they all have the same tense (”ayer [yo] caminé por el parque y jugué tenis” even though “ayer” means yesterday and “yo” means I and the -é means “I in the past”). English apparently also likes to use semantic repetition, so that people know that “chai” is a type of tea and “naan” is a type of bread and “Sahara” is a desert. (I could also totally see someone labeling something, for instance, pan dulce sweetbread, even though “pan dulce” means “sweet bread”.)
Also, specifically with the chai/tea thing, many languages either use the Malay root and end up with a word that sounds like “tea” (like té in Spanish), or they use the Mandarin root and end up with a word that sounds like “chai” (like cha in Portuguese).
So, can we all stop making fun of this now?
Okay and I’m totally going to jump in here about tea because it’s cool. Ever wonder why some languages call tea “chai” or “cha” and others call it “tea” or “the”?
It literally all depends on which parts of China (or, more specifically, what Chinese) those cultures got their tea from, and who in turn they sold their tea to.
The Portuguese imported tea from the Southern provinces through Macau, so they called tea “cha” because in Cantonese it’s “cha”. The Dutch got tea from Fujian, where Min Chinese was more heavily spoken so it’s “thee” coming from “te”. And because the Dutch sold tea to so much of Europe, that proliferated the “te” pronunciation to France (”the”), English (”tea”) etc, even though the vast majority of Chinese people speak dialects that pronounce it “cha” (by which I mean Mandarin and Cantonese which accounts for a lot of the people who speak Chinese even though they aren’t the only dialects).
And “chai”/”chay” comes from the Persian pronunciation who got it from the Northern Chinese who then brought it all over Central Asia and became chai.
I co-wrote a post for The Toast! About Old English and historical accuracy and how we choose to represent the past.
And this is one of the dilemmas of creating historical fiction; what do you sacrifice because it would be misunderstood by modern audiences? What do you alter because it’s important to the story? Are these little extras like bonus Easter Eggs, or are they just a shortcut to history?
”…there’s nothing about a James, a Hannah or a Kate that makes them more or less like any other James, Hannah or Kate. Each James is unique, as is each Hannah and each Kate.
So names are just labels we use to refer to specific people and can’t be used in any general sense. At least that’s the theory. But then there’s When Harry Met Sally.”
We have a new blog post! By our excellent friend James, writing about the meaning behind personal names, invoking Brooklyn Nine Nine, When Harry Met Sally and Flight of the Concords, as well as some top-notch language info. Give it a read!
It was originally called a belowjob, standing for ‘below the belt’ But because people are shit at English, the two words sound the same, so over time it became known as Blow and not Below.
Damn
FACT OF THE DAY FOR MY FUCKING FRIENDS
Thank you this has bothered me.
literally no truth in this and now my OED account shows that i looked up ‘blowjob’. thanks tumblr.
the verb ‘to blow’ was used that way in the 1930s, and ‘blowjob’ was created from that although the exact reasons for ‘blow’ are uncertain. There’s a good discussion here WHY do i always end up writing about swearwords.
Level 8: any conlang not associated with a media franchise and not meant for international communication: ascended to another plane of existence.
And yeah, the Icelandic-Basque pidgin really existed. But it’s not even the weirdest Basque-based pidgin we have evidence of. Let me give you: the Algonquian-Basque pidgin!
What even are these examples of Icelandic-Basque pigeon though??
