In today’s linguistics class we talked about metaphors, and we really want two of the ones we talked about to become conventionalised.
So first of all this one girl told us about a newer metaphor in Russian, “I have paws”, which is something you say when you don’t really want to do something, so you say you’re incapable of doing it since you have paws instead of hands. Like, “hey, finish that report” “aw but I have paws :(” and I think that’s adorable. It’s like “I’m just a girl” but for animals.
We also had the task to invent a novel metaphor and have the others guess what it means, and the teacher really liked my “she’s such a capybara” = “everyone loves her”. Capybara energy is like golden retriever energy except you’re chill about it. You’re just vibing and everyone digs that.
Anyway I think these deserve to become more common in English
If you can find one, a good teacher is going to be your guide to learning how to practice. My oboe professor once told me, “I am here to teach you how to teach yourself. We’re just using the oboe as an example.” And I’ve told this to every student I had in my nearly 20 year teaching career.
So, I’m going to use the oboe as my example for this Ask. :)
There aren’t enough fucking hours in the day to get real good at chess, violin, piano, singing, crosswords, film photography, contemporary dance, literary analysis, writing, film criticism, historical analysis, political commentary, tennis, Latin, French, German, Italian, identification of invertebrates, programming, cooking, musical composition, watercolour painting, philosophy, stage acting, fencing, psychoanalysis, and sickoposting online.
Why get good at all if I am never going to become sublime? Why spend the money and the time and the effort? Why not become like one of those happy people not trying to improve but just accept myself for who I am and who I am not? Why drive myself so hard? Why push myself so hard? Why am I trying to get good? Why? Why? Why? What is the point? What will I gain? I’m not playing tournaments. I’m not trying to get ranking points. I will gain absolutely nothing material from this. I will gain nothing but the satisfaction of a well struck shot or a carefully constructed point. The only thing to gain is, well, living precisely as I would like to live.
You know what I think? I think the coaches and those really talented kids at the academy and the pros who train there, and you, and me and all of the grinders at my local clay courts—I think anyone who tries to get good at tennis does it for probably the same reason. You get good because you want to get good. Sure, maybe, some of those people want to win slams. They have goals, they have dreams—long term, big picture goals that they push toward—but internally, I think they are driven by a desire to want to hit the ball a little better than they did yesterday, or an hour ago, or five minutes ago, or just now. And I think that’s enough. I think that’s a very good goal.
get good, on sweater weather at Substack. Emphasis mine.
one may think “language” is french or spinach for “the nguage”. this is a folk etymology myth, it is actually more like mile -> mileage. “How much language are you getting out ofthose words”
Languages are funny for so many reasons but I’m always surprised when I discover a language uses multiple words for something that only has one word in my native language. Like. What’s the difference between a squash and a pumpkin? That’s all Kürbis to me. Pigeons and doves? Baby, that’s a Taube.
“gemein” means both common and mean in german so sometimes reading the name of an animal or plant is really funny. “Gemeiner Efeu” = “common ivy” but it also sounds like you’re saying “mean ivy >:(”
My favorite relic English still used everywhere is the word “the” used in phrases like: “the more I look at this, the stranger it seems, or "the bigger they come, the harder they fall”. This “the” is not the article of any noun, it is a different word, a conjunction descended from the old English “þā”, pronounced “tha” which means either “when” or “then”. Back in early Middle English the structure “if - then” had not taken over and if you wanted to express an if - then relationship you said “þā whatever, þā whatever”, meaning “when such-and- such, then such-and-such”. “þā” sounds almost the same as “the” and the spelling of the two converged, but the meaning remained totally different. “the more, the merrier” literally means “when more, then merrier” or “if more, then merrier’; same as centuries ago.
[image description: tweets from user Matt (official) that read, "this is not quite accurate. this ‘the’ comes from þȳ, the old instrumental case of the definite article. so it’s like 'whereby x, therefore y’ or 'by how much x, that’s how much y.’
þā … þā does indeed mean 'when … then’ in Old English, but this temporal correlative is not where we get 'the more the merrier’ construction. i’m afraid someone took an OE class and mixed a few things up.
so it doesn’t originally mean 'if more, then merrier’ as suggested in the comment. it has always meant 'by how much more, that’s how much merrier’ i.e. double or triple the quantity leads to double or triple the merriment.” end id.]
everyone else, including the italians who invented it, needs to adopt the spanish spelling of the word “gnocchi.” ñoqui is linguistic perfection. no more fucking around with ‘gn’, letters which even when you suspend your disbelief do not produce the necessary sound. the ideal tool for the job exists and it is the ñ
Fun fact: Spanish, Italian and Portuguese all decided on different ways to spell the l(y) and n(y) sounds which weren’t in original vulgate Latin orthography.
Italian puts a G before L or N, as in tagliatelle and gnocchi.
Portuguese puts an H after L or N, as in Julho and vinho.
Spanish doubles the letter, as in llamo and cabaña (???).
The secret here is that the letter “Ñ” was originally “NN”. The squiggle on the top is actually a second, teeny N, being worn as a hat, because why waste horizontal space when you can just stack the letters for convenience?
