{ 'Lifetime'? The cable channel directed to women?...You'd hate it. }

[delga]

So, bar one tiny, tiny, tiny, miniscule thing, this week's NCIS continued its trend of being WHOLLY FABULOUS. MARK HARMON PLUS KIDS. Oh wow. And Jenny! Being likable! Throwing cards! And - shallow alert - totally gorgeous! AND ABBY AND McGEE! AND EVERYONE! I loved Tony and Ziva hiking.

"Tired, DiNozzo?"
"I'm with Ziva - even the dogs are tired(!)"

THAT MADE ME LAUGH FOR A LONG TIME. !!!

Seriously, these people are SO CUTE. And that was MARTOUF! YAY! Even though he turned out to be The Bad Guy who used to sleep with DiNozzo. WHAT? You know you thought it, too.

No, seriously, I know this episode was filler, but it was so joysome! The ONLY downer was the news that Col. Awesometastic (aka Mann) has LEFT for HAWAII. Damn. No, really, damn. I loved her! Sigh. DEAR HOLLIS, I USE THIS ICON FOR YOU. I really hope you weren't anticipating coherency.

--

In other news, I am giving icon-making a rest for a while. SADFACE. I don't know. I can't get the thingummy to do what I need it to do, even though the caps are the same quality they've always been. I'm frustrated! I have some EXCELLENT caps! And yet: nada. Sigh, sigh.

--

So. GUYS. I REALLY LOVE MYTHOLOGY. And, like, linguistics! I do! They are both FABULOUS. And interesting. And ABOUT PEOPLE in the BIGGEST WAY that isn't Biology! So. What I mean is. Someone needs to make me a course that deals with these things. And I don't mean Classics. I mean. I don't know. The rank of stories! TELL ME STORIES. I love stories! I love verbs! I love that I can make a noun a verb, even if that's technically incorrect! GRAMMAR. God, where would I be without grammar? WITHOUT APOSTROPHES?! And, and, and: CONJUNCTIONS. And PRONOUNS. Wouldn't life be boring without pronouns? GERTRUDE STEIN, YOU CRAZY WOMAN, WHAT DO YOU HAVE AGAINST NOUNS? NAMES?

—SUBORDINATE CLAUSES ARE FANTASTIC.

Comments

[neur0vanity.livejournal.com]

NCIS is pretty much the show that can do no wrong. I've loved every episode.

[powerof3.livejournal.com]

I jumped off the couch and cheered when I read that Mann wasn't coming back. LOL

*hugs you randomly*

[twincy.livejournal.com]

*flails with you* I'm going to rewatch this in a minute.

I loved her! Sigh.
At least she's not dead?

WHAT? You know you thought it, too.
Well, obviously, yes. I'm still surprised you did, though!

I feel as if you deserve my Linguistics course more than I do. Also:
I love that I can make a noun a verb, even if that's technically incorrect!
Why would that be incorrect??

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

Oh, ditto. I love it. I talk about it a lot. I watch the episodes whenever I'm down. There's something about the combination of cast and plot that is such an intriguing take on the procedural genre. Also: everyone is loveable.

Disclaimer: not usually this crazy?

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

Aw, sadface! lols. No, I know a lot of people had that reaction

*happyhugs*

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

I'm still surprised you did, though!
Hahahahaha, why?!

Why would that be incorrect??
Because 'to food'/fooding is not a real verb.

[wliberation.livejournal.com]

(Hi!) Hee, I love that you're so crazy-excited over linguistics and whatnot because, yay, I (probably) know what you're talking about! I mean, I can relate. I just spent this morning geeking over the verb 'to pimp', or rather, why it is awesome in English but pathetic as the Finnish "translation" (for reasons that are too long to state here). I don't know how it's even possible to think about that for two hours.

I wish I knew more about mythology. It would be interesting, I'm sure, but somehow I've never really looked into it. Maybe because it seems like such a huge thing. Anyway, yay you for getting your geek on! I'm glad to hear that you've found something that really interests you.

[twincy.livejournal.com]

Hahahahaha, why?!
Really I'm just surprised that people other than me picked up on that vibe and my being all "omg!" about it wasn't just a result of my tendency to pair Tony with anything that moves.

Because 'to food'/fooding is not a real verb.
But the beautiful thing is that it can BECOME a 'real' verb if enough people use it. And, depending on your view of these things, it could be a real verb simply because you've used it.

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

But the beautiful thing is that it can BECOME a 'real' verb if enough people use it. And, depending on your view of these things, it could be a real verb simply because you've used it.

...which was my point in above post! yayarms!

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

I just— I LOVE IT A LOT. I really, truly get excited over things that NO-ONE CARES ABOUT. Like you were saying re: pimp (which, btw, I'll return to in a moment) I will spend a lot of my time being excited when I realise that the reason why the Gujarati word for pyjamas is the same as the English is because it's exactly the same word (the British nabbed it). Also: I often wonder why language suffixes are different. Like, you have Japanese, Chinese and Portuguese, but then you have German and Italian. Then Finnish, English, Spanish. And French?! Why aren't people in China called Chinish?

Um.

re: pimp, is the word long in Finnish? Because I think half the beauty of pimp is that it's so concise. Also, the verb conjugations maintain that shortness (I pimp, you pimp, they pimp), and those two 'p' sounds, that popping? It adds to the general attitude of the frame in which the phrase originated. So. You should explain about the Finnish! You KNOW I find that FASCINATING. !

I think I may have mentioned this before (I think people may be a little sick of me bringing this stuff up, actually) but I was hugely into myths when I was a kid and I guess that never really went away. But, also, English Lit. (and German, and French, actually) is basically founded on myth. If not the Greco-Roman stuff, then definitely the Celtic/Nordic stuff. A lot of it's similar (which I LOVE - the Eve and apple story? Has a parallel in the Greek mythos. It's different but the basic elements are there which: !!!) but it's pretty fundamental to lit. I think you probably know a lot more about it than you thin you do. It seeps into social consciousness.

Also also also: HI YOU! I was going to email you today except my life is basically "library-library-library" so I didn't have anything to say other than "please to be alive, yes?" which, you know, you are because yay comment!

[wliberation.livejournal.com]

*nodnod* I know I should probably feel a bit embarrassed of how excited I, too, get over such things, but whatever, it is fascinating! (Why don't you say Chinish? Or Francish. Or, alternatively, Finlandese, Russianese, and so on. Though, Swedenese, Englandese? Does sound a bit difficult. I don't know. Languages can be weird.) Like, we had this grammar course, and the lecturer was going on about how he understands that punctuation is kind of boring and we should just bear with him, and I was all, "What are you talking about, you silly man? This is interesting!"

Explain? Well... Remember, you asked for it, so don't complain that this is long. :)

The thing I love most about the word 'pimp' (alongside of the compactness that you mentioned) is how descriptive it is of the action it signifies (when you use it metaphorically and not, you know, when talking of actual prostitution). First, there's the meaning 'to tune something', like a car, 'pimp a car', but when you use the word 'pimp', it's not just any kind of tuning. You're not just tweaking with the motor a bit, or brushing a bit of glittery paint on the body. You're making a pimp car out of it, you know, with all the bling-bling and whatnot. There's a certain mental image of what pimps look like, and that's the sort of car you're making. And all of that is included in/implied with the word 'pimp'.

And then there's the second use, which I'm (we are?) more familiar with, 'to pimp music/books/etc'. So, here the word means something like a mix of 'sharing', 'recommending' and 'supplying'. And what's great about the word is not only that it neatly combines these words, but also that it's especially apt if the recommendation is succesful, if the "recommendee" turns out to like/is satisfied with the thing in question, and furthermore, (and this is fantastic) if the thing recommended is likely to cause some sort of intellectual/aesthetic/entertaining pleasure. Kind of like a top-notch whore, except with less exchanging of bodily fluids. (...Okay, that was a nasty metaphor, I apologise, but you know what I mean, right?)

In Finnish, however, all of these wonderful subtleties have been lost in some pseudo-naughtiness. Here, it's a very new neologism. The first time I ever heard it in use here was last spring, I think. It's basically the English word that has a Finnish verb form added to it. So: 'pimpata'. It's relatively short when conjucted (pimppaan, pimppaat, pimppaa, etc.), and all the hard letters do maintain the compactness of the English word. But. The thing about the Finnish word (the thing that seems to make it so popular) is that according to Finnish vocabulary and grammar, it sounds like a verbified form of the word 'pimppa', which is a word for vagina. Only, - and this is the thing that most people actively using it don't seem to realise - it's the kind of word for vagina that I have last heard being used without irony when I was five and my mother was trying to explain the purpose of a bidet in child-friendly terms. It's in the same category of words as 'wee-wee'. The only word more childish would be 'pimpsa'. All of this just makes the term unintentionally funny - in the sense that if I hear you using this word, I'm not laughing with you, I'm laughing at you.

So, basically, all of the lovely metaphorical aspects of the word in English have, in Finnish, been reduced to, "Oh my gosh, I just said vagina! Aren't I radical! Teeheeheehee, blush, blush!" Which... is really, really pathetic, especially coming from some dude who thinks he's some hardcore gangsta straight from the baddest ghetto of the Finnish sub-urbania, yo */sarcasm*. We could just say 'tune', when we're talking about 'tuning', or come up with some other word, or we could say 'parittaa', which is the actual Finnish word for procuring and which therefore would function in exactly the same way as 'pimp' in English. Why don't we? Maybe I should start doing it, just out of resistance to stupidity. Anarchy! Anarchy! ...Um.

[wliberation.livejournal.com]

Because the last comment was too long for LJ, I have now returned to make one last remark, huzzah! Which went like this:

*huggety!* My life atm is also very much made of the 'library-library-library' thing. Aggravating, but what can you do. If only I had a net connection at home, life would be so much easier. Maybe after New Year when I should have more money. (Oh god, can you believe it's almost 2008? I'm still all "YAY! 1999!)

[wliberation.livejournal.com]

'conjucted'? the hell? I mean conjugated, obviously. (why doesn't the editing work for the previous comment? strange.)

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

Ah, okay, so the semantic complexity sort of gets lost in translation, which is a shame. But I guess what you're saying is that it gets cheapened. Which, again, sadface. But you get in there with your personal language revolution! (You should geek to me over these things MORE. Because you know I love it when you pimp to me /ironic)

[Man, suburbia makes me laugh hardcore. I don't really understand why language bleeds through like that and becomes so... ridiculous in the mouths of suburbians. I mean, I can understand language diffusion, but I don't know why language DIES in suburbia. I'd get it if it was ironic usage, because then it would be a commentary on how urban and rural life are different, and how suburbia has to negotiate the two - and it would be a commentary on the middle class - but seriously, suburbia has all these social rules but NO LANGUAGE OF ITS OWN. How does that happen?!]

Btw, I realised that I am a DUMBASS and should just look up suffixes (re: why the Chinese are -ese and not -ish) and typically, it didn't really give me an answer, but it did show me that there are a variety of suffixes from a variety of sources, and that 'French' actually comes from the same place as the '-ish' suffixes.

Anyway, all of those suffixes mean "of, or relating to" to the noun they're declined to. The '-ese' suffix which is used predominantly to denote countries in the Far East (China, Japan, Vietnam; Portugal is a Western exception as far as I can tell) comes through Middle English, from Italian from Latin -ēnsis, meaning 'originating in'. The next one is 'ish' (English, Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Yiddish, Jewish, and so on; as far as I can tell, it doesn't occur in the East at all which makes me think that it's got some severely Germanic - specifically Nordic - roots, especially if you consider how frequently the suffix turns up in German) which comes from Middle English through Old English, -isc. Actually, that makes sense if you think that the older suffixes (Nordic, Germanic - referring the the area as a whole) are '-ic' although those come from Middle English through Old French -ique, from Latin -icus and from Greek -ikos. So. Maybe not. Though there's nothing to say that there wasn't a mixing in Gaul. I think Icelandic is the only adjective that refers to a modern country as such but if you think of any others, let me know.

Finally, the most common is -an, and it is everywhere. Australian, American, African, [Kenyan, Ugandan] Malaysian, Indian, Korean, Egyptian, Hawaaian, Chilean &c. &c. That seems to come through Middle English from Old French, from Latin -ānus. (I think further North in Europe, it might be '-on', like, Anglo-Saxon).

There is one more that I thought of which is rare, but I can't find the etymology. I think it occurs because of declension rules involving existing noun suffixes and vowel clashes. Anyway, the '-i' suffix which occurs in Iraqi, Pakistani, Bangladeshi. Actually, now that I think of it, those names are very specific to a region and type of people, and it may come from Hindi because in Hindi, Indians refer to themselves as Hindustani and Pakistani people as Pakistanis (!) and I think in that case, these are words that came to England via the Empire. Hmm. But that doesn't sound right either, because Uzbekistan would have nothing to do with that. Unless Uzbeki takes its lead from Pakistani? In which case '-i' is very definitely a Middle Eastern suffix and has nothing to do with Hindi.

"Cypriot" is odd (admittedly, an alternative is "Cyprian" so maybe that doesn't count). "Dutch" looks odd, but it comes from the German, so it makes sense. Oh, Malta. That would be Maltese, right? So, another Western -ese.

Other than that: "Greek"?

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

Huzzah! Encore, encore! (Btw, I watched an episode of Coupling, I think? A girl pretended to be French? I don't really know.)

Yeah, I think everyone in academia is just super busy right now. Or ill. Or, you know, in my case: both. (UGH, I KNOW. The years are freaking me out. I tried to write "2003" the other day, apparently it was an unconscious attempt to regress. Aie.)