osprey_archer, posts by tag: words - LiveJournal

If, like me, you read the title Touring America by Automobile in the 1920s and all but swoon with joy - and swoon again when you realize that this is a primary source, a diary that a woman named Hepzy Moore Cook write during two early American road trips with her husband (one to Yellowstone and the other through the South) - then this is the book for you. There’s lots of good information about the experience of road-tripping in early cars,with their constant tire troubles and the poor state of the roads and the all-but-nonexistent hotel system outside the cities. They either camp or rent rooms in private homes.

I realize that capsule summary makes traveling in the 1920s sound awful, but actually as I was reading it sounds delightfully adventurous (well, except for the part where the diary-writer gets dysentery). I wish there’d been a bit more information about the food, but one can’t have everything. And there is a lot of interesting information about the understanding of history at the time, especially the Civil War: it was sixty years ago by this 1927 road trip, but there’s still a sense of it as a raw spot on the national psyche. The highest praise Hepzy can offer for a Civil War memorial is to say that it shows the spirit of reconciliation.

However, if this sort of thing doesn’t make your heart go pitter-patter, it’s probably not the book for you. The interest is all in the subject matter; the writing is pedestrian at best. It also includes a few clunky typos - I’m not sure typos is the right word for them; but there are places where the author/editor, Hepzy Moore Cook’s grandson William A. Cook, has written something that sounds kind of like the right word but isn’t, including this gem:

“The Prohibition era would also be the geniuses of another popular form of racing in America - stock car racing.”

Geniuses. Isn’t that great? (I’m apt to make these too, although I don’t think I ever made one quite as sublime as geniuses for genesis.)

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I've been reading Barbara Rosenwein's Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, which is fun, even though I can't keep track of the various Merovingians.

The book is built around the idea of social constructionism: the idea that emotions are shaped by the social norms of society. Rosenwein comments that "In Japan there is a feeling, amae, of contented dependence on another; but in English there is nothing comparable and presumably no feeling that corresponds to it." (15)

I disagree. Or rather, I think Rosenwein is correct that most English-speaking adults would be embarrassed to say "I feel contentedly dependent on you!" given the cultural importance of independence. But the feeling of (or at least yearning for) amae exists, subterranean and furtive, and it comes out over and over again in stories.

There's a whole subset of hurt/comfort fic which wallows in amae: Character A is injured or sick, and thus is forced into dependence on Character B - and because that loss of independence is the result of fate, not something they asked for or wanted, it's all right that they rest content in their dependence.

It crops up in professional fiction, too; there's also a whole sequence in The Virginian, the first Western, wherein the Virginian - who has hitherto been a prototype of laconic manliness - gets shot and is utterly dependent on the ministrations of his lady love.

I suspect stories bear the stigmata of all the things we aren't supposed to feel, or can't admit to feeling.

Making lists, because sometimes lists help me get things done:

Fanfics I Am Working On

1. The Sutcliff swap fic. Which I need to finish! Soon! And I don't know why I haven't, because I know basically what's going to happen, but I just...haven't written it.

2. "Vigil," Downton Abbey. In which Edith Crawley sits up with a wounded soldier and chats with Sybil.

Sybil smoothes the covers. “Why don’t you go to nurses’ training?” she asks.

“Oh, I couldn’t,” Edith blurts.

“Couldn't?” Sybil repeats. She looks up, a crusading spark burning the weariness out of her tired eyes. “Why can’t you? You’re ever so much better prepared than I was.”

3. "Five Great Escapes Chuck Never Made", Pushing Daisies, dealing with the weird dissonance between Chuck's stated love of adventure and desire to see the world, and the fact that she lives a terrifically isolated life in her aunts' house till she dies (she doesn't even seem to go to school, let alone away to college, and certainly doesn't get an out-of-the-house job), and then moves seamlessly into Ned's life.

It's a very Victorian progression, when you think about it; quite in keeping with the old-fashioned aesthetic of the show. This is probably why I didn't even notice the contradiction for ages.

I've been working on this fic for *mumblecough* a while, and it's not getting anywhere because I'm not actual sure how to reconcile these two things. What's stopping Chuck from having her adventures? She isn't a Victorian girl, so it's not societal pressure. And it doesn't seem to be pressure from her aunts; there's no resentment there. And Pushing Daisies sometimes seems to inhabit an alternative universe where money is never an issue, so she's not staying home purely out of poverty. (And if she was, wouldn't you expect her to get a job rather than an expensive bee-keeping hobby?)

4. An untitled Garrow's Law story, all about Silvester and his post-duel realization that Garrow does not, in fact, see Silvester as Silvester sees Garrow - to wit, as a professional colleague with whom he has a stimulating rivalry and witty repartee - but instead loathes and despises Silvester as the scum of the earth.

***

Random thought for the day: haberdashery sounds way more swashbuckling than it actually is. There should be a steampunk superherione called The Haberdasher. By day, she seems like a mere button seller; but by night, she engineers robot spider buttons, which detach from waistcoats and make off with the family jewels when activated.

I've signed up for the GRE, finally, and started studying for it only to be informed that the test has just been revised and they've gotten rid of the antonyms section. The antonyms! I was going to pick up SO MANY POINTS off the antonyms!

But then, the antonyms test measures mainly whether you were the type of child who spent so much time inside reading as to risk vitamin D deficiency, so it's probably just as well to be shut of it.

The GRE practice books take entirely the wrong approach to vocabulary acquisition, by the way. They treat it like a drear and dreaded task. But - but it's a chance to meet new friends! Maladroit, hinterland, minatory….I can reminisce with romantic exactness about where I met them all.

What I'm really worried about is the math section. But I've got a month to study.

Yesterday the dog with eyes like a seal wasn't outside the ESL class at break, and everyone was sad.

The class was about swearing, so it got pretty lively. No, you should really never never never say that word - but that one's not really bad at all - and you've got to see this abso-fucking-lutely hilarious George Carlin video!

At the end of class, the dog was back in place, and we gathered to coo over it. Eri knelt to pet its ears, and suddenly grinned. "This puppy," she said, "is so fucking cute."

21,000 words.

I came up with a way to avoid the Horrible Escape Scene. I hate escape scenes; almost always they make the bad guys look like total doofuses (doofi?). It's hard to fear a villain who leaves unnecessarily large air vents in all his prison cells, and doesn't even use them to pipe in poison gas or ninjas.

Also, I've been going back and forth on the word "kvetch." I'm almost positive some people will dislike its use in a fantasy novel, although really, why? Presumably the speakers of fantasy languages steal words from foreigners. It's one thing to object to an expression that's anachronistic (put a sock in it, in a world without phonographs), or obviously refers to an Earth person (Machiavellian, though I can't let it go without pain), but objecting to words because they have a less-than-purely-Anglo-Saxon etymology seems silly.

saudade, n., Portuguese: a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness. -A. F. G. Bell, as quoted in The Untranslatables, by C. J. Moore.

I read this word in a bookstore in Oxford and did the mental equivalent of pumping my fist in the air, because that's it. I've tried to explain this to people - about, say, I know one wouldn't want to live in the forties because the forties were a sexist racist homophobic oh-I-know-let's-nuke-Japan! mess; but all the same I'd really like to walk into a photograph of the forties and live there. Everyone looks so happy! - because they're smiling for the camera. The shutter clicked, and then Judy turned to Joe and snarled, "You're stepping on my foot." And Joe smiled his confident quarterback smile and ground her toes down just a bit more before he moved his foot.

And I know that; but I still believe in the photographs.

Incidentally, I found this word right after I went to the Steampunk exhibit - and Steampunk is an example of saudade if there ever was one.

( Goggles and steampunk iPod. You know you want them.Collapse )

Does anyone want a postcard? I've been on a post-card buying binge, and I have more than I could possibly need: pictures of woodcuts from Weimar Germany (German art in the early twentieth century was weird, man), pottery, sunsets, and possibly the world's cutest opossum, although that's gone AWOL for the moment.

And yes, it was actually cute, not just cute for a possum. No, I wouldn't have thought that could be possible either, but it was a baby possum, and evidently the baby versions of furry animals are always cute.

Also, possum is fun to say. Possum! Possum! Possum was apparently originally the correct pronunciation of opossum, the O being there for decoration or something; but linguistic drift has made possum sound backwoods and opossum proper.

But anyway. Postcards! I'm willing to send them overseas if need be (I just got a partial refund on my tuition. I am rich, rich, rich!) although of course they will take a while to arrive.

A velleity is a mild desire—not a whim, which passes and in any case is often strong enough to lead to action, but a constant vague wish too weak to be acted upon.

I have no idea why this word is not in wider use, because I at least spend my life swimming in a sea of velleities. I have a velleity to start drawing again, to study French, to learn how to ice skate backwards and to dance.

…Then again, there’s something depressing about focusing on things I lack the willpower, time, and/or physical grace to do. Perhaps the word should be left to lie.

Our router, possibly irritated that we abandoned it over break, has stopped working again, so I’m going to be slow with the whole posting/commenting thing until we get that worked out. Other than that, however, my new term is going well (my school is on a quarter system, so we start a new term after spring break); I like all my classes.

Cleverly, I managed to schedule Russian History and History of the Book back to back, thus making a four hour bloc of solid class time. *headdesk* I remember back in high school, when that used to be normal. I can’t figure out how I survived all those years of it.

On a completely unrelated topic: I have a question. Has anyone ever heard the word ginger used as a pejorative for redheads? We had a long discussion about this at dinner, and were evenly divided between yes, no, and “Ginger is a word for redhead?”

I’ve never quite understood why “ginger” is used to describe redheads, anyway. Ginger isn’t red at all – the outside is a sort of dusty colorless brown and the inside whitish or yellowish or, if pickled, pink. Not anything close to red except the taste, and while that would be an interestingly synesthetic explanation I doubt it’s accurate.