Un-Titled @latenightlaundrysoap - Tumblr Blog

as part of their ongoing boycott, Canada will no longer provide the US with totally real long-distance girlfriends who definitely exist

girlwithouthands-deactivated201

“In Russian, Baba Yaga’s name is not capitalized. Indeed, it is not a name at all, but a description—“old lady yaga” or perhaps “scary old woman.” There is often more than one Baba Yaga in a story, and thus we should really say “a Baba Yaga,” “the Baba Yaga.” We do so in these tales when a story would otherwise be confusing. We have continued the western tradition of capitalizing Baba Yaga, since the words cannot be translated and have no other meaning in English (aside perhaps from the pleasant associations of a rum baba). There is no graceful way to put the name in the plural in English, and in Russian tales multiple iterations of Baba Yaga never appear at the same time, only in sequence: Baba Yaga sisters or cousins talk about one another, or send travelers along to one another, but they do not live together. The first-person pronoun “I” in Russian, ‘ia,’ is also uncapitalized. In some tales our witch is called only “Yaga.” A few tales refer to her as “Yagishna,” a patronymic form suggesting that she is Yaga’s daughter rather than Yaga herself. (That in turn suggests that Baba Yaga reproduces parthenogenetically, and some scholars agree that she does.) The lack of capitalization in every published Russian folktale also hints at Baba Yaga’s status as a type rather than an individual, a paradigmatic mean or frightening old woman. This description in place of a name, too, could suggest that it was once a euphemism for another name or term, too holy or frightening to be spoken, and therefore now long forgotten.”

— Sibelan Forrester, from her introduction to Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales

princesssarisa

I own a book of folktales that includes a Baba Yaga story which describes the witch as “a Baba Yaga,” making it clear that this is a type of witch, not an individual name.

Patricia Polacco’s picture book Babushka Baba Yaga, about a friendly Baba Yaga who disguises herself as a human and becomes a little boy’s foster grandmother, describes stories of “the Baba Yaga” as if there were only one, but it also states that the protagonist is “the last of her kind”: i.e. that there were once other Baba Yagas, but this kind-hearted, grandmotherly one is the only one still alive.

frankiefridayyy

ROSS SEAL NEWS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

maureen2musings

A little relaxation, Brooks Falls, Alaska @achdiefranzi

#video

eilooxara

Oat milk was discovered much more recently than you may have known. Like many now-familiar technologies, it was found by accident during the Apollo program when NASA learned what a zero-g environment does to goat milk.

#puns

requiem-on-water

''Summer Faeries series'' by Kazuaki Koseki

my-ny

The Sound of Music + textposts pt. 32/?

creekfiend

gender essentialism is soooo funny bc it's like "this is what women are like" and you're like "I've met women and many of them, if not the majority, have not been like that" and it's like "well women SHOULD be like that" and you're like "why should women be like that" and its like "because that's what women are like"