In Sweet And Sharp Discord @softlypause - Tumblr Blog

This one resonated with me

one if my favorite gifs right now the blankest eyes ive ever seen the lights are on but no ones home. and the other thing like grooming its snout but i don't think its even aware of what its doing. i dont think either of them know anything or know that theyre alive

animate-mush

Since tumblr is currently very excited about versions of Project Hail Mary we made up in our head, an interesting thought experiment might be: what would Rocky sound like if lexicologized and translated by someone else?

The meat of the story is linguistics being done by a non-linguist, which means that Rocky's use of language tells us something about Eridian language but tells us way more about Ryland Grace's translation choices.

Fffffffffff this dovetails so well with my unwritten space story where the team linguist is NOT the archeologist but rather the techie. Dr Zeke Arnolds my irritating beloved, you coulda been played by Ryan Gosling *wipes tear* .....man, Zeke woulda been so rude to Grace about literally everything. [Zeke Arnolds is of course named after the legendary Arnold Zwicky, styled after my irl colleague REDACTED, and fueled by the sort of linguist rage and pedantry you can only acquire in graduate school. Ah, memories...]

On a side note, Rocky is named after a common noun of English that presumably has nothing to do with whatever meaning is name has in Eridian. The name "Rocky" is corefferent with his actual name but it does not translate it. What if Grace's name is the same way? The name Rocky gives him doesn't mean grace, it means This Guy. But the point of the story is that these guys are exactly the same, so what if Rocky assigned him some epithet that was a common noun in Eridian, based on the substance he's composed of

Rocky: can't proceed. Grace all over floor.

Grace: I - what?

Rocky: not human Grace. Just grace.

Grace: ...describe what that word means

Rocky: small liquid contained. Grace.

Grace: ....

Grace: YOU NAMED ME PUDDLE

....okay this was in no way the point of the post but my new headcanon is that Grace's Eridian name is "Puddleglum." Because he is a sad contained liquid.

Grace: actually my name means "divine mercy freely given"

Rocky: Understand. Humans bad at names

pinkninjapj

I tried to look up the passage where they talk about naming. I got the quote, but couldn't find it in a skim read of the book. It's probably within several weeks or a few months of meeting, where they almost exclusively build their vocab around science/maths/biology terms. Obviously this is Andy Weir's favourite thing, and he doesn't give the actual language learning the space that it needs (and that I desire). The passage is pretty brief about it:

Proper nouns are a headache. If you’re learning German from a guy named Hans, you just call him Hans. But I literally can’t make the noises Rocky makes and vice-versa. So when one of us tells the other about a name, the other one has to pick or invent a word to represent that name in their own language. Rocky’s actual name is a sequence of notes—he told it to me once but it has no meaning in his language, so I stuck with “Rocky.”

But my name is actually an English word. So Rocky just calls me the Eridian word for “grace.”

But I can see Weir and Grace and Rocky being way uninterested in having the vocab and cultural/religious conversation for a real translation of Grace at that point. 100% Rocky just gives Grace a descriptor name too and shrugs it off. Probably they circle back around to it when they get to Erid and get a proper translation.

Awwww so all the official historical Erid documentation has the Proper Grace name, but Rocky still calls him his private little nickname.

animate-mush

OH COOL they did think about it!

But this brings me back to my initial point which is about polysemy and translation choices. What does he tell Rocky his name is, and what does that say about him? Is it -

the quality of being light on one's appendages, the opposite of clumsiness

a prayer of thanksgiving said before or after a meal

the gift of divine mercy

any of a set of three goddesses representing feminine virtues

manners and the ability to move appropriately in social situations

....and might he choose a different answer depending on where in his amnesia journey he is? Or would Rocky choose a different one, if presented cogently with all the options?

Funny version:

Grace: Grace as in graceful, good at movement, not clumsy

Rocky, who has heard him run into things or trip on floor junk five times this week: what else word mean question

Sweet version:

The Eridian word for grace, or at least the one Rocky assigns to his friend after years of hopeless solitude, is almost identical to the Eridian word for thank you

pinkninjapj

GAH okay, let's see if this develops beyond flash fic:

Rocky and Grace arrive at Erid, he's severely malnourished after surviving on coma slurry and taumeba for calories. The Hail Mary docks at the space elevator while Eridians a) save the sun and b) synthesise vitamins in a lab to cure scurvy and other whathaveyou.

Rocky: I have new slurry for you. Scientists create vitamins, you digest, you heal.

Grace: let me see the research. I want to know if they're going to kill me by accident before I drink anything. Hey, this paperwork just calls me Alien!

Rocky: you are alien. Proper name not yet caught on in documentation.

Grace: Looks appetising. You know this is wee coloured?

Rocky: No, I not know this. Now hurry, cure your body. Grace live long time.

Grace: it smells like... Like grossly sweet.

Rocky: Glucose common to both our environments. Your laptop shows glucose very important for human tasting receptors. Drink now.

Grace: Give me a second. This is the first time I've eaten something other than Taumoeba in years. I have to psych myself up for it. I feel like I should say grace.

Rocky: Say Grace, question?

Grace: Oh yeah. That's another definition of my name. I guess we never circled back to that conversation. Grace is a religious ritual said at the beginning of a meal in some cultures of Earth. It's a prayer thanking the deity for the food, acknowledging that the food is a gift.

Rocky: Grace means thank you, question? This should be your proper Eridian name. Thank you.

Grace: Rocky, buddy, that's. That means a lot. Wait. What have you been calling me all this time? What does 🎶🎵 mean?

Rocky: you do this with cup of slurry, *mimes knocking it over* makes grace over the table.

Grace: Puddle?! You named me Puddle?! You said you translated Grace!

Rocky: Rocky lied. Did not understand Grace's definition at the start. Had already mentally named you. Too awkward to explain with little language.

Grace: You've been calling me Puddle for years!

Rocky: You should not be surprised, Puddle. Already tell you, you are leaky space blob.

(Yes, "leaky space blob" is what Rocky actually calls him once. Also rereading the epilogue reminded me that Grace says he was told by Rocky "not to talk about eating in polite company" (a change in the movie. In the book eating is like really private and socially taboo) Rocky responds: I'm not polite company, my friend!)

#project hail mary

eclogues

hey so i can feel the soil falling over my head

atomikats

my personal take on the matter

#project hail mary #art

gretchensinister

Consider this (based on a conversation I had with some friends a while ago): Pride and Prejudice and Zombies for people who actually like Pride and Prejudice. Look–I tried to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and I got about 20 pages in before I came to the conclusion that the person who wrote it did so out of the belief that the original Pride and Prejudice was stuffy and boring. There were out of character vulgar puns. And the trailer for the movie did not convince me that I had missed anything by cutting short my reading experience. So, what I’m talking about here is this premise: the world of Pride and Prejudice, but if you die, it’s highly likely, almost certain that your corpse will get up and try to eat people. But no one dies in Pride and Prejudice, you might say. In fact, few or no people die in any Jane Austen novel. This is true. But people do get sick with some regularity. Imagine the tension added to Jane getting sick after going to visit Bingley if there was the chance that she would become a zombie after she died. Becoming a zombie in an eligible bachelor’s house probably would have seriously wrecked any chances of any of the living sisters ending up with him. Imagine Mr. Collins, as a minister, having the duty upon someone’s death of severing their head with a ceremonial plate or something that would prevent the corpse from rising. Obviously important, but this only makes him more self-important and obnoxious. And dangerous. For you see, in this version, Mr. Bennett, who stays in his office all the time, whose life is the only thing allowing Mrs. Bennett and her daughters to stay in the house–Mr. Bennett is definitely a zombie. He died at home, and Mrs. Bennett decided that, no way were they dealing with this, and so…just started faking it. Jane and Elizabeth know. The younger sisters don’t. In this universe, I think we have to go with zombies that are not any faster or stronger than the humans they were, and in fact tend to get weaker as time passes because their flesh is rotting. And…hmm, okay, how about they are pretty violent upon rising, and for about a week afterward, trying to bite people and spread the infection (even though most people are carriers anyway, but getting a nasty bite from a corpse will give you other stuff that will have you die while carrying the virus). But then they calm down and basically just start sort of attempting to act like they did in life, that is, taking habitual actions with no consciousness, in a depressing and desiccated way. So Mr. Bennett is a zombie, and Mrs. Bennett’s number one goal is to get her daughters married before anyone finds that out. And this, actually, makes Elizabeth’s refusal of Mr. Collins more frustrating for Mrs. Bennett–obviously Mr. Bennett didn’t tell Elizabeth that she could refuse Mr. Collins, because Mr. Bennett is dead, but Mrs. Bennett can’t say anything or the game would be up. Another question in this version–does Mr. Darcy find out about Mr. Bennett being a zombie somehow? Does Elizabeth find out that he knows and didn’t say anything and this is something that helps repair his earlier actions? Anyway, this is the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies that I was looking for.

exigencelost

Okay also: in the original, when Elizabeth walks through the rain all the way to bingley’s to care for Jane while she’s sick, it’s a very dramatic expression of both Elizabeth’s love for her sister and her penchant for flamboyant rebellion, but consider, if there is a chance Jane will wake up a zombie and Elizabeth knows it, how does that change the dynamic? Elizabeth might be going to help take care of Jane, or to *take care* of Jane should things take a more morbid turn…by killing her zombie sister.

This works especially well if zombieism is communicable prior to death; if mr. Bennett is a zombie and only the elder Bennetts know, that means Jane has been pre-exposed and is almost certain to wake up as a zombie should she die in the Bingleys’ care— which the Bingleys do not know. Elizabeth has to forge through the rain to be there in case things get ugly, because she knows that the Bingleys aren’t prepared.

shenzuul

And I think you pretty much HAVE to make Mr. Bennett’s zombie status play a role in how and why Darcy separates Bingley from Jane—the heavy implication behind Darcy’s line about the want of propriety shown even by her father hits Elizabeth like a ton of bricks as she realizes he knows—he knows, and he thought Jane lying to Bingley about it was evidence that Jane didn’t love Bingley—but—but Darcy must not have told Bingley that part of it. Bingley couldn’t keep a secret on his life; if he knew, his sister would know, and word would already be out and they’d have been ruined by now—

And of course, not only does the fact that Darcy, who owes their family nothing, has kept and continues to keep this secret for them even after Elizabeth’s refusal deepen the gratitude she begins to feel for him after the letter of explanation, but it also liberates Elizabeth to fall in love with him. Because Elizabeth-who-wants-to-marry-for-love would never be happy marrying someone who didn’t know the family secret in advance. She had resigned herself to spinsterhood because she couldn’t be satisfied with having to hoodwink someone to have their hand, but also couldn’t put her family at risk by trusting someone who wasn’t bound to them by more than an engagement. (Maybe she was even tempted to confide in Wickham at one point, and hasn’t Darcy’s letter proven she was absolutely right not to yield to that passing thought.) But Darcy figured it out himself, and he’s kept her trust, and she could fall in love with him without guilt—if she hadn’t already turned him down.

AND THEN LYDIA HAPPENS. And Darcy realizes immediately that Mr. Bennett can’t do anything to recover her—and if Mr. Bennett doesn’t do anything about Lydia, Mr. Collins might become suspicious, or even just officously involve himself, so find out the while thing. When Darcy blames himself for not revealing Wickham’s character, it’s with a much more immediate sense of urgency. It’s not that the other sisters’ marriage prospects being ruined may impoverish them down the road—it might immediately drag them all into destitution. That’s why he rushes off to go look for Lydia himself.

chiliadicorum

I sometimes love getting in Fingon's headspace after he found out that Thorondor delivered Fingolfin's body to Turgon (however long that news took), especially when he must have believed he was on good terms with the eagle king (you know, after that whole rescue thing and all). He spent every year of their foray into beleriand by his father's side, fighting the battle with him. He must've been so torn...

What did I do wrong?

Is it because I'm a kinslayer? Maedhros and his brothers never got to have their father's body...

Do I not deserve to say goodbye...

Fingon never got to see his father again after he road off, alive or dead. I wonder if there was confusion, or anger, jealousy? Or maybe he knew the reason why and made his peace with it. Either one, no way it was easy.

#fingon #tolkien