Peg

💐Child of Hermaphrodite💐

[quotemadness]

“We will either be saved by the poet or by fire.”

— Ernst Jünger

[senchais]

3 | le petit prince 6-10

chapitre vii

anéantir | to annihilate

bercer | to cradle, lull

le boulon | nut and bolt

dévisser | to unscrew

le cambouis | grease

cramoisi | crimson

impitoyable | heartless

la muselière | muzzle

l’orgueil (m) | pride

le sanglot | sobbing

secouer | to shake

chapitre viii

avoir la bonté de | to be kind enough to do sth

bâiller | to yawn

embaumer | to perfume

friper | to crease, wrinkle

ombrageuse | shaded, irritable, touchy

le paravent | screen

tousser | to cough

chapitre ix

ramoner | to sweep (des cheminées)

sot, sotte | stupid

chapitre x

bredouiller | to mutter

le carrosse | carriage

se hâter | to hurry

le pan | section, part

siéger | to sit, reign

[sespursongles-deactivated201906]

I found out recently that at a time of his life when Tolstoy was in a slump and had stopped writing & earning money, his wife Sophia borrowed money from her mum to start her own publishing office and publish editions of his works—and in order to figure out how publishing worked, she travelled to St Petersburg to ask Anna Dostoyevsky for advice, as Anna had also spent the past 14 years planning the editions of her husband’s work, correcting proofs, placing ads in papers, battling official censors, etc. It reminded me of this post about women writers supporting each other—so many links between women in history that we never hear about. Someone please write a book about the wives of all the great male writers…

(In previous years Sophia, while giving birth to Tolstoy’s 13 children and raising them and managing his estate (he was a count) pretty much on her own, also wrote the clean copies of all of his manuscripts out of his nearly illegible drafts—the final draft of War and Peace was 3,000 pages and she copied it seven times, correcting spelling and grammar and offering key suggestions and critiques of the plot; for example explaining to him that people would be more interested in the social or romantic plots, the human aspects, than in the minutiae of the battles and war strategy plots. A few months before his death, Tolstoy named a male friend the executor of his literary estate rather than his wife, who had been doing this thankless job since she was 19, and gave to the public domain all the copyrights to his works that Sophia had previously owned (for her publishing company). She wrote in her diary “Now I am cast aside as of no further use, although I am, nevertheless, expected to do impossible things.”)

Also I shouldn’t be surprised (but I am) at just how many “great male writers” read their wife’s (or female relatives’) diaries and drew a lot of inspiration from them, stealing ideas or even sometimes entire sentences / paragraphs / poems out of them. This is such a recurrent pattern. There’s Tolstoy (who read Sophia’s diaries and also asked her, when she was 17, to show him a short story she’d written, gave it back to her the next day saying he’d barely glanced at it, when he actually wrote in his diary “What force of truth and simplicity!” and used the story as the embryo for the Rostov family in War and Peace), but also William Wordsworth who read his sister Dorothy’s journal and drew a lot from it, and F. Scott Fitzgerald of course. When Zelda was still young a magazine editor offered to publish parts of her journals, and her husband (of 5 months!) said he couldn’t allow it because he drew a lot of inspiration from them and planned on using parts of them in his future novels and short stories. There’s also French novelist Raymond Radiguet who stole his female lover’s diary to write his novel The Devil in the Flesh, and was lauded by fellow male writers & critics for his brilliant insights into a woman’s mind. Which had been copy/pasted from this woman’s diary. [Also, while he didn’t read it until after her death, Henry James’s sister Alice mentions in her diary that he “embedded in his pages many pearls fallen from my lips, which he steals in the most unblushing way, saying, simply, that he knew they had been said by the family, so it did not matter.”] I really love reading women’s journals, and when they were married to a famous writer, you wouldn’t believe how often the person who edited them mentions in the introduction “if some passages sound familiar it’s because her husband was reading her diary and ~getting inspired” ie plagiarising although the term technically doesn’t apply because every word his wife wrote and idea she had was legally his property (just like she was).

It makes me feel so bitter to contrast what women do—decades of unpaid, unacknowledged work to proofread, copy, publish, preserve from censorship, improve, develop and promote their husband’s writing—with what men do—openly steal ideas and whole sentences from their wife’s writing while forcing her to give birth to 13 children that she didn’t want and he doesn’t help raise.

[frayedcobweb]

This makes me so angry.

[soulsellinscribe]

[quotemadness]

“I am lonely. I’ve been like that since I was young. But I think I am a person that needs to be lonely.”

— Choi Seunghyun

[thebeautifulwordlist]

Cheville

Noun

[shuh-vee]

1. Prosody.  a word or expression whose only function is to fill a metrical gap in a verse or to balance a sentence.

Origin: 1880-1885; Cheville represents the normal northern French phonetic development of Latin clāvīcula “key, tendril, pivot,” a diminutive of clāvis “key, bar, hook.” In French cheville means “ankle, peg, dowel, pin, plug.” It is this latter sense “plug” that gave rise to the English meaning of a filler word or phrase in a sentence or line of verse. Clāvis derives from the Proto-Indo-European rootklēu-, klāu- “hook, peg,” the same source of the very many Greek forms, e.g., kleís, klēī́s, klāī́s (all from assumed klāwis, identical to the Latin noun), Celtic (Old Irish) clō “nail,” Baltic (Lithuanian) kliū́ti “to hang, hang on,” and Slavic (Polish) klucz “key.” Cheville entered English in the 19th century.

“The languages were by this time close enough to each other to make this easy, and when there was any difficulty it scarce required the wit of a Chaucer to supply such a cheville as “An emperesse or crowned queen” … (though it may be observed that “crowned” is a distinct improvement to the sound, if not to the sense of the line)…” - George Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody, Volume I, 1906

[pagans-dream]

[makeuphall]

[soulsellinscribe]

👑Royal Affair👑 I couldn't help but to put a purplish filter on today lighting was shit and it just went so well with the look..😂🦄 #nyxcosmetics #anastasiabeverlyhills #benefitcosmetics #revlon #makeupforeverhdfoundation #toofaced #smashbox

[soulsellinscribe]

Milk baths have been used throughout history since the times of Cleopatra's ancient Egypt to soften and supplement skin. The lactic acid, which is an AHA (alpha hydroxy acid), in milk acts as a soft exfoliant. Varieties of skin-friendly herbs, flowers and honey add different skin benefits and scents for the bather to target their skin concerns.

[gentleacademics]

Please stop mixing these up, I’m begging you

Because words mean things, here are some definitions. All of these taken from their respective Wikipedia articles.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and involves an analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context.

Polyglotism or multilingualism is the ability to master, or the state of having mastered, multiple languages. Sometimes people who are currently learning languages in an effort to become fluent in them are also called polyglots.

Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary criticism, history, and linguistics.

Ergo:

Some linguists are also polyglots, but not all of them.

Basic linguistic knowledge is necessary to learn a language, but they’re still separate things.

Polyglots know how to drive different kinds of vehicles. Linguists are mechanics.

[sapirwhorfhypothesis]

One way to explain what linguistics is to a prescriptivist (or anyone for that matter).

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Oftentimes a non-linguist may ask a linguist (I will use this term for students as well) which language is easiest to learn, how many languages they know, or if one dialect is “better” than another.

One option is to tell them to think of linguistics as similar to geology (on the simplest of levels, of course; I’m not a geologist and don’t plan on becoming one):

A geologist studies rocks. They study their formations, how they change, and how they are similar and different from other rocks.

A geologist may have a type of rock that they know extremely well, but try to understand a lot about the other types as reference.

Society may place value on certain rocks, but that does not make one rock better than another to a geologist.

A scientific, descriptive approach to language is similar.

A linguist studies language. They study grammars of different languages, how they change, and how they are similar and different from other languages (among other things).

They describe language as it occurs naturally, not telling others the “correct” usage of a word.

Most importantly, a linguist recognizes all instances of language as equally valid, not privileging a certain dialect or language over another.

How do you explain linguistics to your peers?

[allthingslinguistic]

So then asking a linguist how many languages they speak is like asking a geologist how many pet rocks they have? 

The analogy I generally use when explaining what a linguist does is that a biologist looks at animals and plants and pokes them and figures out which parts are connected, a linguist does the same to language(s). And while some biologists mostly specialize in, say, frogs, it’s useful to have some knowledge of other animals or you won’t know whether the fact that frogs have two eyes is some unique characteristic or very common. 

By this analogy, English is kind of like the lab rat of linguistics, in that the vast majority of work is done on it. I think this is problematic for a whole bunch of reasons similar to the problem of only researching lab mice which are outlined in this excellent Slate series. And then other much-studied languages are like other well-researched animals such as fruit flies and guinea pigs and chimps. 

[onlyusefulphrases]

A series of very threatening messages

[quotemadness]

I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

Neil Gaiman (via quotemadness)

[thequantumwritings]

Sometimes i think about the idea of Common as a language in fantasy settings.

On the one hand, it’s a nice convenient narrative device that doesn’t necessarily need to be explored, but if you do take a moment to think about where it came from or what it might look like, you find that there’s really only 2 possible origins.

In settings where humans speak common and only Common, while every other race has its own language and also speaks Common, the implication is rather clear: at some point in the setting’s history, humans did the imperialism thing, and while their empire has crumbled, the only reason everyone speaks Human is that way back when, they had to, and since everyone speaks it, the humans rebranded their language as Common and painted themselves as the default race in a not-so-subtle parallel of real-world whiteness.

In settings where Human and Common are separate languages, though (and I haven’t seen nearly as many of these as I’d like), Common would have developed communally between at least three or four races who needed to communicate all together. With only two races trying to communicate, no one would need to learn more than one new language, but if, say, a marketplace became a trading hub for humans, dwarves, orcs, and elves, then either any given trader would need to learn three new languages to be sure that they could talk to every potential customer, OR a pidgin could spring up around that marketplace that eventually spreads as the traders travel the world.

Drop your concept of Common meaning “english, but in middle earth” for a moment and imagine a language where everyone uses human words for produce, farming, and carpentry; dwarven words for gemstones, masonry, and construction; elven words for textiles, magic, and music; and orcish words for smithing weaponry/armor, and livestock. Imagine that it’s all tied together with a mishmash of grammatical structures where some words conjugate and others don’t, some adjectives go before the noun and some go after, and plurals and tenses vary wildly based on what you’re talking about.

Now try to tell me that’s not infinitely more interesting.

[ephemeral-elegance]

It’s FRIDAY FASHION FACT! One of the biggest “hot topics” of today is the unrealistic beauty standards for women. We are constantly surrounded by Photoshopped images and celebrities who spend a vast amount of time and money sculpting their bodies to “perfection.” Though the discussion is at the forefront now, the topic is nothing new. One of the most iconic instances of these near-impossible beauty ideals is the infamous turn of the 20th Century Gibson Girl.

The Gibson Girl is named for her creator, artist Charles Dana Gibson. In the 1890s, Gibson worked for LIFE magazine, where his girl first appeared. As she gained popularity, his work was soon printed in all the major magazines. There is speculation that the girl was modeled after his wife or his sister, but according to Gibson, she was not one girl, she was every girl, and that’s what made her beautiful. He saw her as the embodiment of the American melting pot- she was a combination of countless nationalities and races (of course, in this era, that still meant a very pale caucasian). In a way, the Gibson Girl was the first “All-American Girl.”

Gibson believed that the more races were mixed together, the more beautiful women would become, as he predicted only the best features from each would be passed down. He theorized that as a result, women of the future would be far more beautiful than the women of his day. In his drawings, Gibson combined what he saw as the best features: delicate facial features, soft hair in the latest bouffant style (but still with natural wisps and tendrils falling gracefully aside) a full chest and hips paired with a slender waist, positioned into the highly corseted S-bend. She was perfect, but not absurdly so, in a way that felt almost attainable.She wore the latest fashions, but was not at the level of the royals whom Europeans often turned to for beauty standards.

If her so-close-yet-so-far looks were not enough to attract admiration, Gibson gave her a personality to match. She was active and independent, playing sports, going off to work, not desperate for the help of a man. She was playfully teasing towards men, for how could they possibly hold the interest of such a woman? She did get swept up in romance, though, becoming a wife and mother. She was not content keeping house, though, and continued to spend her days with women as equally tenacious as she. Yet she was not political or controversial, steering clear of the rising suffragette movement, or stating any strong opinions of women’s rights. She was the perfect blend of modern and traditional.

The Gibson Girl was the perfect embodiment of “Women want to be her, men want to be with her.” It is due to this mass appeal that so many women strove to physically emulate the Gibson Girl. After all, who wouldn’t want to be the girl that so many people adored and admired? Of course, creating the look in real life was not nearly as simple as it appeared. The S-bend corset became extremely popular, yet this corset style forced the body into arguably the most unnatural shape of any other corset throughout history. Reality meant that it was near impossible for women to adopt the relaxed and care-free attitude of the Gibson Girl.

There were a few actress and celebrities who came close to the ideal, several of whom actually served as models for Charles Gibson, most notably Camille Clifford, whose near-perfect hourglass figure was the drawings come to life. Of course, this only enhanced the idea that the look was attainable for the average woman. Just like every beauty ideal, though, the Gibson Girl look eventually fell from favor. By the 1910s, society was shifting. The women’s rights movement was gaining momentum, catapulted by women joining the workforce en masse. The Gibson Girl was soon viewed as too proper, uptight, and locked in tradition. However, to this day the image remains the icon of the Edwardian age.

Have a question about fashion history that you want answered in the next FRIDAY FASHION FACT? Just click the ASK button at the top of the page!

[sartorialadventure]

GIRLS WILL BE GIRLS

[bnmxfld]

“We should meet in another life, we should meet in the air, me and you.”

— Sylvia Plath / Lesbos