#a harmless drudge

[bookhobbit]

'Cheap thrill' and 'simple pleasure' are another one of those pairs where if you look at just the individual elements, they look like they COULD be roughly synonyms, but they're not at all that close in use, because of the connotations.

A lot of dictionaries define 'cheap thrill' as something like 'an inexpensive/minor source of excitement' but that misses out the fact that 'cheap' here has disparaging connotations, and usually when people use it they're being either dismissive or shamefaced about the thrill in question. It's often used about something titillating, a bit scandalous, or slightly taboo. I think it would be more accurate to gloss 'cheap' here as its 'low in value' meaning, not its more common 'low in cost' one.

But on the other hand 'simple pleasure' is overwhelmingly used for things that could be described, if you were so inclined, as 'wholesome'. Generally it encompasses things that bring enjoyment but are not disparged or taboo. I also have a feeling that 'simple pleasure' is more likely to be used for things that make you feel peaceful or quietly happy, while 'cheap thrill' is for things that make you feel excited and keyed up.

So although the two could have been near-synonyms, in fact they're sort of near-antonyms within the same narrow dynamic. Easy to access (derogatory) excitement, vs easy to access (complimentary) joy.

I'm just doing free-range semantics bullshit for fun here so don't expect this to lead to any important conclusions. Not sure whether this classifies as a cheap thrill or a simple pleasure. For a definite cheap thrill, I do recommend finding a sentence that has 'cheap thrill' in it and a sentence that has 'simple pleasure' in it and swapping the two, see what results.

[bookhobbit]

just learned that the Welsh word for weekend is penwythnos. Wythnos is 'week' which I didn't know offhand but I do know pen, an incredibly common word meaning, among other things, 'head' or 'top'. Comes up a lot in place-names related to hills, which is why I know it so readily: I remember place name elements much easier than other vocabulary. Today I learned that it also means 'end', so wythnos pretty similar semantic composition to the English weekend, but for a minute I parsed it as 'summit of the week' and I was like damn.....so true....give it its place of honor.

[bookhobbit]

What's a cool linguistics fact that you know?

I have NO idea what is cool at this point or what anyone knows about anything but I think a lot of people would like to know about the Pokemon Onomastics. TLDR: some linguists compared the names of various Pokemon across languages to examine sound symbolism in the languages in question. The study I linked is only one of several -- when I did my dissertation, a committee member described it as "a thing" and suggested I look at it because she wanted to know if there was any sound symbolism going on in neopronouns. (I didn't find any, which is not to say there's none, though I think many neopronouns are highly typographic as entities. They're often written a lot more than they're said out loud, you know?)

Anyway, I don't know much about Pokemon myself but one thing I love about this is it's a very interesting and rare opportunity to be crosslinguistic about sound symbolism in a very controlled, clear way. Sound symbolism is tricky and to study for many reasons, and it's tricky to compare across languages, but because the Pokemon remains the Pokemon but gets a new name in line with the conventions of the dub's language, you get a very nice set of items. Especially because there's like a gazillion Pokemon I believe. Onomastics I think is probably one of the areas where pop culture provides the most useful and interesting material for linguistic analysis -- see also ship name blends which I think has gone around several times before but is always worth mentioning again because it's a very enjoyable piece of work.

[bookhobbit]

defining a bunch of function words at work which is quite challenging and therefore I'd love it if my brain would stop playing Conjunction Junction from Schoolhouse Rock, but only the line ♪Conjunction Junction, what's your function?♪ over and over again

[bookhobbit]

my head is full of too many thoughts and feelings all the time and if I don't drain them regularly by making pointless texts posts they turn everything into an undifferentiated mass of mud and wet paper and I can't find anything I want in there so that's why I'm Like This

[bookhobbit]

Researching something about the abbreviation tfw/that feel when and a bunch of dictionaries gloss it as "that feeling when", sometimes without even mentioning "that feel when" as a possible alternate. I'm so annoyed by this. You understand nothing. A feel is different from a feeling. Happy to concede that many people might use that feeling when, but as the ONLY form?? This is a 4chanism, dude, don't try to iron it into respectability and standard English by leaving out its original form. Next you'll be calling lolcats laughoutloudcats.

[bookhobbit]

For eight years I've been listening to @overelegantstranger saying "the lurgy" every time he or anyone else got sick, and only This Month did I learn that this is not one of the extremely numerous Manchester, Lancashire, Northwestern, or generally Northern dialect words he's always using but instead more or less made up (perhaps from real roots but seemingly not with a direct transfer of meaning) by Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes for 1950s radio program The Goon Show. Shaken by this revelation. In fairness nobody ever told him either so he is equally shocked.

[bookhobbit]

In Welsh charity shop is siop elusen and I was staring at a sign waiting for the bus and I was like I bet that's the kyrie eleison word because I know Welsh has a lot of very old Latin borrowings and Latin got that from Greek and do you know what? It is indeed: "from Middle Welsh elusen, from Proto-Brythonic *elβ̃ʉsen, from Vulgar Latin *alēmosyna, from Latin eleēmosyna, from Ancient Greek ἐλεημοσύνη", which does derive from the same ultimate Greek 'mercy' root that eleison does.