#megstuff

[withlovemeghana]

Hermès: “ Don’t come off too strong*

Orpheus: “ Oh..okay okay”

*not even 2 milliseconds later*

Orpheus: “ HEY COME HOME WITH ME!! I’M THE GUY YOU ARE GOING TO MARRY”

Hermès: ....

[morpholomeg]

panthera leo

they say have some pride, and i say: first, join your pride.

find us where we roam, and know we’re here to give you home, child, to claim you for our own, to see you strong and grown, to guard you and to guide.

unsheathe your claws, let loose your roars

run with your pride.

bare your teeth and learn to snarl with glorious ferocity learn to hunt learn to worry away at the gristle and the grit learn to run them ragged

learn to live with your pride.

in my pride i have ferocity with feral grins wide we bite and we bide our time hanging on, clinging on, because all we need do is survive

and instead, we thrive

so, my child, my little lion cub, you who tried you who lied you who found yourself dissatisfied

run with me.

fight with me.

come with me, and join your pride.

My friend Courtney Carola/@drunk-on-writing’s LGBT+ poetry anthology ‘Have Some Pride’ was published today. Click here to buy it on Amazon. This is the first piece of poetry I’ve written in years, but I felt like I had to join the party, so to speak! Here’s to all the LGBT+ youth out there, and to the future we’re building with them.

[morpholomeg]

For International Women's Day this year, YouTube instigated a #DearMe campaign, where women address their younger selves and give them advice. This is mine.

[morpholomeg]

What made you choose to study linguistics?

On a practical level, my A Level French teacher, who let me know that it was a thing. She also gave me a couple of book recommendations (David Crystal's Little Book of Language was the first) to get me into it.

But really, I wanted to study linguistics because it's fascinating. Language is one of those things which is teetering on the edge of all sorts of classifications - nature or nurture? science or art? - just as linguistics is. It's something we use without thinking, something that seems so immeasurably natural to us, and yet we know so little about how it works, and we're so unaware of its utterly beautiful complexity.

(Right, you know the way Tony Stark feels about engines? This is how I feel about languages, except for the bit where I didn't use that enthusiasm to create whatever the linguistic equivalent of Iron Man would be.)

It's a series, a collection of interlocking and interdependent systems, all coming together to create a larger whole, analogous to biology - the body is made up (partly) of organ systems are made up of organs, which are made up of tissues, which are made up of cells... (btw, I am not a biologist and probably got all that wrong, but anyway.) Language is made up of sentences, which is made up of words, which are made up of morphemes, which are made up of segments... And just as in biology each level needs to be understood in its own right, so must each level of language, except they all interlink. Syllables! I find syllables so fascinating, because you know what a syllable is, right? If I told you to go back to your primary school poetry lessons and clap out the syllables of a word, you could do it, right? Native English speakers, take 'clandestine'. You would be perfectly happy dividing that up 'clan-de-stine'. But WHO ON EARTH told you that the 'n' goes at the end of 'clan' and the 'd' goes at the beginning of 'de'??? No one, but you knew it anyway. DO YOU EVEN KNOW how much subconscious linguistic knowledge you're displaying there?? You know that 'n' and 'd' are separate segments. You know that English does not allow 'nd' clusters at the beginning of syllables (we say 'in the onset'). You also know that it would be perfectly fine at the end (in the coda) of a syllable (cf. 'hand'), so why haven't you said 'cland-e-stine?' Because you ALSO know that English likes to put as much stuff in the onset as possible - it's technically called the maximal onset principle. ALL THIS STUFF YOU KNOW and you didn't even know you knew it.

The sheer amount of information that is necessary to use languages... It's mind-boggling. It's amazing. AND YOU LEARNT IT ALL (probably) BY THE TIME YOU WERE LIKE FOUR. What's more, you learnt it perfectly (according to your native dialect) despite the fact that no one around you was speaking it perfectly. Think about it - we all stutter, we tail off at the end of sentences, we play with language, use deliberately ungrammatical structures - a lot of parents in particular will use non-standard, non-grammatical language to talk to their children WHO LEARN TO SPEAK PERFECTLY ANYWAY. ??? We learn the systems behind the language, so I can tell you that the party-hatted penguins dispersed fluidly through the tree and YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN even though a) you have never read that sentence before (probably) and b) it doesn't even make sense. You just used your knowledge of English morphology to take the word 'hat' and the suffix '-ed' and understand my new word 'party-hatted', and you used your knowledge of syntax to work out what on earth I was going on about...

*takes a deep breath*

To go back to biology, yeah, sure, it's also amazing that the human body functions in a way that allows for, like, breathing, but language is on a completely other level. It's at this weird borderline between conscious and subconscious use. Particularly in hearing actually - linguistics tends to focus massively on the speaker rather than the hearer, but I'm always fascinated by the fact that not only can we construct all this marvellous complexity, but also deconstruct it. I mentioned segments up there somewhere - they roughly correspond to individual sounds in an utterance. Like, in 'thing', you've got 'th' 'i' and 'ng'. Except if you analyse a recording of the word 'thing', it's impossible to pick a moment at which one segment ends and the next begins. They overlap. But every hearer can still break the word down into its constituent segments.

Basically, humans are amazing, and language is amazing. P much as soon as I started becoming aware of all of this amazingness, I was like "I want to do that one please." And here we are.

*takes another breath* *sips tea* *thinks about all the uni work she could actually be getting on with* *ah well*

[morpholomeg]

Warnings for: suicide, drugs, alcohol, violence, abuse, misogynistic slurs. Um. I think that's it.

'Sheila' was originally by Jamie T. This version is by Leddra Chapman. It's like the least Christmassy song we could possibly have chosen. Sorry about that.

[morpholomeg]

I did another song. 'Send in the Clowns' is my favourite song to perform, and yet I've never actually performed it! This may have something to do with how it's an alto song and I always audition for stuff as a soprano. But anyway, I hope you like it.

[morpholomeg]

Everyone's been singing it, but have they been singing it IN FRENCH?

For song week on fourspice, I've done a cover of 'Do you wanna build a snowman?'... but the French version. I've translated the lyrics back into English and put them as subtitles so you can see the difference between the two versions. :)

Also included: old photos of me, my sister and my cat Harry building a massive snowman.

[morpholomeg]

Recipe here (I halved everything because I only had one bar of chocolate!): http://sallysbakingaddiction.com/2013/11/20/biscoff-white-chocolate-oatmeal-cookies/

Laci's video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ualuem6zFT0

Quick note: obviously it's not just women who have periods, and not all women have periods. Despite this, I do think it's fair to include the topic in a week with a theme of women, because it is an issue which affects a majority of women at some point in their lives.