#wordsmiths

[beardedmrbean]

[jaggedjawjosh]

If I could rewrite yesterday, you'd find success in every stumble, grateful for lessons whispered by time's gentle hands. Keep dreaming onward.

[lindalofbroome]

dont think i drew them as gross as i was imagining but that wouldve been more in the colours and line art i guess

yoinked some lotr screenshots, also not quite what i have in my head but close enough i guess. i was imagining that you only see the mouth and jaw, everything else is shadowed by the hoods. imaginign sickly gums and jagged yellowed teeth and spots and black saliva/blood dripping from gaping jaws etc

🤔 i actually thought Rodda was going to go another way with the wordsmiths because the line that described them as all single men seemed poignant, especially with their venerated status and power -- with their education and their control of the fourth floor etc. i thought their isolation wouldve been explored more and how that would make them vicious and unrelenting and unempathetic but alas

anywayyy my early theory was that derry was the son of a wordsmith and thats why he could read unlike everyone else.

couldnt possibly fathom the How but im imagining that outside the. palace? he met a woman from the countryside and there was something about her that was intriguing and yadayayada they fall in love and i guess either:

he manages to have a secret family for ~ten years while continuing wordsmith duties -- until he's discovered with conflicting loyalties, with lies, hypocrisies, or he becomes a problem and they try to get rid of him or something. then it's a race to the family home and to escape to the shore (which now that im writing it out, the threat of pursuit would parallel nissa and the Executioner, and all of the landovel books are about echoes of the past and repeated actions so. kinda reminiscent of that by accident lol)

he escapes immediately to be with his love and raise their son in the countryside (scene of the teapot??) away from the palace (maybe the pregnancy is a trigger to snap him out of it or maybe it happens later when he dares to live a humble domestic life instead) -- until they finally track him down to their lil cottage. (ohhhhhh my god just remembered there's an episode in star wars clone wars where they come across a clone that defected from the army and was living a nice farmers life with his wife and kids. long story short maybe that was in my subconscious lmao) (also! jarred and anna)

i was imagining they get word ahead of time and theres just enough time to pack up and head to shore and catch a boat to Free. but i suppose maybe only one makes it to the boat, and maybe neither of them do, only derry.

either way in my little exploratory thumbnail sketches i ended up with the mum dies when cram's crew boards, she was probably defending her family or maybe she was just outspoken and they hated it. the dad is sold into slavery somewhere, and in book three derry wouldve come across him. and thats the moment when things fall into place in the rodda styled book if you know what i mean. it'd be like when doom got his memories back.

anyway i still dont understand what the hell is going on with the "time lines" but im choosing to believe that means all AUs are canon

[artsy-19]

[dbaydenny]

I longed to create,

sing, compose, be an artist

possibilities

were faint, small improbable

leaving these few words for you.

.

D W Eldred

[agatheringofthreads]

Pomegranate

The sky is pomegranate red at sunset.

A wayward cloud shaped like an arrow pierces the fruit and the juice drips secrets down into vessels, into valleys, into all the fields and oceans.

Clouds gather. Tides roll in. I watch from the shore, shifting with the sand, asking for my place in all of this.

The roots of trees respond to me:

Be honored. You are witness. You are watered by the storms you’ve weathered. You are lifted by the winds and you dance. You sing. You journey and return. You are pulsing, a complex system intertwining, yet a still and simple thing of nature. You are many things and many ways at many times and many places, and always through it all you are witness. There is nothing more precious you can be than that which you are.

I listen to the rustle of the wild blooms that sprout from my limbs and face and heart and everywhere, and I know that the roots speak true.

I gather the seedlings that the breeze plucks off my petals and onward, with an armful of hope, I flow.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

By Leanne Italie

November 27, 2023

NEW YORK (AP) — In an age of deepfakes and post-truth, as artificial intelligence rose and Elon Musk turned Twitter into X, the Merriam-Webster word of the year for 2023 is “authentic.”

Authentic cuisine. Authentic voice. Authentic self. Authenticity as artifice.

Lookups for the word are routinely heavy on the dictionary company’s site but were boosted to new heights throughout the year, editor at large Peter Sokolowski told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview.

“We see in 2023 a kind of crisis of authenticity,” he said ahead of Monday’s announcement of this year’s word.

“What we realize is that when we question authenticity, we value it even more.”

Sokolowski and his team don’t delve into the reasons people head for dictionaries and websites in search of specific words.

Rather, they chase the data on lookup spikes and world events that correlate.

This time around, there was no particularly huge boost at any given time but a constancy to the increased interest in “authentic.”

This was the year of artificial intelligence, for sure, but also a moment when ChatGPT-maker OpenAI suffered a leadership crisis.

Musk himself, at February’s World Government Summit in Dubai, urged the heads of companies, politicians, ministers and other leaders to “speak authentically” on social media by running their own accounts.

“Can we trust whether a student wrote this paper? Can we trust whether a politician made this statement? We don’t always trust what we see anymore,” Sokolowski said.

“We sometimes don’t believe our own eyes or our own ears. We are now recognizing that authenticity is a performance itself.”

Merriam-Webster’s entry for “authentic” is busy with meaning.

There’s “not false or imitation: real, actual,” as in an authentic cockney accent.

There’s “true to one’s own personality, spirit or character.”

There’s “worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact.”

There’s “made or done the same way as an original.”

And, perhaps the most telling, there’s “conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features.”

“Authentic” follows 2022’s choice of “gaslighting.”

And 2023 marks Merriam-Webster’s 20th anniversary choosing a top word.

The company’s data crunchers filter out evergreen words like “love” and “affect” vs. “effect” that are always high in lookups among the 500,000 words it defines online.

This year, the wordsmiths also filtered out numerous five-letter words because Wordle and Quordle players clearly use the company’s site in search of them as they play the daily games, Sokolowski said.

Sokolowski, a lexicologist, and his colleagues have a bevy of runners-up for word of the year that also attracted unusual traffic.

They include “X” (lookups spiked in July after Musk’s rebranding of Twitter), “EGOT” (there was a boost in February when Viola Davis achieved that rare quadruple-award status with a Grammy) and “Elemental,” the title of a new Pixar film that had lookups jumping in June.

Rounding out the company’s top words of 2023, in no particular order:

RIZZ: It’s slang for “romantic appeal or charm” and seemingly short for charisma.

Merriam-Webster added the word to its online dictionary in September and it’s been among the top lookups since, Sokolowski said.

KIBBUTZ: There was a massive spike in lookups for “a communal farm or settlement in Israel” after Hamas militants attacked several near the Gaza Strip on October 7.

The first kibbutz was founded circa 1909 in what is today Israel.

IMPLODE: The June 18 implosion of the Titan submersible on a commercial expedition to explore the Titanic wreckage sent lookups soaring for this word, meaning “to burst inward.”

“It was a story that completely occupied the world,” Sokolowski said.

DEADNAME: Interest was high in what Merriam-Webster defines as “the name that a transgender person was given at birth and no longer uses upon transitioning.”

Lookups followed an onslaught of legislation aimed at curtailing LGBTQ+ rights around the country.

DOPPELGANGER: Sokolowski calls this “a word lover’s word.”

Merriam-Webster defines it as a “double,” an “alter ego” or a “ghostly counterpart.”

It derives from German folklore. Interest in the word surrounded Naomi Klein’s latest book, “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World,” released this year.

She uses her own experience of often being confused with feminist author and conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf as a springboard into a broader narrative on the crazy times we’re all living in.

CORONATION: King Charles III had one on May 6, sending lookups for the word soaring 15,681% over the year before, Sokolowski said.

Merriam-Webster defines it as “the act or occasion of crowning.”

DEEPFAKE: The dictionary company’s definition is “an image or recording that has been convincingly altered and manipulated to misrepresent someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said.”

Interest spiked after Musk’s lawyers in a Tesla lawsuit said he is often the subject of deepfake videos and again after the likeness of Ryan Reynolds appeared in a fake, AI-generated Tesla ad.

DYSTOPIAN: Climate chaos brought on interest in the word. So did books, movies and TV fare intended to entertain.

“It’s unusual to me to see a word that is used in both contexts,” Sokolowski said.

COVENANT: Lookups for the word meaning “a usually formal, solemn, and binding agreement” swelled on March 27, after a deadly mass shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.

The shooter was a former student killed by police after killing three students and three adults.

Interest also spiked with this year’s release of Guy Ritchie’s "The Covenant” and Abraham Verghese’s long-awaited new novel, “The Covenant of Water,” which Oprah Winfrey chose as a book club pick.

More recently, soon after U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson ascended to House speaker, a 2022 interview with the Louisiana congressman recirculated.

He discussed how his teen son was then his “accountability partner” on Covenant Eyes, software that tracks browser history and sends reports to each partner when porn or other potentially objectionable sites are viewed.

INDICT: Former President Donald Trump has been indicted on felony charges in four criminal cases in New York, Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C., in addition to fighting a lawsuit that threatens his real estate empire.

[agatheringofshapes]

Meeting Place

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