timepiececlock | Entries tagged with linguistics

Finally finished some laundry, so I'm off to San Diego in the next half hour. Comic Con, here I come!

In the mean time, here's a ( a fanon thought on naming practices and DW post-4x13 ''Journey's End'' )

Anyway, I'm a romantic about names. I think names are important, and there's so much meaning and symbolism and so much emotion wrapped up in how we refer to ourselves, how other people refer to us, how the world remembers us in written record. Names have the power that we give them, no more and no less... but let's face it: we give names a *lot* of power, in our world. In our relationships, in our politics, even in our crime.

Hemingway: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

For kicks:

Great costume! Are those tentacles AAAAAAAHHGRRHH!?!!!

Stage right: a love story sabotaged.

Dump me? You better avoid crosswalks.

What happened to the last volunteer?

Watermelon seeds grew in my stomach.

Bird, sunlight, window: the first lesson.

Drama: breakfast, dinner, but never lunch.

Jealousy's born green but bleeds red.

I've been fascinated by the number three for a long time. It's not my favorite number (that'd be 12), but it's always held a bit of a mystique for me. I learned the rule of 3 and 5 when I first took art class, and it has lasted in my mind longer than most of the other things I learned in high school.

I love phrases that come in three words, I love lists of three, I note that the first essays they make you write in school have three body paragraphs, and there's three primary colors, and all great stories have three characters, even if the third character is just a place or an idea. The three main characters for ATLA, for example, are Aang, the Avatar, and Zuko. The three main characters of The X Files are Mulder, Scully, and the FBI. The three main characters of The Little Mermaid are Ariel, Ursula, and Eric.

Three nights of moonlight for werewolves to transform, three promises to seal it, 1-2-3-GO!, rock-paper-scissors, getting your steak done to well, medium, or rare.

Clovers have three leaves, I'll give you three guesses, three sirens, three fates, three warnings, three colors on the stop light, three medals to win at the Olympics, and the linguistic conjugation of good, better, best.

It's a great number to play with, and it holds a unique place in our culture, structurally and linguistically. After all, nobody ever wrote a song called called "Bizzare Love Square."

If I could impart any advice to the people who write for

ship_manifesto--or any internet essay project-- it would be this:

Structure.

Structure

Structure

STRUCTURE.

Your running thoughts do not an essay make. STRUCTURE IT. If you do that, then it doesn't matter what you say, because at least you will sound somewhat respectable.

One of the things that always annoyed me about JKR's use of spell-words in Harry Potter books, in fact the only thing of this nature that really did annoy me about her spell naming, was designating the phrase "Avada Kedavra" as a death curse, and basically the worst curse that could be uttered in the entire series.

Then she went on to sell billions of books and influence children's vocabularly for an entire young generation. The problem? She basically ruined the phrase "Abracadabra". Every 10 year old who read HP is going to forever associate the two, which puts unfair negative connotation on a phrase that has survived for hundreds of years with a relatively neutral meaning. It could be used to do good things, bad things, or things classified as neither moral nor immoral (like turning a flower pot into a clock.)

Here's a perfectly well-known word that's seeped in literary tradition, used by flowery princes and evil sorcerers alike, a phrase the Tooth Fairy might use to sneak some money under a child's pillow, and now through some questionable phonetics JKR has villified it. Ruins a good word.

If you're curious about the origins of the phrase abracadabra, Wikipedia has an entry on it, though no promises to accuracy or validity with that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abra_Kadabra#History

I love puns. Good puns, bad puns, any pun under the sun.

So come on, Livejournal afficiandos!

Give me a pun, and I'll love you tomoooooooorrrrrrow. Something you've been saving up, or something you heard somewhere, or something in another language even. But English is the language I'm most likely to understand, note.

Want to know what bugs me?

People who say "I could care less" when what they really intend to say is "I couldn't care less."

Think about that.

Current Music: Joe Hisaishi - Reprise (Spirited Away OST)

I wrote this last night. I haven't put it up on ff.net because I think it kinda sucks dead eggs.

And I hate the title.

And I'm not sure what the point is.

http://community.livejournal.com/rashaka_fiction/4707.html (SPOILERS - Avatar 2x08)

The following rant has been cross-posted below, so that you can read about my angst without having to spoil yourself or even read it if A:TLAB is not one of your known fandoms:

See? See that? It sucks. Even the parts I like, I'm not that wild about. And looking at all the parts I don't like, I can't even imagine fixing them; I just want to scrub them out entirely.

Plus, I really *really* think my ability to have a variety of sentence structure is going down the toilet. All my sentences sound the same to me these days and they all sound boring.

This disgruntlement has been present for months. I feel like I've fallen into bad writing habits (for example, always putting things in threes) that on their own aren't a problem but when I do it continuously all my fics start to sound the same to me, and I begin to fear I'm actually re-using phrases. I haven't caught myself doing it yet, but some internal part of me wonders.

I know every writer has their own style, but I think my style's changed considerably over the years since I started writing fanfic and not all the changes have been for the better. On the plus side, my stuff now is better than my stuff four years ago; I have a better grasp of story structure and pace, for one thing. On the negative side, I think I have less daring sentence structure and a certain flatness of tone. ((I'm speaking mostly about my general to dramatic fics here, since I use a different style completely for humor/parody.))

I think it also differs from fandom to fandom. Like, my Naruto fics don't annoy me as much as my Avatar fics do. And my Buffy fics annoy me for the same reason my Avatar fics do, but are counterbalanced by the fact that I think I had better vocabulary in my BTVS fics than the current stuff I'm writing.

It's all very confusing and frustrating.

Maybe it's because it's been so long since I sat down to read good fiction? All I read these days are textbooks and fanfic. While it gives me spelling and grammar practice, that can't be doing anything but slowly sapping my writing abilities of anything resembling a sexy turn of phrase. ---See! Right there! I used "anything" twice in the same sentence!

I'm highly disatisfied.

Hello darkness my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping.
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.

In restless dreams I walked alone,
Narrow streets of cobblestone.
'Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence.

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening,
People writing songs that voices never shared.
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence.

"Fools" said I, "You do not know,
Silence like a cancer grows.
Hear my words that I might teach you,
Take my arms that I might reach you."
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed
In the wells of silence.

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made.
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming.
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls."
And whisper'd in the sounds of silence.

I've always looked back on this song and agreed that it is an excellent example of the lesson she was trying to convey: that every word in a poetic work should serve the whole. What I love about this song is not just the slightly creepy cultish theme or the pessimistic ideas, or even the way it's played. What I love is that you can pick out almost any noun or verb or adverb in the song and easily trace how it relates to the whole. The themes of sound, silence, and music are in every aspect of the song/poem--- not just what the little "story" is saying, but in each word chosen for its power and place. Figurative language, say hello.

Current Mood: nostalgic

petrichor

(PET-ri-kuhr) noun

The pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a dry spell.

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in
waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht
the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl
mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the
huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a
wlohe.

I gto tihs in an eimal from my autn, btu I'd aelrady sene it oenc bfeoer.

I did a survey. For MIT. I think it's pretty cool.

Analogies and Metaphors Found in High School Essays

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.

18. Even in his last years, Grandpappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

Current Mood: bouncy

The word nada is Spanish.

I went through nearly twenty years of my life with nada as part of my lexicon, always used correctly, and never once did it occur to me that it might be a Spanish word.

I just thought it was slang. California slang. haha. You can all laugh at me now.