A classical education to combat violent crime: brilliant policy poorly defended?

Discuss.

Note: I work in fashion retail and this conversation grew out of my bitching about the misuse of apostrophes in signage/labels.

Boss: So how do you spell "bangles"?
Self: B-A-N-G-L-E-S.
Boss: Yeah, someone was trying to tell me it ended in "E-L-S".
Self: Were they German?
Boss: No.
Self: "Weasels" ends in "E-L-S".
Both: But we don't sell weasels.

I blame popular culture, music in particular, for the decline of the subjunctive in English (possibly also for the mangling of adverbs into prepositions, but never mind that just at the moment). Consequently, I also believe that popular culture is one of the best channels for rectifying the sorry state of language use and vocabulary in the English speaking world, and possibly in others too.

Dear suzycat, thank you for the table of contents, the page numbering, and the bylines at the beginning.

YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.

Spot the amusements:

parakuihi: breakfast
tina: lunch
parāoa: bread
rīwai: potato
kūmara: sweet potato
kānga: corn
pūhā: perennial sowthistle
mīti: meat
kīnaki tōmato: tomato sauce

ātaahua: be beautiful, handsome; beauty
pakari: be strong, sturdy
mokemoke: be lonely, solitary
māngere: be lazy, idle; laziness

Edit: This will probably not be at all amusing to overseas players, unless you find obvious English transliterations amusing (about which we had a rather interesting tangent in today's/yesterday's lecture, btw.). It's just, no-one here says "sweet potato", even less than nobody says "perennial sowthistle". We say kūmara and pūhā. The latter is like a wild salad green or spinach thing. And Mangere is a suburb of Auckland.

"You'll have had your tea"

It's a future perfect in form, but not in intent. It took a while to explain to M what I was on about. Similarly, yet less perfect, looking like an idiot in a Maori lecture a while ago when someone asked a question I can't remember, but roughly equivalent to whether the idiomatic English use of the future, as in, "where's the sugar?" "It'll be in the cupboard" would be translated with the future in Maori.

A tangential weird thing: "Hair" is a collective singular in Maori. "Trousers" are treated as plural, but I'm not sure "spectacles"/"glasses" are. Selective assimilation FTW.

"Scare quotes"

I think it was in communication with my nasty ex-boss that this really bugged me. I know it may have been unintentional, especially as English isn't his first language, although I'm pretty sure native speakers offend as well.

To me, putting things in scare quotes indicates a degree of disbelief or disapproval. As in, X introduced me to her "boyfriend", Y. Here I'm expressing that I don't believe Y was her boyfriend. Sure, I'd look up an example from evil ex-boss' correspondence, but that would make me livid, and we can't have that.

The thing that bugs me about it is that I don't know if I'm being oversensitive or if people who use them like that really are having a dig.


EXTRA, EXTRA! NON-LANGUAGE-RELATED PEARLS OF...ER, SOMETHING!

Camels a-copulating

The fact that camels are not an endangered species implies that the following are true:

1. There are baby!camels, and
2. Camels have sex.

I am finding both of these things hard to imagine. Do the babies have humps? What's the proper term for a baby camel? Don't the humps get in the way of camel!sex? What does it take to get such a stereotypically grumpy animal "in the mood"?

See, I used the quotation marks there to signify that I know it's a slightly dumb and hackneyed phrase. This "" business is complicated, dammit.

Some answers. The website can't spell, but it seems that to some extent, the humps grow after birth.

Excuse me while I squee in an undignified fashion over the fluffy ickle baby!camels. kthx.

It turns out I was wrong about the not-being-endangered-bit, which might explain why I can't find any pictorial evidence of Bactrian camels mating.

"With poisonous gasses we poisoned their asses"

Flight of the Conchords: The Humans are Dead with BONUS!Bill Bailey. This song is stuck in my head.

Which may or may not have to do with how as I can't seem to get to sleep.

In my Maori lecture today I realised I didn't know the etymology of this word:

cemetery
1387, from O.Fr. cimetiere "graveyard," from L.L. coemeterium, from Gk. koimeterion "sleeping place, dormitory," from koiman "to put to sleep," keimai "I lie down," from PIE base *kei- "to lie, rest" (cf. Goth haims "village," O.E. ham "home, house, dwelling"). Early Christian writers were the first to use it for "burial ground."

And that I'd forgotten what the opposite of Kosher is (Trefah, among other transliterations). Cf. Halal/Haram.

Yes, we were talking about tapu vs. noa.

*

Fabian is a satire that makes me want to cry.

Vorher, damals und heute, er war stets ein armes Luder gewesen, und er hatte große Aussichten, eines zu bleiben. Seine Armut war schon ein schlechte Angewohnheit, wie bei anderen das Krummsitzen oder das Nägelkauen. (S. 109)

---

Aus der Lebensmittelabteilung vertrieb ihn der Fischgeruch, den er seit seiner Kindheit, vielleicht auf Grund einer embryonalen Erinnerung, nicht ausstehen konnte. (S. 134-135)

Now that's not a very nice thing to imply about your mother.

It pisses me the fuck off when my mum (in particular) goes “well that is/was/will be different”, and I’m all, DIFFERENT FROM WHAT, FFS?!?!

Well, in Māori, if you say something is “different” without saying what it’s different from, that just means it’s STRANGE.

He rerekē ia.: He/she’s weird.

He rerekē tōku waka i tōu waka.: My car is different from your car so there.

You know what’s nerdy? I’m writing this entry in Word then pasting it into my LJ, so I can do the stupid macrons.

Anyway. I can do comparatives, look:

He tere atu tōku waka i tōna.: My car is faster than his/hersso there.

Now really. I need to go and study imperatives and negatives and the agent emphatic. And why is there not chocolate in the house?! Most oversightful.

WTF backwards FTW!

Ganked from _hedgewytch

Your Vocabulary Score: A

Congratulations on your multifarious vocabulary! You must be quite an erudite person.

I think I got "quixotic" wrong...