Posts by incrediblemelk@aus.social
 (DIR) Post #ASPez1xLNpGTRkOdE0 by incrediblemelk@aus.social
       2023-02-06T13:33:09Z
       
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       How did people use to learn #Latin in the days when it was a Western lingua franca? Did they just sit down with a dictionary and rote-learn a bunch of words, and then get drilled on them until they had memorised them?The other day I made myself a Latin Grammar Cheat Sheet that was me teaching myself the grammar basics that #Duolingo does not:The six cases of nouns, and how they are used (my editor’s knowledge of English grammar helped here)What the fuck is a declension??????I’m totally guessing about what gender a noun is but the most useful thing I made is a table of pronouns for all the cases, singular, plural, masc, fem and neuterThat there are four conjugations of verbs, and you can vaguely tell what ending they should have by whether the infinitive ends in are, ere or ireI’m pretty solid by now with your regular Latin verb endingsI stopped writing down the verb rules when I realised so many are irregular that I would be better off just to learn individual verbs by rote rather than understanding them as a rule I also made a list of “small confusing words” and words that start with Q, which mainly map onto English words that start with W
       
 (DIR) Post #ASiRvLiKVTWaIGPx4a by incrediblemelk@aus.social
       2023-02-15T21:18:22Z
       
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       @clive the machine transcript of my digital media lectures called it “afford. Inces” every time. Who or what is Inces? I got so sick of fixing that
       
 (DIR) Post #AXhw5vCAe3AXRLtwNE by incrediblemelk@aus.social
       2023-07-14T23:24:47Z
       
       2 likes, 4 repeats
       
       Just found this glasses cleaning #AlignmentChart I made in 2021
       
 (DIR) Post #AXocqzAH4B10NutkSO by incrediblemelk@aus.social
       2023-07-18T01:57:27Z
       
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       I was just thinking "can you have a figment of anything else but someone's imagination?" Turns out the word 'figment' is from the early C15th & could be used alone to mean an invented or imagined story – but it also carried negative connotations of deceit or false doctrineIt comes from the Latin 'figmentum', meaning something formed or fashioned, from the verb 'figurare', to form or shape (cf. "to make up a story"), and ultimately from a PIE root 'dheigh-' meaning to form or buildThis is the same root that gives us dough, feign, feint, fiction, effigy, paradise (yep! it means "[lovely place with a wall] made around [it]") & lady, as the Old English hlǣfdīġe means "bread-kneader", a job that fell to the female head of a householdquick sidetrack: in the C14th 'feint' was an adjective for weak/feeble, from the Old French verb 'feindre', "to hesitate, falter; lack courage". It's fossilised as a stationery trade term for pale ruled lines, in case you've wondered why exercise-book covers spell it that way!but most of all, 'dheigh-' gives us 'figure', "a visible or tangible shape or form of something". Such a rich word! My fave: the colloquial verb figure (out), "to expect or work out" comes from the maths sense of 'doing arithmetic', which in turn comes from numerals as shapes#Etymology
       
 (DIR) Post #Aaqm6WLHypAJqqELVQ by incrediblemelk@aus.social
       2023-10-17T04:41:32Z
       
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       @clive you’re absolutely not the only one who’s picked up on this, esp as apparently part of it was straight ripped from Marinetti’s manifesto but with “poetry” swapped out for “technology”
       
 (DIR) Post #AcvJgY3PoxfSItf5Ie by incrediblemelk@aus.social
       2023-12-18T03:13:49Z
       
       0 likes, 1 repeats
       
       I'd love to know if there's any #linguistics research about the colloquially expanded usage of 'where'so it floats free of its material, locative meaning and starts to mean 'regarding which' or even 'when'so rather than a physical space, it denotes a conceptual space, i.e. a situation or scenarioas seen in the 'Friends' episode naming format "The One Where…"it is impossible to google this, but basically in everyday speech I'm noticing people using 'where' as a catchall adverbI do it too, e.g. "I had a good day where I managed to get my work done"As an editor I still strongly feel that you express yourself more clearly and precisely if you allow words to have distinct meanings, or at least distinct contextual appropriateness…"I had a good day when I managed to get my work done"but this has a more refined meaning focusing on time:"the day _on which_ I got work done was a good day"rather than the productivity itself:"getting my work done that day was a good situation"I'm wondering if I need to be less prescriptivist about 'where' and recognise the semantic nuances of its descriptive usageI don't want to pedantically force all usages of 'where' into spatial/locative senses and so crush its range of figurative sensesgod, why can't I just edit stuff rather than breaking my brain obsessing over language like thisAt times like these I feel neurodivergent in a disability sense, like other people's brains can just intuitively propel them through their work while I feel dragged down by my compulsion to understand the history, rationale and mechanisms of every tiny aspect of my work before I can even begin it#grammar #EnglishGrammar #editing #copyediting