Tag: vocabulary

It’s okay when I do it

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, ReadingLeave a comment

I’ve been reading a lot of Sarah J. Maas lately– ACOTAR 6 comes out in a few days, and in the last month or so I’ve reread the first four books; I’ll finish A Court of Silver Flames next week sometime, then go into the new book, then in between ACOTAR 6 and 7 I’ll reread the Crescent City books. The Throne of Glass series is actually my favorite of her work, but it’s not as tied into the rest of them, so rereading that will have to wait until next year.

I don’t argue with people about books very often– it just doesn’t come up, to be honest– but I especially don’t argue with people about SJM. She has a couple of little quirks about her writing that drive some people up a wall, and while I don’t share them, I get it, more or less. The biggest one is her insistence on using “male” and “female” to refer to her fae and angelic characters and never, ever “man” or “woman.” Men and women are human. It’s a hard line. I noticed a moment in ACOWAF a couple of days ago where a character actually uses the wrong word, and she immediately corrects herself.

The other one is her use of “mate.” The mating bond in ACOTAR isn’t entirely voluntary and tends to make its own decisions, for lack of a better word– simply making eye contact with the person who is supposed to be your mate can trigger it, and once it snaps into place, it can be ignored, at some cost, but it can’t be reversed. The fun bit, also explored in ACOWAF, is that sometimes the mating bond makes shitty decisions? The main male (sigh) character’s parents were mated and weren’t good for each other at all.

You’re gonna see the word “mate” a lot in ACOTAR. A lot a lot. And if it gets on your nerves, you’re not gonna have a good time with the series.

Anyway, I read ACOWAF and ACOFAS back to back, and I picked up another book off my Unread Shelf as a sort of palate cleanser before going into the next book. This book has lizard people in it. Lizard people are nearly deaf and psychic, so they communicate via telepathy. Only the book never uses the word “telepathy.” The word the author has chosen– or, at least, the translator, as the book was originally written in Korean and it’s not entirely clear how one translates neologisms from one language to another– is nearm. Nearm is both a verb and a noun; one nearms a nearm. I’m not sure how to pronounce it, as I’m reading the book and not listening to it; the one TikTok video I found discussing the book pronounced it “neerm,” and I can’t shake “knee-arm” out of my head even though “neerm” is probably closer.

Nearm is a dumb word. It might sound less dumb in Korean, maybe; I don’t know a damn thing about Korean. It sounds really dumb in American English. I’m pretty sure it sounds equally dumb in all the other Englishes as well. And any time one of the lizard-people shows up on the page you’re gonna see the word as many times as you might see “said” for any other character. God help you if there are more than one of them and they’re talking– sorry, nearming— at each other.

It’s got me ready to put the book down, and I was really looking forward to this book, and damn, Maas-haters, if I didn’t get it before, I get it now.

On vocabulary

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading2 Comments

I learned a new word while reading a sex scene tonight, and I’m both surprised and a little alarmed by that. I thought I knew all the words for the different ways humans can rub their bits together! I did not.

(That’s all I’ve got. My students shit the bed on another test today. If someone can explain to me what I need to do to keep 8th graders from consistently, from year to year, underperforming on anything I call a test, I would absolutely love to hear it, because nothing I’ve ever tried has worked. You’ve seen this post before, and I’m pre-exhausted by it without even writing it.)

In which maybe I *am* good at this

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

We took a field trip today, to a manufacturing plant, and got a tour and little presentations by a dozen or so different people over the course of the trip, and … man. Maybe talking to kids is a lot harder than I think it is? Not teaching, mind you, just talking to kids. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate these folks, and there’s something to be said for trying, and everyone was really nice, but it was really, really clear that these folks have been embedded in manufacturing-speak and boat-speak for forever and that they had no idea how much of the vocabulary they were using would be completely opaque to adults outside the field, much less actual children. Like, maybe when you’re talking to a bunch of kids, don’t use a lot of acronyms? I’m a grown-ass man with two Master’s degrees and I don’t know what the hell a BMA could possibly be, and the context isn’t helping me at all because I don’t know shit about manufacturing or boats. I could follow along with the IT guy’s spiel, on account of being a big nerd, but I’m pretty sure I was the only one in the room, and he’d probably have gotten a lot more engagement out of the kids if he’d talked about the giant gutted server blade that was sitting on the desk in front of him. Instead, he just kept talking about blades, and my kids were looking around for swords.

Here’s everything I know about boats, in fact:

Sigh.

I mean, whatever; the trip ended with my group getting to climb all over a couple of very expensive looking boats, and they enjoyed that, and at least we didn’t go to the box factory? One group got two hours about boxes. Boats are better than boxes.

In other news, and I don’t think this is me being mean or inappropriate but if you disagree let me know and maybe I’ll delete it, but I encountered this man on my way home yesterday and he is the angriest … banjo? Ukulele? Mandolin? Let’s go with mandolin, it looks like it’s got eight strings– player I’ve ever seen. Like, prior to observing him for a minute or two at a red light, I would not have believed that you could play a mandolin at someone, much less at passing cars, but holy hell. I don’t know what he was upset about, but every ounce of it was getting poured into that instrument. I kinda wish I could have heard him.

In which I reconsider

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

I think it’s probably time to admit that if I want to take a serious shot at learning Arabic I’m going to have to 1) spend time with textbooks and 2) probably suck it up and take a class. I was pleased with the way Busuu introduced the alphabet, but it went from that directly to “Okay, you know this now, and you’re ready for entire sentences in this tiny-ass font, right? Plus a bunch of symbols that we never really discussed in the alphabet section? You won’t be able to make half of them out anyway so don’t worry about learning them.”

Like, guys, language learning apps should explain shit, and I don’t understand why they don’t. Busuu’s approach to anything that isn’t the alphabet has been to give a handful of examples that may or may not generalize, not explain them, and then just … move on. Like, my last unit was on comparatives and superlatives? It gave me bad/worse/the worst and, I dunno, maybe good/better/best and that was it. I liked the “pull words out of this conversation” feature the first time I saw it, but I just don’t know enough to be able to do that easily and I can’t read well enough to go from spoken word to one of four different words that may not differ from each other all that much. Especially when, again, I don’t know all of the vowels and diacritics. Every so often it will show me a picture and ask me to say something about it for one of the social media features, and, Christ, I don’t even know where to start.

There also might be a dialect difference between it and Duolingo, and I can’t figure that out either. Lots of the nouns end differently (-atun seems to get added to a lot of them, and sometimes just -a) and I can’t figure out what the ending means, or why Duolingo’s vocabulary never bothered with it, and gendered endings seem inconsistent, and … gah. I’m smart enough to learn this shit, but I’m not smart enough to figure it out, especially given limited examples and the weird fact that that ending doesn’t seem to be properly represented by the actual letters at the end of the word, which is probably a function of one of those symbols I never got an explanation for.

And, for the record, if you happen to understand Arabic, don’t worry about explaining how all of this works. Like, I have access to other sources of information, and to a certain extent this is a function of my own laziness. I want there to be an app that explains this at the depth and quality that a textbook would, because I want to learn Arabic five minutes at a time while sitting in a comfortable chair in my living room or my library, and not hunched over a textbook or sitting in a classroom that I have to pay tuition for. I shouldn’t be surprised when I can’t find that.

On that coffee

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews4 Comments

I had a cup of Importin’ Joe’s Habesha coffee this morning, one of the two types I ordered, and as I was drinking it it occurred to me that I really don’t have any vocabulary for writing anything even approaching a review of a liquid. There is a little blurb on the front of the bag about what “tasting notes” to expect, and I’ll be honest: I picked up on the toffee, I guess, but other than that? It was coffee. It was good coffee, mind you, but I’m not a hundred percent sure how to go into detail about what the differences between “good coffee” and “bad coffee” are, other than that I’ve had Starbucks a couple of times and I understand what people mean when they say that Starbucks coffee tastes burnt. I have finally successfully conditioned myself to be able to drink my coffee black over the course of the last year, and so I didn’t put any additional sugar or creamer or anything like that into it. I’m not opposed to that or anything, but I figure since I can drink coffee black now I may as well drink my first few cups of this unadulterated so that I can learn what it tastes like. And yeah: it’s good stuff; I just wish I could be more elaborate than that.

What’s the best coffee you ever had? And can you tell me what made it the best coffee you ever had?

This post is basically just a whole bunch of Tweets strung together

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

luckycharms02…got home from work, fell asleep on the recliner (well, mostly) while they boy watched Dumbo, reflected on how catchy racism is (the phrase “be done seen ’bout evrythang” is gonna be running through my head for a bit) and then had cereal for dinner.

Because fuckit, cereal for dinner, dammit.  Lucky Charms, specifically.

Fact: WordPress replaces “fuckit” with “faucet” if you aren’t paying attention, which… is not the same thing.

Secondary fact: The little marshmallows in Lucky Charms and various other cereals are called “Marbits,” and if you are savvy, you can get them in giant bags all by themselves.  I have not done such a thing, but my wife has given bags of marbits (WordPress correction: marabouts) as Christmas gifts.

Related to the post below: you may have noticed that the rape/sexual assault complaints about Bill Cosby have been all over the news lately.  Ponder the fact that the actual women coming forward never really led to much, but a relatively unknown male comic jokes about the assaults and now it’s national news.

Thanksgiving is next week.  I am not sure how this is possible.

My son, who as we established a couple of days ago is three, got a report card from his preschool.  It is thoroughly standards-based and something like nine or ten pages long.  It doesn’t have actual grades on it but if it did I think he’d be on honor roll.  I can live with that.

We are supposed to get somewhere between four and eight inches of snow tonight, but I am not lucky enough for it to result in school closings.

The federal monitoring visit today went… interestingly.  I may talk more about it later but it doesn’t fit into the theme of this post very well.

In case you ever thought I was smart

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

Screen Shot 2014-07-16 at 11.07.47 AM

I’d like to point out that Chuck Wendig is a Real Author and this is therefore somewhat more humiliating than it ought to be.  I have literally been complaining about “ducking” since I got an iPhone and this is the first time it’s been pointed out to me that ducking actually is a goddamn verb.

I is a writar!

My Google-fu and vocabulary have failed me

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Writing7 Comments

The bit that’s flipped up there, so that the pilot can climb inside the jet.  What’s that called?

jet-fighter-cockpit-11568964

I swear to God I’ve just spent several minutes looking for the answer with no luck.  Closest I can get is “windshield,” but I feel like that shouldn’t apply to the back part of the damn thing and plus windshield doesn’t repurpose to part of a spacecraft all that well, since there’s no goddamn wind.  Vacuumshield?  Dumb.

Words are stupid.

(Sidenote: Ha!  There was a period of time early in the life of the blog where for some reason WordPress wanted to add “aviation” as a tag to every single post I wrote no matter what.  I get to use it for real!)