zeborah | Entries tagged with language

I've been whimsically noodling at this on and off for a couple of years now as a mnemonic (derailed by successfully memorising it long before I could quite get it all to scan) but a recent/ongoing Situation at work has provided incentive for me to perfect(**) it as an emotional regulation aid. Because it's super emo! but also super chipper! All exclamation marks are intentional!

O! Domine, ne in furore tuo arguas me!
Deus, neque in ira tua corripias me!
Miserere mei quoniam infirmus sum valde!
Quoniam conturbata sunt ossa mea sana me!

(Um diddly iddly iddly um diddly ay! bis!)

Et anima mea turbata est valde! Et tu,
Domine, usquequo? Et tu, Domine, usquequo?
Convertere et eripe animam meam!
Salvum me fac propter misericordiam tuam!
O! Quoniam non est in morte qui memor sit tui!
In inferno autem quis confitebitur tibi!
Laboravi in gemitu! Per noctes lavabo
lectum meum! Stratum meum lacrimis rigabo!

(Um diddly iddly iddly um diddly ay! bis!)
<modulation>
(Um diddly iddly iddly um diddly ay! bis!)

Turbatus est a furore oculus meus!
Inveteravi iam inter inimicos meos!
Discedite a me omnes qui... operamini iniquitatem!(*)
Quoniam exaudivit Deus vocem fletus mei!
O! Dominus exaudivit orationem meam!
Dominus suscepit deprecationem meam!
Erubescant inimici mei vehementer!
Conturbentur, convertantur valde velociter!!!

(*) Cantandum valde velociter

(**) While googling to double-check my spelling for this post I discovered Gabrieli also created an arrangement for Psalm 6 and, having listened to it on YouTube, I'm sorry Gabrieli your polyphonic harmony is very pretty and clever but I think you'd agree my version is infinitely superior.

On Wednesday lunchroom conversation at work turned to "no-one knows people in their neighbourhood anymore" and I opined that this might be more a factor of people moving a lot: whereas I've lived in my house for 12 years and, despite being pretty antisocial I'm now getting to know a good number of the neighbours.

(On reflection, other factors are probably that "the people who you meet when you're walking down the street" don't get met if instead of walking down the street you walk only to your car and then drive down the street; and that more and more both/all adults in a family have to work during the day so there's less opportunity for interaction.)

( These are the people in my neighbourhood )

So.

Wednesday afternoon, after the long-aforementioned lunchroom discussion, I come home and the boy who appears to be the Deaf girl's younger brother greets me with "This is from your mailbox." Holding up a bag with a notebook and pen in it that I keep in my mailbox for the noting of messages in case of emergency. I said, "...Yes, yes it is," and put it back and went into my house.

Ten minutes later I'm grabbing a zucchini and some silverbeet from the garden when K comes over to give me a lovely gift set of nice sauces. My guess is that it came from someone's well-intentioned contribution to a food parcel, because she immediately asked if she could borrow some money. I happened to have the $20 she paid me back last time so gave her that.

Ten minutes later I'm chopping up vegetables for my dinner when the Deaf girl knocks on my door and shows me her broken scooter. I poke ineffectually at it for a while with various tools, then decide it really needs the nuts taken off which I can't do. So I'm halfway to next door to see if they have what it takes when I hear the distinctive sound of power tools. Immediately changing direction I find someone with an entire car-yard in his driveway. Once I've explained the situation he immediately agrees to fix it: "Anything for the neighbourhood kids."

Which I feel is a lovely end to the day.

But then as I'm cooking my dinner the Deaf girl comes back to ask my name. It takes her three goes before I understand but then we spend some time fingerspelling and then I confirm with paper just to be sure. (I'll call her H.) She takes this opportunity to wander through my entire house touching everything at which point I'm... what is going on here. I explain I'm eating and show her to the door.

Halfway through dinner she's back. I explain again that I'm eating. At some point this turns into a tour of the garden (it's now after dark). I start wondering if I've given her the impression that I'm going to give her something to eat, so grab a bunch of grapes off the vine for her and send her on her way.

Today I go to several neighbours both on this street and the street behind us to ask if anyone's seen my missing cat. (The majority of them ask "The black and white one?" Sadly no, but I know the one they mean.) [ETA: the cat came back the next morning, in 'recovering from mystery illness mode'.] When I'm back, K comes over to ask if she can borrow more money; I say I don't have any cash. (This is not strictly true to the extent that I do in fact have cash, but I also have limits. Poorly defined limits, but limits.)

As she goes, H comes and wants to hang out. Or something. I try to explain I can't and she seems to go away. For about five minutes. At some point I go and hide in one the spare bedroom to attempt to ignore the knocking on the door; it doesn't help much. I'd have gone to the library except it was closed for Anzac Day. I did take the opportunity to teach myself some NZSL online; unfortunately what I taught myself was "I'm busy doing stuff, sorry, go home."

On the bright side she does clearly understand when I sign this to her! Yay communication! She goes away and I breathe a sigh of relief. On the downside, she comes back again, and again, and again. (She knocked on the door again while I was writing the above paragraph.) I get the impression of a) some degree of intellectual disability, hard to be sure given my lack of NZSL but OMG boundaries, plus b) a bunch of loneliness such that being able to talk with someone who knows like six words including "go home" is really exciting.

I should go talk to her family and say actually I'd love to practice my pathetic NZSL with her, but, like, once a week max at a predetermined time. Or at least just on the footpath. It's just, I've already talked to more humans in the last 24 hours than I ideally prefer, and could happily go another month without any more interaction with any of my neighbours at all.

<thud>

The challenge, by @mhoye: OK Twitter. It's late but let's see if we can make this interesting: What is the least plausible story about yourself that's true?

My response: "In my first hour in Ulaan Baatar I chased a pickpocket into an alley to demand my wallet back. In Mongolian."

To contextualise:

I am a language geek. So when I was at the end of my second year contract teaching English in Korea, and decided to see a few more East Asian countries before returning home, and picked Mongolia as one of them, of course I decided to learn some Mongolian before I went. It has vowel harmony, how cool is that! (Pro-tip: vowel harmony is way more cool in theory than practice.) Luckily my plane to Mongolia had some engineering trouble and was delayed almost two days (putting my Korean visa status in jeopardy, but come to think of it that's a whole nother implausible story) so I had extra time to study up my Lonely Planet Mongolian Phrasebook while I waited.

So, I arrive in Ulaan Baatar, I'm delivered to the apartment I'm renting for three weeks in a gritty Soviet-era apartment block, I leave my bags and go out to exchange one of my traveller's cheques and do some grocery shopping.

I achieve both these things. I'm waiting at a traffic light on the walk back home when a local girl taps me on the shoulder and communicates (I forget whether in Mongolian, English, or gesture) that that man over there has just stolen my wallet from my bag. She also convinces me by the same means that we should chase him.

Being confrontation-averse, I naturally go along with this plan.

Our chase ends up with the man ducking into an alley. I pursue. The local girl quite sensibly does not. The alley is a dead-end and the man is therefore forced to turn and face me. It is at this point that I realise that I'm in the position of a cat that has cornered a doberman and now has to decide what to do with it.

But there's a girl back on the safety of the street rooting for me and I'm too embarrassed to disappoint her. So I make like a cat and puff myself up with all the confidence I can muster.

I also attempt to muster some vocabulary. I believe (based on distant memory and my still-treasured Lonely Planet Mongolian Phrasebook) that what I came up with was along the lines of "Minii möng!" (my money) although it may have been closer to "Minii möng???" (It may possibly even have been "Minii ... <perplexed gesture>" but given that I'd just been to the bank I probably remembered the word for money.)

He looked perplexed back. Who, him? he said in the universal language of facial expressions. He was completely innocent! Why, he just ran into this dead-end alley for fun! I attempted, with my aforementioned tremendous eloquence, to press my point, but ultimately he was very convincing. That is to say, ultimately I was convinced that trying to get my money back off him was a really stupid idea.

So I went back out to where the girl was waiting and shamelessly lied to her that something like "Ter yavan" (he goes away) or possibly, if I was really onto the past tense, "Ter yavav".

Then we got to chatting. Her name was Purje, she was 16 and studying English at school. She knew more vocabulary than me, but I was less shy so we mixed languages about equally. She taught me how to wear my bag in front of me (which meant I only got pickpocketed once more during my visit), and for the next week we met every day to visit museums and a local hill and her family's ger. So really it all worked out pretty well for all concerned.

And there you have number 2 on my list of Top Three Most Dangerous Situations Zeborah Used Her Highly Fluent Mongolian In.

Crossposts: http://zeborahnz.livejournal.com/109932.html

Late to the party I think, but:

This may have made me even more teary than the descant to the "Men of every" verse does.

(I've been browsing links. About NZSL is one of the key ones, and the Online Dictionary of NZSL and online exercises for students studying NZSL which I can do a *bit* of guessing at for some of lesson one, based on mimesis (I think that's the word I want?), context, lipreading, and a slow memory of fingerspelling. Also in the second lesson I think I recognise the words for boy and girl but that's about it. --Oh, the 'g' would be the grand-(mother/father) prefix. --I took an NZSL course about ten years ago and have forgotten most of it since.)

You know the joke: Someone says, "So-and-so is such a pig!" and someone else says, "Hey, that's offensive to pigs!" and everyone laughs.

The reason people laugh is that no-one really cares whether or not pigs are in fact offended. Most people care a certain amount that they're treated humanely, and good numbers would like them to be killed humanely or better yet, not killed at all. But I think you'd be hard-pressed to find many who care about the pigs' self-esteem, least of all among the pigs.

So in reality, the only one an epithet of "pig" is likely to offend is the person it's used against.

When, however, the derogatory epithet used is the name of a human, or a group of humans, or otherwise refers to a human or group of humans, the effect is quite different. Because now we're not disrespecting pigs, but humans. So saying "That's offensive to ____" isn't a joke anymore. It's a (very frequently painful) reality. It offends humans. It hurts humans. It makes it clear that the speaker doesn't care whether or not they offend these humans, and more than if they were barnyard omnivores. It reflects society's disrespect for humans, and it strengthens society's disrespect for humans.

( Cut for examples )

Two things:

1. Sometimes a member of a group thus maligned won't care. That's cool. But they can't speak for the whole group. Just because 1%, or 10%, or 50%, or 99% of a group doesn't care, doesn't stop it hurting the remainder of the group. And even if that remainder is only 1%, they're still human and deserve not to be hurt.

(Plus and moreover, I don't believe it's good for people to get in the habit of disrespecting a group of humans. It makes it harder to prevent oneself disrespecting other groups of humans, and one ends up in a constant struggle to prove that one is in the one true group of humans that deserves respect. Far better to just concede from the start the shocking notion that all humans are deserving of respect.)

2. To the inevitable woeful cry of, "But where will all this terrible politeness end?" I say: It ends where humanity ends. Women? Human. People of colour? Human. Gay people? Human. Insane people? Human. And you just don't get to use humans as weapons in your personal war of words unless you've secured their unanimous consent to be so used.

You can, however, malign pigs and snakes and weasels to your heart's content, and slow coaches, and sticks in the mud. Hey, I'll even give you arses: at least then you're maligning all humans equally.

Digital TV is awesome. So is being on holiday. Unfortunately Chinese TV (WTV, channel 28) doesn't have any readily discoverable programme, but I talked to a colleague at work and she's told me all the timeslots she knows of that have Korean sageuk. <bounce>

The channel also has a learn-Chinese segment at 2:40pm which is... actually way too advanced for me: I've never been at a stage where the words for "pumice" and "sinkable wood" and various east Asian trees are the most important gaps in my knowledge and I couldn't follow the conversations at all. The 这是不是。。。呢 and 这会不会是。。。呢 structures they briefly touched on were more my level. OTOH it does bring back a few of the words I learned at uni, so. I'll probably keep watching for the rest of my holiday, but don't think I'll bother recording it after that.

After that segment is over, I change the channel to Māori TV for their 3pm learn-Te Reo segment, which is just about perfect for my level. At one point they mentioned homework and going to the website; I went to the website and couldn't find the homework, but I did find the video summaries of the previous 200+ episodes of the series, and I'm now downloading them to my iPod for revision (one by one; there doesn't seem to be an rss feed; oh well). Yesterday I also watched Te Kaea (news) which is in Te Reo with English subtitles. (Oh, and a bit about the building of the marae at Waiariki Polytech, which ditto. And sidebar: I'm now trying to work out what the excuse of the opposition was for resisting the addition of a kitchen. I'm not surprised that there was Pākehā resistance in the slightest, but what excuse could they possibly come up with? A marae without a kitchen seems to me like a building without a doorway. When you welcome people onto the marae, you have the pōwhiri and then you eat. If the marae didn't have a kitchen, how would the tangata whenua feed the manuhiri? Does not compute!) This is also about right for my level: it keeps me following along enough to familiarise me with the words I just recognise, and confirm/correct my understanding of their meanings, whereas without subtitles I wouldn't know what was happening so would get bored and tune out.

In other learning-something-new-everyday news, I've taken up scambaiting again. (It's a lot more convenient now that Google lets you be logged into three accounts at once. Also I'm on holiday, so I don't know how long I'll keep it up once I'm back to work, we'll see; though I hope I can, because the first week of a scam hardly wastes any of their time since they're just running off a script still anyway.)

Anyway this morning I got an email stating that:

my sister [...] will be coming with me to your country because i am her father and the only family she has now

which, once I switched out of the "mock the mugu" headspace that makes fighting crime so much more efficient, I decided must mean something like "male head of household / legal guardian" or somesuch.

The only problem with the Freeview digital decoder is that when it's on standby it makes a quiet whirring noise which sometimes you don't notice and sometimes you can't not notice it and it drives you up the wall.

Warning: this post almost certainly involves Fail related to mental-health issues and, specifically, the word "crazy". I'll do my best not to be a jerk about it, but I expect it'll still be there.

Warning on the other side of things: I reserve the right to be dictatorial over comments. That is, over comments who think I'm being overly "PC" or whatever. Comments calling me on ablism will have free range.

So. In various places I've seen people point out that using "crazy", "going crazy", etc, in various figurative/non-literal ways is ablist language. (If this is hopelessly vague I can try to find examples, but I think people likely to know what I mean will know what I mean?)

And. I don't want to use ablist language. It's relatively easy to avoid derogatory language based on specific conditions - eg "retard", "schizo", and my personal un-favourite "psycho" - and it's very clear why avoiding them is a good thing. Likewise I aim to avoid casually using words like "insane" which have a clear clinical meaning.

"Crazy", to me, feels much less clinical, much less targeted, and much more vernacular. And...

Hmm, let me back out a bit. What I'm having trouble with is, I regularly need to be able to describe:

a) the way one's feelings/emotions get when one is all confused/stressy/turmoil-y/all mixed up, and

b) the way people sometimes act either:
i) apparently-from-my-POV irrationally (which may not be actually-from-their-POV irrationally), or
ii) hyper'rationally' without apparent-to-me regard to ethics, morals, empathy, etc

And "crazy" in current vernacular covers those, and I haven't been able to think of other words/terms that cover any and/or all of them. (NB: I am totally open to suggestions here!)

[Fun story time from my teens! So sixth form (aka Year <counts> 12) was super-stressful. At one point I commented to my best friend that it felt like I was going to have a nervous breakdown, and she was annoyed because I shouldn't joke about such things. (My point of view was that joking about it was one of the few things keeping it from actually happening; seriously I was super-stressed.) Not overly long later we were up on the balcony outside out maths class and she made some comment about jumping off, then was annoyed that I took her seriously and told a teacher, when it was 'obviously' just a joke. (My point of view was that, given that she was super-stressed too and various other things I knew about how she was coping with said stress, actually it wasn't anywhere near that obvious that it was a joke.) --Okay, look, I had a point when I started writing this parenthetical. I think it's that, at least for myself, I wasn't clinically depressed or clinically insane or clinically anything except a teenager dealing with stuff that was hard to cope with. But there need to be words that someone can use to express the nggh, the head-inside-outy, the argh!!! kind of feelings that just go along, sometimes, with being human. Because if you can't express what you're feeling then you just feel worse and that's not good for anyone.]

So I would like to be able to draw a dividing line and say, "Look, world! I'm using "crazy" to cover non-clinical craziness only, because the word seems appropriate for someone with good mental health who is nevertheless feeling/acting crazily/in ways that promote evil despite their good intention pavingstones; whereas it doesn't seem appropriate for someone who has schizophrenia who is being a sensible and decent human being."

At the same time I recognise that my personal definitions don't actually mitigate any hurt or harm that my use of the word may cause.

So.

??? <flounder> <flail> Thoughts, suggestions?