![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vriddy) wrote2025-05-22 06:47 am
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
common_nature, and more Vigilantes anime chit-chat on bnha_fans!![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
merriamwebster_feed) wrote2025-05-22 01:00 amMerriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 22, 2025 is:
voluble • \VAHL-yuh-bul\ • adjective
Someone may be described as voluble if they are talking a lot in a rapid, energetic way.
// Bri knew something was bothering her normally voluble friend when he was reluctant to talk about his day.
Examples:
“The movie is built around an interview with the legendary 91-year-old actor, still vigorous and voluble, with a seize-the-day cornball glow to him. In ‘You Can Call Me Bill,’ Shatner sits under the hot lights, with the camera close to his face, talking, talking, and talking—about life, death, acting, fame, love, desolation, and trees.” — Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 16 Mar. 2023
Did you know?
In a chapter titled “Conversation,” from her 1922 book Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home, Emily Post offers her trademark good advice for the loquacious among us: “There is a simple rule, by which if one is a voluble chatterer ... one can at least refrain from being a pest or a bore. And the rule is merely, to stop and think.” Voluble, as is clear in this context, describes someone or something (as in “voluble personality/prose/presence”) characterized by ready or rapid speech. Voluble traces back to the Latin verb volvere, meaning “to set in a circular course” or “to cause to roll.” Another volvere descendant, volume, can also be a help in remembering voluble’s meaning, not because someone described as voluble speaks at a loud volume, per se, but because they have volumes to say.
nanila) wrote in awesomeers2025-05-22 06:53 amsovay) wrote2025-05-21 11:11 pmashlyme introducing me to Idris the Dragon. I have now seen what a gas station looks like when the fire suppression system has been deployed. Fell over in the evening and went down a rabbit hole of Boston vintage radio. Read some film criticism by Graham Greene. Am still not really watching movies myself. My brain could come back online any time.scrubjayspeaks) wrote2025-05-21 05:40 pmlb_lee) wrote2025-05-21 08:08 pm
musesfool) wrote2025-05-21 07:32 pm
soc_puppet) wrote in moodthemeinayear2025-05-21 04:46 pmredbird) wrote2025-05-21 05:07 pmthisfinecrew)hunningham) wrote2025-05-21 09:20 pmNothing major, life-threatening, or horrible, but it has felt like a lot. All my cherished little routines have been disrupted, and I have been tired and cranky.
The cat has also tired & cranky - his water-bowl has been moved, his main person (myself) has been missing, the workmen were loud and the floors covered in plastic sheeting.
But nowish that we're both getting ourselves back together. Here is a journal post, Friday I will restart crossfit. The cat's waterbowl is back in the bathroom, and he is once again sitting on the bookshelf while I work.
I do need routines.
thewayne) wrote2025-05-21 02:10 pmthewayne) wrote2025-05-21 01:50 pmsolarbird) wrote2025-05-21 11:58 amI’ve been checking hardware stores the last couple of weeks, mostly because there are things I need, but a little because I’m watching their stocks fall.
Smaller hardware stores are having a harder time covering the stock gap than larger ones. That makes obvious sense; they have less to begin with, so the duplications and outright gaps are more clearly visible. Hand tools in particular are getting pretty thin on the ground at this point; screwdriver bit replacements – well, lots of particular varieties are no longer available. Stuff like that. It’s been a multi-week process, not all-at-once – though it will probably look that way in retrospect.
Today, though, I had a somewhat more pointed experience.
Yesterday, Home Depot had 34 of a particular China-made mini circular saw available. It’s inexpensive because it’s corded; it’s from WEN, who make very basic but generally adequate enough kit for people on a budget. A chonkier Ryobi, perhaps. And last night, they had 34 of these saws available for store pickup or delivery.
This morning, when I woke up, they had 17.
An hour later, they had 15.
I was going to buy this with credit union rewards points, but it seems that was going to take too long. So I shelled out the cash, buying it immediately instead. It’s not a big deal for me, we’re still within our current tight budget this month.
So now they have 14.
Maybe that big drop was a one-off, a fluke – an organic surge, rather than someone grabbing a set for their employees while they could. Maybe Home Depot’s remaining 14 are enough that they’ll still have 10 in another month.
Or maybe it was scalpers. I don’t know how quickly these things sell, as a rule.
But that… that was a surprise.
Most people won’t notice stock thinning, I don’t think. Not quickly. I don’t have a reason for that other than recent experience shows that most people don’t notice a single goddamn thing until it punches them, personally, in the face. They to go get a thing, and it won’t be there, and then they notice.
A lot more people are probably pretty close to that moment of noticing.
They’ll notice it even more when their Medicare gets its $350 billion dollar cut.
It’ll be a moment of awareness, a moment of panic. It won’t last long – the fascist noise machine will do everything it can to patch it over – but it’ll be there.
Are you ready to take advantage of that? Particularly with your Trumpy relatives?
Maybe you should be.
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
languagelog_feed) wrote2025-05-21 05:12 pmBlake Shedd called my attention to
…an article on philosophy / human rights and how a Chinese translation of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (available online from Philosophy Now, 118 [February-March, 2017], 9-11, and also available here from the website of one of the authors) raises some questions of hermeneutics.
Here's the article:
Hens, Ducks, & Human Rights in China: Vittorio Bufacchi & Xiao Ouyang discuss some philosophical & linguistic difficulties
Blake continues:
There were several conclusions and statements in the article that I found interesting, e.g., “Chinese culture may not have the conceptual apparatus, or need, to distinguish the ‘community’ from the ‘individual.’” As a non-specialist, I find this statement surprising because I assume(d) all languages can make this distinction in some fashion. I’d very much be interested in reading what you think.
First of all, I think that Italian co-author Vittorio Bufacchi was misled by his Chinese co-author about the grammar and other aspects of Chinese language, starting with the choice and explanation of this Chinese proverb: jī tóng yā jiǎng 鸡同鸭讲 (lit., "a chicken speaking with a duck" i.e., "mutually unintelligible; unable to understand one another; talking about two different things; getting one's wires crossed; talking at cross purposes; people not understanding each other; talking without communicating; talking in circles; talking past each other"). This saying forms the basis for the title of the article and for the elaborate drawing that accompanies it. For an article that is dealing with the translation of terms relating to human rights from one human language to another, the theme / thrust of this proverb is highly unsuitable. As the authors say, "It is as if the Western language of human rights is untranslatable or unintelligible to the Chinese."
Because the authors of the article have mistakenly come to believe this, they arrive at the false conclusion that the only way out of this presumed misunderstanding
…lies in a linguistic turn: the way forward is to abandon the Western terminology of human rights and appeal instead to aspects of Chinese philosophy that can perform a similar role, although the term 'human rights' is never used.
If we abandon "human" and "rights" in a serious discussion of "human rights", what is there left to talk about?
In my estimation, the authors need to gain a better understanding of the Chinese language and its grammar.
The authors declare:
The majority of the thirty articles in the English version of the [UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights] refer to 'everyone' and 'no one', while the Chinese translation conveys all such expressions with the phrase 'ren-ren', 人人 — literally 'man and man'. This linguistic nuance is significant, since it means that the two languages convey the meaning of 'universality' in metaphysically distinct ways.
What this tells me is that the authors of the article do not understand how the inclusive plural is formed in Chinese. The reduplication of a noun in Sinitic languages is one of the most common means to form the plural: rénrén 人人 means "all people" or "everyone". To assert that it means "man and man" is to proclaim that this Chinese expression is gibberish. It is not. Insisting that rénrén 人人 means "man and man" is tantamount to insisting that English terms must be translated at the morphemic level. When morphemes join in lexical and grammatical constructions, they acquire new meanings depending on their context. The same is as true of Sinitic languages as it is of English.
Here are some additional examples of the reduplication of a noun to form the inclusive plural:
tiāntiān
天天
"every day; daily; day by day"
If we follow the Bufacchi & Ouyang style of grammatical explication, that would erroneously mean "day and day". Wrong!
For grammar sticklers:
This is about 量词 (measure words) repetition. Yes, it’s a way to form the plural. Other examples are:
个个都很聪明。("Each of them is smart".)
天天都很开心。("[I am] happy every day".)
栋栋（measure word for house) 都很漂亮. ("All the houses are beautiful") (but you can’t say 房房都很漂亮，because 房 is a noun, not a measure word)
人人都要面对 ("Everyone has to face [it]"). Here 人 is a measure word, not a noun)
Two famous lines of a poem by the Tang poet Li Shen 李绅 (772-846):
谁知盘中餐，
粒粒皆辛苦?
"Who knows that, in their rice bowl,
Each grain bespeaks bitter labor?"
[thanks to Jing Hu]
VHM: Note the use of emphatic 都 and 皆 ("all, every") in each of these lines.
Which all goes to show there's a difference between philosophy and linguistics, between philosophers and linguists. N'est-ce pas?
Selected readings
osprey_archer) wrote2025-05-21 01:16 pm
