“I like this one. It matches the esque of your glasses.”
I’ve never heard “esque” (like the productive suffix used to make an adjective) used in this manner before, but I love it!
Word of the day: Generalization
My friend just used the word “genderalization” and I think it’s a really clever portmanteau of gender-based generalizations.
Aging dummy thicc
I’ve been mulling over the word “thick” or “thicc” lately. Like a lot of slang, I’m pretty sure it originated in Black English, and is generally seen as a compliment. But when I think about who it’s applied to, I think it’s generally just specific body types that are thicc (fat in an acceptable way), in the most common usage of the word.
As I’ve been getting older, most of my weight gain has been centered on my belly. Sometimes folks still ask if I’m expecting. It’s stopped hurting, but it’s always jarring.
But I think about that, about the fact that I have a thick waist/belly and no noticeable hips or butt and minimal (though finally, beautifully, extant) boobs; and I think of the phrase “unfashionably thick.”
But then I think more about that phrase. It’s the sort of thing you might see in a fantasy novel that has a female protagonist: where “unfashionably thick” is just code for “she’s conventionally attractive in our world, but not in her own.” And I think the word for my middle aged wine mom lib body is “thick, in the unfashionable way.”
But it is still mine; and I am grateful to have it.
Word cringe
I’ve had a couple young people side-eye my use of “skeet” for micro blogs posted on BlueSky.
To them I say: this feeling you have right now? I spent decades feeling that about the word “cyber.”
And now I wonder what the next unintentionally horrible word will be?
喝水了吗
Lately, I’ve felt very weird asking people how they are doing. Everything is terrible and my. County is one failed court injunction away from breadlines.
So instead of “How are you doing,” I’ve started asking people if they’ve drunk water recently, as a way of expressing that I care about them and want to make sure they’re taking care of themselves too.
And I suddenly realized that I just reinvented the Chinese greeting 吃饭了吗，”have you eaten (rice)?” (Chi fan le ma, pronounced roughly as “chur FAHN luh muh”.)
So. 喝水了吗？ Have you drunk water? (“Heuh shway luh muh”.)
Not even gonna try to translate “don’t shrimp,” though.
Polysemy and Sorry
I saw this video on Instagram and it reminded me of one of my soapboxes about words.
“I’m sorry” is a phrase that has (at least) two meanings in English. One is “I apologize for the wrongs I have done to you.” The other is “I offer my condolences for the bad thing you have suffered.”
The neat part is, both of these are valid meanings!
Anyway I’m sorry her hamster exploded. I didn’t mean for it to end up like that.
Names are hard
I was chatting with a friend about the air haze, and he mentioned wanting to build one of those homemade air filters out of box fans and filters.
But he couldn’t remember the name (Corsi-Rosenthal box), so he hazarded “Rimsky-Korsakov box?”
This reminded me so much of the Benedict Cumberbatch Problem that I had to share it.
Emilybook 