Tag: language

Writer’s Corner With Mica gets obsessive: 

  • “His austere features are striking on a ship that is brim-full of young, good-looking people.” 

“brimming with” is fine. “full to the brim with” would flow better here. “brim-full” is a) spelled “brimful”, b) archaic, and c) sounds straight-up bizarre in that context.

image

I was so sure I was right that I went and made google fucking graph it to confirm my instinctual feelings. I still, stylistically, prefer “full to the brim with” despite unpopularity, but google does bear out my suspicion that “brimming” is the most common modern usage, “brimful” sounds oddly old, and “brim-full” has barely been used at all since the 18th century. 

þ!

mirrific:

maire-annatari:

eggypeggy:

A feature of English which I think is stupid,

If we’re carrying on with this game,

Is how we abolished the thorn and replaced it,

With two letters that meant the same.

The þ was a letter, amazing, astounding,

Perfect in every respect,

Representing the ‘th’ sound and shortening words,

The one thing it didn’t expect;

One day T and H went and burgled its meaning,

And then, thanks to the printing press,

Its symbol mutated and morphed into Y,

Which is pointless, I must confess.

Þoughtlessly, the þ was forgotten,

Þreatened as the language evolved,

Þankful for þose who knew of old English,

A topic where it was involved.

It only survived in Modern Icelandic,

In English it’s treated with scorn,

And as barely anyone knows it exists,

Please try to remember the thorn.

ð!

Saving the thorn from obscurity
Is surely a laudable aim
But if this letter deserves our praise
The eth should receive the same.

The scribes of the Anglo-Saxons
interchanged the eth and thorn
until the first one fell from use
and the second was left forlorn,

But for the modern Icelander
their roles are more defined
and could improve our English texts
if we were so inclined.

The thorn (Þ, þ) denotes a voiceless dental fricative
as in the English ‘think’ or ‘thresh’ but not the ‘th’ in ‘hither,’
whereas the eth (Ð, ð) is a voiced dental fricative
perfect for ‘this’ and ‘that’ and most especially for ‘thither.’

So I propose ðey boþ be used 
in the Icelandic manner;
ðen students won’t be loaþ to learn
our spelling and our grammar.

To þink we’ve never fixed ðis mess
is really quite astounding.
One letter cluster for two sounds?
Ðat’s damnably confounding!

Þank you for ðis informative post!

tonight’s writing tip: using “deign”

what NOT to do (courtesy of an otherwise decent fanfic):
“He must have come home, but I had yet to be deigned with his presence.”

a person (subject) deigns (condescends), but a person (object) cannot BE deigned, and deign takes the preposition “to” (never “with”)

our example, when corrected, becomes the much more graceful:
“He must have come home, but as yet had not deigned to grace me with his presence.”

conjuringseed:

jewcats:

chromalogue:

runtime-err0r:

itsvondell:

you can take one man’s trash to another man’s treasure but you can’t make it drink

Fun fact: the blending of idioms or cliches is called a malaphor.

My personal favorite is “We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.”

I’m rather fond of “It’s not rocket surgery” and “not the sharpest egg in the attic,” but my all-time favourite is, “…until the cows freeze over.”

i didnt know there was a word for this! my great grandpa always said “he who hesitates is worth two in a bush”

@weirdmonger holy shit there’s a word for the thing!!!!!!! i LOVE this thing!!!! personal fav has always been “don’t judge a book until you’ve walked two miles in another man’s bush”