I’ve got new socks on.

Anybody on the outside would think I live in the midst of utter chaos. Yet if they ask me where something of mine is, I can unerringly go to it.

So the only answer I can have for your question is either “无” or ☯.

Getting some decent flower pics since the spring explosion has started finally.

I just drink tea nowadays. Brewed tea at home, not bottled tea with ten tons of sugar per tenth of a serving. It took me about ten months to move from exclusively sugary carbonated drinks to tea, but now I don’t even enjoy the former anymore.

UNMARKED POLICE SURVEILLANCE VAN

I can appreciate æsthetics independently of emotion.

But I need emotion to get “turned on”.

So I’m in this weird space where I can admire the looks of people (in about the same way that most people admire scenery) without wanting to fuck same (in about the same way that most people don’t want to fuck a forest … or a couch).

But logic isn’t innate. It’s a pattern. And human brains are basically very good at patterns.

But there are many, many, many patterns in life and logic is only one of them (and it isn’t even particularly useful if you don’t have some other patterns backing it up).

It was pretty common in the Zhou Dynastic period, being the official name and all that. That’s 789 years. I think we can consider it firmly established usage from that, no?

Bough, dough, slough, slough (yes, two different pronunciations!), rough …

It’s a mess, isn’t it?

Because the name of the nation comes from the Iroquoian word “kanata” (for “village”) and mythology says that Jacques Cartier mistook that for the name of the land.

I cannot think of any language besides English in which an “f” can be written as “ph”.

French. Vietnamese (via the French influence) when transliterated. Italian (where in Greek-origin words you can see either being used). German (same as Italian, though over the years some words got formally modified from ph- to f-, but words like Philosophie is still spelled that way). Spanish and Portuguese too, though far more rarely than in Italian (where it is in turn far more rare than in French). Polish and Hungarian too, IIRC.

Uh… 中国(Zhongguo) was first used in the Western Zhou period, over 3000 years ago. Other words like 诸夏(Zhuxia), 诸华 (Zhuhua), 天下 (Tianxia), 华夏 (Huaxia), 神州 (Shenzhou), 九州 (Jiuzhou), and assorted combinations or variations of these were used off and on over the time as well. (None of which sound like “China” naturally.) 大清国 (Daqing Guo) was used the Qing before they were overthrown and the Republic, and later the People’s Republic, took the country over again.

And why “China” instead of “Zhongguo” or “Zhonghua” or any number of words, none of which sound like “China”.

I think that’s why it was “Min or Wu” there.

English is a trash fire. It’s a trash fire in pronunciation, in orthography, in grammar, in pretty much ever respect.

But my favourite thing remains ‘ough’: tough, trough, though, thought, through. All pronounced differently.

A half-American (it’s complicated) company I worked for went on a buying spree and bought a Swiss company that had some technology they wanted. When the Swiss technical and managerial leads came by the company headquarters to work on integration they were appalled at how slack our standards were compared to theirs.

How do I know this? (I mean I was just a lowly marketeer in a tech company; the most despised class.) Well, thing is, at one lunch hour I happened to join them in the elevator. I don’t look even slightly Germanic (Mom’s genes governs about 80% of my appearance) so they took it in stride and started saying some pretty mean things about my coworkers. And i just carefully listened in as we descended to the ground floor.

When the doors opened, I turned around and said in flawless Frankfurter German (with a slight hint of an English accent), “Des war echt en faszinierendes Gespräch; villeicht sollteste dat mal mit de Geschäftsführung bespreche.” (A Hessian dialect, as I said, to hammer the point home: what you’re seeing as grammatical error is my attempt to get how Frankfurters actually speak orally.) It translates roughly to “That was a fascinating conversation; perhaps you should have it with the management.”

It was cute watching large, fit, grown men suddenly look terrified at my oh-so-threatening 160cm, slim self.

I guess if we’re redefining words willy-nilly, did you know if you write long, unrequested lectures on things that makes you a lifetime scold?

People lived in the mountains and “bopped down to market” for thousands of years before. We can do it again.

50%? I’m sensing a baijiu drinker! :D

You know what is my strongest temptation to problem drinking?

Teetotallers lecturing.

Kind of like how vegetarians lecturing gives me the urge to chow down on a massive pile of raw hamburger.