24 Jun 2014 marnanel   » (Journeyer)

Gentle Readers, 2014-06-23: hot tea, cold coffee

Gentle Readers
a newsletter made for sharing
23rd June 2014: hot tea, cold coffee
What I’ve been up to

I've made a draft of a website for Gentle Readers. Do go and have a look, and tell me what you think.

I've been submitting my new novel to various publishers. This isn't the one about Erica I mentioned the other day; Unbound say they're not interested in it, but I'll be writing it anyway.

My friend Sath supplied an interesting idea for days as hot as today: make some coffee, let it go cold, pour it into an ice-cube tray and freeze it; then drop some cubes into a glass of milk and you have iced coffee.

And on a similar note, I pass this along: what's the difference between a teabag and England's football team? A teabag stays in the cup for four minutes.

A poem of mine

(T115)
NEW DITTY

The world is filled with frenzied folk
who say I'm incomplete
until I've played some game, or tried
their favourite thing to eat,
or read a certain book, or heard
some orchestra or band,
or spent a decade living rough
in such-and-such a land;
but most of all experiences,
the one that draws my praise
is walking round with nothing on,
on hot and sticky days.
 
I have been advised to remind you to look closely at the title.
A picture
http://thomasthurman.org/gentle/original-selfie.jpg

Immediately afterwards came the Original Selfie.

Something wonderful

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says that your thoughts are shaped by the language you use. This is a pervasive idea; I remember as a child discovering Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the idea that you can restrict people's ability to rebel by restricting their language. The hypothesis hasn't been widely believed by linguists for a long time, at least not in a way that means people's thought is necessarily restricted by the languages they speak. But there is still research going on into whether it has a more subtle influence.

So, yes, we were just talking about tea, weren't we? Yesterday I found myself at a very pleasant tea-party where I met a gentleman from Tanzania. We talked about Bantu linguistics, amongst other things, and it reminded me of a story I'd once seen in a book. Later, I found the book and scanned the page.

The book was written by an Englishman living in Swahili-speaking parts of Africa in the early twentieth century. In a chapter about the Bantu verb system he digresses to explain why he couldn't get a decent cup of tea: it turned out, he said, that because the Swahili verb "to boil" is derived from their verb "to jump", it covers all the time from when the water starts bubbling, whereas the English verb to boil covers only when it's actually becoming steam. So he would say to someone, "Could you boil me some water and make the tea?" and it would be undrinkable, until he learnt the difference in the meaning of the verbs.

http://thomasthurman.org/gentle/boiling.jpg

Something from someone else

Language note: "The blue devil" here means depression: "the blue devils" became "the blues", which we still have. "The blue bird" is the bluebird of happiness. So "that is the blue devil that once was the blue bird" means "what you once thought joy has become despair."

THE ARISTOCRAT
by G. K. Chesterton

The Devil is a gentleman, and asks you down to stay
At his little place at What'sitsname (it isn't far away).
They say the sport is splendid; there is always something new,
And fairy scenes, and fearful feats that none but he can do;
He can shoot the feathered cherubs if they fly on the estate,
Or fish for Father Neptune with the mermaids for a bait;
He scaled amid the staggering stars that precipice, the sky,
And blew his trumpet above heaven, and got by mastery
The starry crown of God Himself, and shoved it on the shelf;
But the Devil is a gentleman, and doesn't brag himself.

O blind your eyes and break your heart and hack your hand away,
And lose your love and shave your head; but do not go to stay
At the little place in What'sitsname where folks are rich and clever;
The golden and the goodly house, where things grow worse for ever;
There are things you need not know of, though you live and die in vain,
There are souls more sick of pleasure than you are sick of pain;
There is a game of April Fool that's played behind its door,
Where the fool remains for ever and the April comes no more,
Where the splendour of the daylight grows drearier than the dark,
And life droops like a vulture that once was such a lark:
And that is the Blue Devil that once was the Blue Bird;
For the Devil is a gentleman, and doesn't keep his word.

Colophon

Gentle Readers is published on Mondays and Thursdays, and I want you to share it. If you have anything to say or reply, or you want to be added or removed from the mailing list, I’m at thomas@thurman.org.uk and I’d love to hear from you. The newsletter is reader-supported; please pledge something if you can afford to, and please don't if you can't. Love and peace to you all.

This entry was originally posted at http://marnanel.dreamwidth.org/300872.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Syndicated 2014-06-24 02:33:31 from Monument

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