(no subject)

Alright, it looks like some of you fine players didn't get the memo I sent out, so, for your benefit as well as mine, let me repeat:

NO EXTRA INNINGS, BITCHES!

Yes, I loves me some baseball drama. I don't want the wins to seem cheap, I want to see the teams really duke it out for the title. But JesusflamingH-E-doublehockeystickChrist, fourteen fucking innings? On a school night? I've got a work week to get through here! What I wanted was a pleasant diversion while I ate my salmonburger with mesclun greens at my local gay pub and what I got was the longest goddamn game in World Series history. I've never watched a game go to five extra innings before. I've before never seen a team run through its entire bullpen before. Superdemented craziness!

I don't blame the Scoutmaster for leaving before midnight, since Wednesday is his nightmare heavy day. At 11:30, I was ready to buy my friends a round to celebrate victory. At 12:30, I was willing to buy a round for anyone still standing. At 1:30, all I wanted to do was crawl into bed. Props to the lovely Antwan, who I'd barely met once before, for sticking it out to the bitter end with me.

Best snark of the night: At Astacio's appearance. "Girl, look at your hair! 'I just got out of bed. They called me at home to pitch this game.'"

Stupidest moment: Men on first and second and Ensberg, instead of trying to get one of them out, toddling behind the grounder like a doofus waiting to see if it will roll foul. Um, it didn't.

More minor mysteries solved!

I was surprised to begin the work week with about $7 in my pocket. Didn't I just withdraw money the other day? So yesterday I tramped over to my bank to take out $200 dollars--and promptly blew a quarter of the amount on used books at a store around the corner.

Ah.

One of the titles I picked up was Cantonese: a comprehensive grammar by Matthews and Yip. I've been eyeing this for years--used copies show up frequently around here--but this particular example had the right combination of condition and price, plus it was the "corrected" edition to boot. (Even so, I think caitalainn would be appalled at some of the poor proofreading. I certainly was!)

When I lucked into a copy of Huang's Speak Cantonese several years ago, the first thing I did was leaf through it looking for phrases memorised from years of watching Hong Kong movies. Most I found relatively easily, but two eluded me. One sounded like "May see-ah?" and meant something like "What's going on?" The closest I could find was Mātyéh sih a? (lit. "What affair(s)?"), which is best characterised as a near miss. From Matthews and Yip, however, I find confirmation of something I'd long suspected: In colloquial speech, mātyéh contracts to m'yē or mī'eh. [One of the book's not-so-charming inconsistencies: It gives one variant in some places, another variant in others without explaining the alternation.]

The other expression was something like "Hye-mey?" and tends to be glossed as "Really?" in subtitles. The first part was easy: haih is the equivalent of Mandarin 是. An extension of its role as copula is it's use a particle of affirmation. (To put it roughly, the Chinese don't say "yes" or "no", they say "it is" or "it isn't". In this respect they are--believe or not--just like Welshmen.) But what was the second? I wondered if it couldn't be a worn-down version of mhaih ("is not"). After all, it's common to use haih mhaih to question the veracity of a state of affairs. "Is or isn't it the case that..."

That now looks like a false trail. One of the distinctive features of Cantonese is its bewildering wealth of sentence-final particles. Mandarin has a few, true, but they're nothing in comparison. Matthews and Yip list about a dozen basic particles which combine to yield over forty possibilities, each with its own usage and range of nuance. Among them is mē which "marks questions with negative presuppositions". That is haih mē would mean "It is?" when you thought that it wasn't. Seems a darn good match for the common use of "Really?" in English, haih mhaih?