Soberly hungover

These West Coast games are for the birds. Thank the Lords of Baseball that tonight's triple header is forcing those Southern Californian layabouts to get to the park by three in the afternoon, 'cuz I'm not up for another late night. I confess, I'm a bad fan: I tuned out during the 8th inning. Sorry, but I know my team and they're not the Cubs; eleventh-hour comebacks are not their forte. When they failed to get on the board in the 7th I figured it was all over, and so it was.

Turn of the season

I guess I'm overdue for another semilyrical post about the onset of autumn. After all, I've been admiring the ashes with their ochre-to-violet displays all week and, just this morning, I was struck again by the beauty of a flaming red maple in the crisp morning air.

Time to get off my duff and do something about the herbs if I want to have any available through the long dark months of winter. The mint never flourished like we hoped, but there's enough there to be worth saving. Or maybe I should just brew it all away over the next couple weeks. The real success story, however, has been the verbena. I've been meaning to harvest and dry it but that requires drier weather than we've been having for some time. I think the beam over the dark corner of the back porch would do nicely--not to mention the festive touch it would add.

Looking forward to the holidays, I've only got two solid ideas so far for Christmas gifts. Still I'm feeling pretty chuffed, not least of all because a good friend (who shall remain nameless lest I besmirch her reputation as a Martha) confessed to me the other night that she doesn't have a single gift bought or made. I'm still grasping for a theme for monshu in the way that last year's was Things To Keep the Old Man Warm.

WotD: co-mother-in-law

1. die Gegenschwiegermutter
2. [n.a.]
3. la consuegra
4. la consogra
5. [n.a.]
6. [n.a.]
7. [n.a.]
8. współteściowa, współświekra
9. 안사돈 (안査頓)
10. 親家母 qīnjiāmǔ

Notes:8. Son's mother-in-law and daughter's mother-in-law, respectively. 9. May mean daughter's mother-in-law only; further investigation needed.


Credit lhn with this one. He was tickled to find that both Hindi and Hebrew shared a term for this. In case the English is unfamiliar to you (as it was to me), this entry is about how you would refer to the mother of the spouse of one of your children. I guess no one is surprised to find terms for this in the East Asian languages, whose kinship terminology is the stuff of legend, but it's interesting to see what European languages follow suit. I, for one, would not have guessed that such a term existed in German. (And lest you think it's just some academic construction, Googling turned up a Swabian dialect equivalent, Gegenschwiger.)

I'm less surprised by the Polish after having turned up a fearsome list of kinship terms during my brief study of the language. So far no joy elsewhere in northern Europe; in particular, the Celtic languages have always struck me as having a surprisingly impoverished vocabulary for this sort of thing despite retaining a predominately rural and family-based economy for so long. Even their terms for an ordinary mother-in-law (máthair chéile "mother [of a] spouse"; mam-yng-nghyfraith, an English calque) are recent and analytic.

(If you know of any other words, feel free to contribute them. The lack of a conventional English term makes it very difficult to use ordinary dictionaries to find them.)

Little barbershop of horrors! or Y Cythraul o Farbwr o Ystryd y Fflyd

There's a lot of cute things going on in this video--starting with the little bear who sings and wields a wild razor!

(If you can't understand what's being said, then it's a sign you need to work on your Welsh. Or your Russian. Or both.)