WotD: dormouse

1. der Bilch, die Schlafmaus
2. de slaapmuis
3. el lirón
4. el liró
5. le loir
6. y pathew (N), y bathor (S & W)
7. an luch chodlamáin
8. popielica
9. 동면쥐 (冬眠쥐), 겨울잠쥐
10. 睡鼠 shuìshǔ

Notes: Where no general term exists, the name given is that applied the edible dormouse (Glis glis). 7. In modern scientific Welsh, pathew has been chosen to designate Glis glis and bathor for Muscardinus avellanarius even though in popular usage these are regional variants which each cover both species. 10. The "native" Korean name is a calque of the Sinitic version, lit. "winter sleep mouse".

I had a very definite idea what I wanted to give my nephews for Christmas this year. During my last visit, I came across ECI watching a video with Spanish audio and French captioning. (Or was it the other way around?) I was impressed with his curiosity and wondered what I might do to encourage it further. I decided to get them some picture books in foreign languages. Those should be rewarding to browse even if they couldn't read them themselves, and if I could find some in Spanish or French, my sister, who has studied both of those languages, should remember enough to read them to them.

I ended up gifting them two books in French and one in German. The latter was apparently designed to expand children's vocabulary since throughout the text certain words were replaced with images and there was a key on the endpapers giving the verbal equivalents. I sat down first with ECI, then with him and IMI, and read out an English version of the German text, pausing at each picture to let them guess it. All went well until I hit the chapter concerning the Siebenschläfer ("seven sleeper") and the Gartenschläfer ("garden sleeper"); I had no idea what either of these were. At first glance, I thought they might be lemurs. They are, respectively, the edible dormouse (G. glis) and the garden dormouse (Eliomys quercinus). Neither of these species is found in North America, so the boys wouldn't have recognised them even if I had known what to call them.

4,000th post

Besides sickness and five days in a house with a 1:8 computer/person ratio, the main reason why I've let so much time elapse between entries is that I knew this big round number was coming up and I wanted to do something to mark the occasion but I couldn't decide on what. I even resorted to deleting some old aborted posts in order to put off the day of reckoning! It seems more than a bit out of touch to be celebrating past posts at a time when LiveJournal has become a quiet eddy in the turbid world of social media. (Indeed, I've just noticed that this is the fewest entries I've had in a single month since July of 2002.) But being somewhat backward-looking is simply part of my nature.

Obviously I wasn't going to comb through all 3,999 posts trying to select my favourite ones so I began looking for automated cheats. Obviously running a page hit count would be the simplest way to determine popularity but I'm not upgrading to paid status just for that. So I started Googling, but that also yielded little in the way of usable data (beyond the interesting bit of trivia that this journal is now the second hit for "muckefuck" for a US-based English-language search, just behind the Wikipedia entry and before the one in Wiktionary).

A bit more bumbling around and I came across the idea of using LJSeek. The first five hits there are various "Talk to Muckefuck Stories™", an occasional series I began in March of 2003 inspired by some of rollick's longer form posts. They strike me as good representatives of what makes LJ unique among social media channels. Humourous aperçus and brief status updates get tossed into the maelstrom of Facebook (or Twitter or Google+ for some of you, I imagine); many of my linguistic posts end up on specialised fora where they're more likely to attract responses. But when I want to have a go at pretending to be on the staff of a third-rate New Yorker manqué, this is where I keep coming back to.

Obviously, I'm not a writer and the quality of these posts is uneven at best. Although I go back and reread past posts on a regular basis (a dirty little habit I call "smelling my farts"), I never revise them beyond correcting obvious typos. But in the hopes that there is at least some pleasure to be found in strolling through the aisles of my external memory, here's a sampling of links:

• There be wampires: a Talk To Muckefuck Story™
• "Mucho pain": a Talk to Muckefuck Story™
• Homeboy: a Talk to Muckefuck Story™
• Sweet rice for sweethearts: A Talk To Muckefuck Story™
• Arkadaşlar : a Talk to Muckefuck adventure™
• Weekend report: A Talk to Muckefuck story®

Bonus entry: Numbering the days of Kim Jong Il (4 Apr 2004)