The Sixth Conversation Thread

[Arayaz]

(Ani Yehudi.)

I as well. I haven't fasted before for Yom Kippur, but I am this year. It's about as hard as I expected.

[WeepingElf]

A Happy European Day of Languages to everyone!

[Arayaz]

A Happy European Day of Languages to everyone!

Oh my gosh, that's a thing?

[Salmoneus]

My brain (which clearly feels itself wasted when I'm awake) made three interesting points to me while I was dreaming last night.

Firstly, an interesting thing happened while we were fighting the English Civil War (which ended up being a cricket match, obviously). Which is that a key battle was lost because the commanding officer and his aide decided to personally scout out the terrain early before the battle, and got trapped on a difficult muddy slope when they accidentally intimidated a mother warthog and its child, and it took them hours to be able to navigate around the warthog (since any attempt to leave involved going toward the warthog, which made it think they were a threat to their young). By the time they escaped, the battle was almost over and their side, lacking strategy or leadership, had lost badly.

This has never happened in history to my knowledge but, my brain then smugly insisted to me, it totally could have. Commanding officers DID sometimes personally inspect the battlefield and surrounding area, and several animals would have the potential to keep a few humans pinned down for quite some time if they thought their young were in danger. Maybe not warthogs in European history, but boar, bears, even a herd of cows. Could totally happen!

Then, reflecting on the resulting overthrow of the monarchy and institution of the protectorate, my brain made the insightful-seeming observation that even Alexander was fearful of his generals, yet Cromwell, despite the instability around him, was effectively untouchable, and may have been one of the most absolute rulers ever.

I have no idea whether that's true or not, but I was impressed by how informed and insightful it sounded.

Then it took a wrong turn and it started going on about the word "caporette", and how it referred to a person who has personal, first-hand experience of warfare that permanently sets them apart from those who have never been in a battle themselves, and how this word originally specifically indicated a veteran of the battle of Caporetto (on the Italian front of WWI).

Now, WWI didn't happen during the English civil war, so this was a bit anachronistic. And so far as I'm aware there is not and never has been such a word, 'caporette'.

Nonetheless: where the hell did that come from!? I'm impressed my brain even knows about the battle of Caporetto, let alone is able to folk-etymologise fictional coinages from it! I'm not sure I know about Caporetto. I had to double-check that it was a real battle, when I woke up. I doubt I've seen it heard or mentioned more than maybe once in the last twenty years. Yes, I think there was half a page about it in a textbook in school, and I am vaguely aware of the existence of the Italian Front, but that's it.

Except... it turns out Caporetto DID become a byword in Italian, for a disaster or catastrophe. And it turns out the Italian commander WAS incapacitated at the time (though by illness, not by warthog). So... that's just creepy, brain!


[after that, though, the brain gave up its intellectual pretensions and had me working out which people had been infected by mind-controlling aliens, which I did by assuming they were all slices of bread and seeing which ones were stale. Normal sleeping stuff.]


[for those curious: Caporetto is also notable because the battle was in part designed by Otto Hahn himself (the father of nuclear fission). That's because it began with a massive poison gas attack. And one of the young lieutenants at the battle, a certain Ernst Rommel, won an award for his performance there, and later analysed the tactics in his influential memoirs.]

[Arayaz]

My brain (which clearly feels itself wasted when I'm awake) made three interesting points to me while I was dreaming last night.

Firstly, an interesting thing happened while we were fighting the English Civil War (which ended up being a cricket match, obviously). Which is that a key battle was lost because the commanding officer and his aide decided to personally scout out the terrain early before the battle, and got trapped on a difficult muddy slope when they accidentally intimidated a mother warthog and its child, and it took them hours to be able to navigate around the warthog (since any attempt to leave involved going toward the warthog, which made it think they were a threat to their young). By the time they escaped, the battle was almost over and their side, lacking strategy or leadership, had lost badly.

This has never happened in history to my knowledge but, my brain then smugly insisted to me, it totally could have. Commanding officers DID sometimes personally inspect the battlefield and surrounding area, and several animals would have the potential to keep a few humans pinned down for quite some time if they thought their young were in danger. Maybe not warthogs in European history, but boar, bears, even a herd of cows. Could totally happen!

Then, reflecting on the resulting overthrow of the monarchy and institution of the protectorate, my brain made the insightful-seeming observation that even Alexander was fearful of his generals, yet Cromwell, despite the instability around him, was effectively untouchable, and may have been one of the most absolute rulers ever.

I have no idea whether that's true or not, but I was impressed by how informed and insightful it sounded.

Then it took a wrong turn and it started going on about the word "caporette", and how it referred to a person who has personal, first-hand experience of warfare that permanently sets them apart from those who have never been in a battle themselves, and how this word originally specifically indicated a veteran of the battle of Caporetto (on the Italian front of WWI).

Now, WWI didn't happen during the English civil war, so this was a bit anachronistic. And so far as I'm aware there is not and never has been such a word, 'caporette'.

Nonetheless: where the hell did that come from!? I'm impressed my brain even knows about the battle of Caporetto, let alone is able to folk-etymologise fictional coinages from it! I'm not sure I know about Caporetto. I had to double-check that it was a real battle, when I woke up. I doubt I've seen it heard or mentioned more than maybe once in the last twenty years. Yes, I think there was half a page about it in a textbook in school, and I am vaguely aware of the existence of the Italian Front, but that's it.

Except... it turns out Caporetto DID become a byword in Italian, for a disaster or catastrophe. And it turns out the Italian commander WAS incapacitated at the time (though by illness, not by warthog). So... that's just creepy, brain!


[after that, though, the brain gave up its intellectual pretensions and had me working out which people had been infected by mind-controlling aliens, which I did by assuming they were all slices of bread and seeing which ones were stale. Normal sleeping stuff.]


[for those curious: Caporetto is also notable because the battle was in part designed by Otto Hahn himself (the father of nuclear fission). That's because it began with a massive poison gas attack. And one of the young lieutenants at the battle, a certain Ernst Rommel, won an award for his performance there, and later analysed the tactics in his influential memoirs.]

Often our minds know things that we do not...
We also have a thread for weird dreams!

[WeepingElf]

A Happy European Day of Languages to everyone!

Oh my gosh, that's a thing?

It is.

[Knox Adjacent]

Betty left, but at least I can get back to conlanging more.

[DesEsseintes]

Betty left, but at least I can get back to conlanging more.

Who is Betty?

[Man in Space]

Betty left, but at least I can get back to conlanging more.

Who is Betty?

The spaceship from Alien: Resurrection.

[lsd]

not sure that once the betty has left,
there's much time left for the auriga conlangers
to produce new alien languages...

[Creyeditor]

Betty left, but at least I can get back to conlanging more.

Incidentally, the same holds true for me, just with different pragmatic information, I guess.

[Egerius]

I've been obsessing over this bilingual (Latin/very Late Old English) female-audience copy of the Benedictine Rule (c. 1220s South-Western England): https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDispl ... dius_D_III

It's been recently digitised by the British Library, and I'm still waiting for Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 38 (c. 1160, South-Eastern England?) to go on-line (I want to turn it into a typeable font some day).
The style of the coloured initials and the still not completely fractured script (for comparison, MS Hatton 38: https://www.flickr.com/photos/133734300 ... 295090319/), on the other hand, the Cotton manuscript already forgoes the use of the insular <f>, which descends below the base line (except for one instance in the main text at folio 56r, the rubricator applies it more often).

Anyway, there's been talk that thylacine RNA has been found in and extracted from a Swedish specimen.
I want one, and I'd love to see whether they can be raised by a domesticated canine.

[Knox Adjacent]

It was the clingy live-in girlfriend, guuuuuys.

[Salmoneus]

If any of you are ever thinking of visiting London and wondering what museums we might have here, I just came across this helpful flowchart! (yes, it's on wikipedia, so it's not exactly an abstruse discovery, but if you don't know it exists you probably wouldn't even go looking for it).

It's not complete, unfortunately - one I spotted is that they don't mention the Anaesthesia Museum, for instance - and some of them end up just grouped into blocs when really ideally they'd be explaining the differences, but it's actually a pretty good resource for visitors, even if just to give you some ideas and things to look up. A lot of tourists don't get to a lot of these places not because they're not good or because they're on unpopular subjects but simply because they never even hear about them.

[note also as a warning that some of them - mostly some of the historic houses - aren't necessarily in places you'd automatically think of as being in London. I've been to Down House, for instance (Charles Darwin's house/museum; small, not mind-blowing, but very nice), and didn't realise it was in London at the time - it's within the political borders of London, but slightly outside the built-up area. It's with the TfL public transport area, but it's a good hour from central london.]

[and one thing that would be helpful would be if it distinguished free museums (the majority, obviously) from those where you have to pay an entrance fee.]

So certainly do further research, but it's a good start!


[EDIT: if I had to recommend one to visitors, incidentally, other than the obvious, it would be the Wallace Collection, which is criminally under-known. It's a relatively small house, but it contains a collection of classic art that's probably better than many national collections - Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Canaletto, Turner, Titian, Watteau, Velazquez, Gainsborough, Fragonard, Hals, Memling, Delacroix, Boucher, Poussin, Rosa, Reynolds, etc. That's before you get to one of the world's greatest collections of ceramics, an immense collection of (mostly 18th century) fine furniture, and one of the most important collections of historic swords and armour from around the world. All housed in a beautifully-restored Victorian nobleman's house.]

EDIT EDIT: now we just need another of these things for notable churches and other architectural sights...

[Dormouse559]

I guess it’s not surprising that a big city would have a whole herd of museums, but it’s still striking to see so many listed so systematically in one place. That section on past and future museums is a neat idea.

It's not complete, unfortunately - one I spotted is that they don't mention the Anaesthesia Museum, for instance

I guess you could say they’re … sleeping on it.

[Arayaz]

Did the font change?

[sangi39]

Did the font change?

Doesn't seem to have done. At least not on my computer

[WeepingElf]

Not on mine, either.

[Arayaz]

Then it's my computer that's the problem; it's a Chromebook and the OS just got an update. It broke the fonts on Gmail too.

[WeepingElf]

That may well be the case. I have experienced similar things with OS updates, too (not on a Chromebook, though - I use Ubuntu Linux) - this may happen when the update includes the addition of new fonts that fit the original font of the web site better, so they are from then on used to render it.