The Friday Five for 24 October 2025

Oct. 23rd, 2025 03:23 pm
anais_pf: (bunny gif)
[personal profile] anais_pf posting in [community profile] thefridayfive
These questions were originally suggested by [livejournal.com profile] akarii.

1. What do you see when you are looking out of the window closest to you?

2. Who was the last person coming into your room?

3. What is the most predominant colour around you?

4. What is right behind you?

5. What is on today's calendar sheet?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

Writing Sprints October 24-26

Oct. 23rd, 2025 11:31 am
treefrogie84: (wwm)
[personal profile] treefrogie84 posting in [community profile] weekendwritingmarathon


what’s a 1k1h?|| time zone converter || 1k1h Calendar

All sprints are run on Discord only. You can find our Discord server here.

Friday ( time zone converter)

5am PT/ 8am ET/ 12pm UTC Mrsimoshen 

8am PT/ 11am ET/ 4pm UTC Max

11am PT/ 2pm ET/ 6pm UTC        LittleMissTPK

1pm PT/ 4pm ET/ 8pm UTC LittleMissTPK

5pm PT/ 8pm ET/ 12am UTC Treefrogie84

7pm PT/ 10pm ET/ 2am Sat UTC Alec


Saturday ( time zone converter)

24 Hours of Sprints starting at Midnight Eastern!

Sunday ( time zone converter) **EU TIME CHANGE!** Please double check your time conversions!

5am PT/ 8am ET/ 12pm UTC PreciousAnon

7am PT/ 10am ET/ 2pm UTC Treefrogie84

9am PT/ 12pm ET/ 4pm UTC Treefrogie84

12pm PT/ 3pm ET/ 7pm UTC PreciousAnon 

5pm PT/ 8pm ET/ 12am Mon UTC Treefrogie84

7pm PT/ 10pm ET/ 2am Mon UTC Joe


Reality TV, a Mystery, & More

Oct. 23rd, 2025 03:30 pm
[syndicated profile] smartbitches_feed

Posted by Amanda

The Fake Mate

The Fake Mate by Lana Ferguson is $1.99! Lara reviewed this one and gave it a C:

If this book had maintained its giddy pace all the way through, it would have absolutely delighted me. As it is, it’s a distinctly meh situation that I’m left with. Would I recommend it? Probably not. The first just-over-half is really fun reading, but it falls apart so dramatically after that, I ended up very disappointed.

Two wolf shifters agree to be fake mates but unexpectedly find something real in this steamy paranormal romantic comedy by Lana Ferguson.

Mackenzie Carter has had some very bad dates lately. Model train experts, mansplainers, guys weirdly obsessed with her tail—she hasn’t had a successful date in months. Only a year out of residency, her grandmother’s obsession with Mackenzie finding the perfect mate to settle down with threatens to drive Mackenzie barking mad. Out of options, it feels like a small thing to tell her grandmother that she’s met someone. That is, until she blurts out the name of the first man she sees and the last man she would ever date: Noah Taylor, the big bad wolf of Denver General.

Noah Taylor, interventional cardiologist and all around grump, has spent his entire life hiding what he is. With outdated stigmas surrounding unmated alphas that have people wondering if they still howl at the moon, Noah has been careful to keep his designation under wraps. It’s worked for years, until an anonymous tip has everything coming to light. Noah is left with two options: come clean to the board and risk his career—or find himself a mate. The chatty, overly friendly ER doctor asking him to be her fake boyfriend on the same day he’s called to meet the board has to be kismet, right?

Mackenzie will keep her grandmother off her back, and Noah will get a chance to prove he can continue to work without a real mate—a mutually beneficial business transaction, they both rationalize. But when the fake-mate act turns into a very real friends-with-benefits arrangement, lines start to blur, and they quickly realize love is a whole different kind of animal.

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

The Prince of Broadway

The Prince of Broadway by Joanna Shupe is $1.99! I stalled on finishing this one, but these were my thoughts: great chemistry and I love the hero is pretty upfront about wanting revenge on the heroine’s dad. He tells her so. However, it takes place simultaneously with the events of The Rogue of Fifth Avenue, so the dad in question is still terrible to his daughters.

In the second novel in Joanna Shupe’s the Uptown Girl series, a ruthless casino owner bent on revenge finds his plans upended by a beautiful women who proves to be more determined than he is—and too irresistible to deny.

Powerful casino owner.
Ruthless mastermind.
Destroyer of men.

He lives in the shadows…

As the owner of the city’s most exclusive casino, Clayton Madden holds the fortunes of prominent families in the palms of his hands every night. There is one particular family he burns to ruin, however, one that has escaped his grasp… until now.

She is society’s darling…

Florence Greene is no one’s fool. She knows Clayton Madden is using her to ruin her prestigious family… and she’s using him right back. She plans to learn all she can from the mysterious casino owner—then open a casino of her own just for women.

With revenge on his mind, Clay agrees to mentor Florence. However, she soon proves more adept—and more alluring—than Clay bargained for. When his plans are threatened, Clay must decide if he is willing to gamble his empire on love.

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

The Charm Offensive

The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun is $1.99! I mentioned this on a previous Get Rec’d! It’s a m/m romance set in a reality dating show. One main character is a producer and the other is the Bachelor-esque contestant.

In this witty and heartwarming romantic comedy—reminiscent of Red, White & Royal Blue and One to Watch—an awkward tech wunderkind on a reality dating show goes off-script when sparks fly with his producer.

Dev Deshpande has always believed in fairy tales. So it’s no wonder then that he’s spent his career crafting them on the long-running reality dating show Ever After. As the most successful producer in the franchise’s history, Dev always scripts the perfect love story for his contestants, even as his own love life crashes and burns. But then the show casts disgraced tech wunderkind Charlie Winshaw as its star.

Charlie is far from the romantic Prince Charming Ever After expects. He doesn’t believe in true love, and only agreed to the show as a last-ditch effort to rehabilitate his image. In front of the cameras, he’s a stiff, anxious mess with no idea how to date twenty women on national television. Behind the scenes, he’s cold, awkward, and emotionally closed-off.

As Dev fights to get Charlie to open up to the contestants on a whirlwind, worldwide tour, they begin to open up to each other, and Charlie realizes he has better chemistry with Dev than with any of his female co-stars. But even reality TV has a script, and in order to find to happily ever after, they’ll have to reconsider whose love story gets told.

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

Detective Aunty

Detective Aunty by Uzma Jalaluddin is $5.99! If your library hold is still waiting to come in since this was released in the spring, this is around half off right now.

When her grown daughter is suspected of murder, a charming and tenacious widow digs into the case to unmask the real killer in this twisty, page-turning whodunnit—the first book in a cozy new detective series from the acclaimed author of Ayesha at Last.

After her husband’s unexpected death eighteen months ago, Kausar Khan never thought she’d receive another phone call as heartbreaking—until her thirty-something daughter, Sana, phones to say that she’s been arrested for killing the unpopular landlord of her clothing boutique. Determined to help her child, Kausar heads to Toronto for the first time in nearly twenty years.

Returning to the Golden Crescent suburb where she raised her children and where her daughter still lives, Kausar finds that the thriving neighborhood she remembered has changed. The murder of Sana’s landlord is only the latest in a wave of local crimes which have gone unsolved.

And the facts of the case are Sana found the man dead in her shop at a suspiciously early hour, with a dagger from her windowfront display plunged in his chest. And Kausar—a woman with a keen sense of observation and deep wisdom honed by her years—senses there’s more to the story than her daughter is telling.

With the help of some old friends and her plucky teenage granddaughter, Kausar digs into the investigation to uncover the truth. Because who better to pry answers from unwilling suspects than a meddlesome aunty? But even Kausar can’t predict the secrets, lies, and betrayals she finds along the way…

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

[syndicated profile] languagelog_feed

Posted by Victor Mair

"Hear What the Language Spoken by Our Ancestors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sounded Like" | Open Culture (10/14/25)

With two audio recordings.  If you want to hear them, click on the link embedded on the title.

…since oral cultures far predate written ones, the search for linguistic ancestors can take us back to the very origins of human culture, to times unremembered and unrecorded by anyone, and only dimly glimpsed through scant archaeological evidence and observable aural similarities between vastly different languages. So it was with the theoretical development of Indo-European as a language family, a slow process that took several centuries to coalesce into the modern linguistic tree we now know.

The observation that Sanskrit and ancient European languages like Greek and Latin have significant similarities was first recorded by a Jesuit missionary to Goa, Thomas Stephens, in the sixteenth century, but little was made of it until around 100 years later. A great leap forward came in the mid-nineteenth century when German linguist August Schleicher, under the influence of Hegel, published his Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages. There, Schleicher made an extensive attempt at reconstructing the common ancestor of all Indo-European languages, “Proto-Indo-European,” or PIE, for short, thought to have originated somewhere in Eastern Europe, though this supposition is speculative.

To provide an example of what the language might have been like, Schleicher made up a fable called “The Sheep and the Horses” as a “sonic experiment.” The story has been used ever since, “periodically updated,” writes Eric Powell at Archaeology, “to reflect the most current understanding of how this extinct language would have sounded when it was spoken some 6,000 years ago.” Having no access to any texts written in Proto-Indo-European (which may or may not have existed) nor, of course, to any speakers of the language, linguists disagree a good deal on what it should sound like; “no single version can be considered definitive.”

And yet, since Schleicher’s time, the theory has been considerably refined. At the top of the post, you can hear one such refinement based on work by UCLA professor H. Craig Melchert and read by linguist Andrew Byrd. See a translation of Schleicher’s story, “The Sheep and the Horses” below:

    A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: “My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses.” The horses said: “Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool.” Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.

Byrd also reads another story in hypothetical Proto-Indo-European, “The King and the God,” using “pronunciation informed by the latest insights into PIE.”

See Powell’s article at Archaeology for the written transcriptions of both Schleicher’s and Melchert/Byrd’s versions of PIE, and see his article here to learn about the archeological evidence for the Bronze Age speakers of this theoretical linguistic common ancestor.  

For more on Schleicher's Sheep, see also J. P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair, The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West (London:  Thames & Hudson, 2000), pp. 222-223:  Schleicher's original version of 1868, Adams' new version of 1997 (with laryngeals), and our translation.

 

 

Selected readings

[h.t. Ted McClure]

Episode 2691: The Fistfight Show

Oct. 23rd, 2025 09:11 am
[syndicated profile] darths_and_droids_feed

Episode 2691: The Fistfight Show

For some players, even overwhelming odds looks like a cool challenge. There are two ways out of this.

Have other players talk sense into them. Or let them try and find out.

The second is more fun, but the first is more conducive to an ongoing adventure.

aurilee writes:

Commentary by memnarch (who has not seen the movie)

Oh, huh. I guess I didn't think that getting hit like that would slow the group down enough for them to get caught. Sure, Chewie or Finn would have needed to pick Poe up from prone, but that wouldn't have stopped the other from continuing to shoot troopers showing up. 30+ troopers would be a little difficult to win against though, so..... I guess this would be the same result in the end.

Poor Chewie. Briefly relieved from his prison, only to be caught a minute later and then told he's part of a comedy program again. At least Rey is still running around and can break them out again later? If that Force Distraction isn't too enticing I suppose.

Transcript

Soulgazer by Mary Rapier

Oct. 23rd, 2025 06:00 am
[syndicated profile] smartbitches_feed

Posted by Guest Reviewer

D+

Soulgazer

by Maggie Rapier
July 8, 2025 · Ace
Fantasy/Fairy Tale RomanceRomance

This guest review comes from Lisa! A longtime romance aficionado and frequent commenter to SBTB, Lisa is a queer Latine critic with a sharp tongue and lots of opinions. She frequently reviews at All About Romance and Women Write About Comics, where she’s on staff, and you can catch her at @‌thatbouviergirl on Twitter. There, she shares good reviews, bracing industry opinions and thoughtful commentary when she’s not on her grind looking for the next good freelance job.


Florid, breathless, filled with stomach-churning effluvia and old skool as all get-out, but also self-aware enough to know what it’s done and where it’s going, Soulgazer is an extremely dramatic peek at the life of an utterly helpless waif cursed with Too Much Power, the witty pirate who is magnetically drawn to her, and the love that binds them together in spite of it all. It’s campy, but not campy enough to really make it a legendary hoot — a D+ read that mostly kept me entertained due to its ripeness.

Ever since she was a literal infant, Saoirse has been cursed with an extremely powerful, volatile and unpredictable magic that has resulted in her father imprisoning her in an isolated cabin with no human contact after she accidentally kills her brother. This was because of her touching a soulstone after being kidnapped by her grandmother, who thought Saoirse’s death would bring an end to her own curse. Most people who touch soulstones — which are formed when a person dies – go mad or die themselves. She violently suppresses the magic as hard as she can with the help of an amulet, but its protections aren’t perfect. The only way out of her isolation is marriage to the Stone King, who is notoriously rough and mean. This will provide a political alliance for her father, the king of their island, and thus make her useful to him and get him some heirs. If that means having the amulet’s runestone symbol tattooed on her back so her husband will never know she’s got such gifts, so be it.

She is too much of a marshmallow for marriage to such a guy, naturally. Fortunately for Saoirse, she’s heard legendary tales of the roguish pirate Wolf of the Wild since she was young – it is later established that they are only two years apart in age so I guess I can buy a teenager thinking a teenage pirate is cool?

Faolan, said Wolf of the Wild, is luckily in-port when she manages her daring escape. Saoirse seeks him out on the eve of her wedding, thinking he might give her passage to the Isle of Lost Souls, which is the only place in the world strong enough to absorb her magic, as it was created by the now-dead gods her people once worshipped. They instead strike a bargain. They enter into a handfasting of convenience and she promises to guide him to the invisible lost Isle of Lost Souls using her powers. Her father and former fiance are not happy. Let the chase begin.

Warning: you are entering nigh-on cartoonish territory with this one, and I admit I couldn’t stop giggling in the wrong places. The magical system kept me reading, as did the charming if stereotypical and egotistical Faolan, so I’m keeping this at a solid D+.

Poor Saoirse is the most put-upon heroine I’ve read about in centuries. Her magic is mighty but the suppression of it is painful. So is the tattoo her parents place upon her skin to force her into keeping her magic in tight. Until she meets Faolan, a lot of this reads like misery porn. She does have a core of strength and dignity, but watching her flail around and throw up and be victimized and hurt can be painful to see in a not-fun way, and it goes on for pages and pages. She desperately resists her magic, believing that she’s to blame for trauma and death, but even when it shows its positive side, she thinks her father’s lies about her powers are right instead of taking in what she sees before her. By the end of the book she finally starts to unleash herself, and that is a blessing to the narrative, which can finally stop focusing on her suffering.

Faolan, meanwhile, is your classic roguish pirate. Killian Jones from Once Upon a Time and Jack Sparrow are his clear role models. His shivers timber. But he’s fun and a sensual enough presence. He and Saiorsie bring out the best in one another even though he and his crew are pretty mean toward her at first and even though Saoirse has to keep reminding herself that oh no, this isn’t a real marriage! But he does get her to at least show some spirit and spunk and call him out on things, so that’s a relief.

The villains here – Saiorsie’s dad and the Stone King – are noncomplex: the personalities are broad, and the adventure kind of predictable. The language used here on occasion made me giggle. Every time a character exclaimed feck all I could think of was Father Ted – definitely not a comparison I wanted to think of for multiple reasons, especially during the love scenes.

It’s flawed, and it’s sometimes accidentally funny, but I have to admit I was never bored while reading Soulgazer. I’d definitely take the sequel out of the library instead of buying it, however – unless I were offered buried pirate’s treasure.

sunnymodffa: Cartoon of 2 seals swimming in a desert oasis (Seals in a sunny oasis)
[personal profile] sunnymodffa posting in [community profile] fail_fandomanon
 
Obviously, the character's personal Suez Canal was wide, wide open... and then the Ever Given attacked.

The Ever Given touched a set of coordinates inside Suez that had never been touched before.
“Oh” Suez said, clenching down and trapping Ever inside him. ”Oh!”


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November Project - the Top 30

Oct. 22nd, 2025 08:40 pm
senmut: Plo Koon and Kit Fisto side by side (Star Wars: Plo and Kit)
[personal profile] senmut
So I went and grabbed my 'most written' fandoms, and have a list of 30. I plan to write at least a drabble for each of these thirty fandoms.

I will take requests on a first come, first serve basis for prompts to these fandoms. (Extra prompts might get used later.)

The List

*DCU
1. Comics
2. TimmVerse
3. Birds Of Prey (TV, Movie)
4. ReeveVerse Superman
5. Keaton et al Batman
*Star Wars
6. OT & Related
7. PT
8. TCW & Rebels
9. Legends
10. Forgotten Realms
*Transformers
11. G1 (Original comics and cartoons)
12. Bay Movies & Bumblebee
13. Shattered Glass-esque
*Anne McCaffrey
14. Pern
15. Talent
16. Freedom
17. Crystal
*Star Trek
18. TOS
19. TNG
20. Novels
21. DS9
22. Marvel (spotty across franchises)
23. Fast & Furious
24. Forever Knight (TV 1992)
25. Stargate SG-1
26. Highlander: The Series
27. Doctor Who (spotty across franchises)
28. Elfquest
29. Labyrinth (1986)
30. MASH (TV)



Leave a comment with the fandom, character(s), and simple prompts if you want to claim one.
[syndicated profile] mangabookshelf_feed

Posted by Sean Gaffney

By Hiromu and raemz. Released in Japan as “Chitose-kun wa Ramune Bin no Naka” by Gagaga Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Evie Lund.

Throwing up the spoiler warning here: I discuss the big revelations in this book, but not till the third paragraph.

I was expecting something else, to be honest. After the trauma of the last few books, the sturm und drang and Yua playing Baker Street over a sobbing Chitose, that we would sort of go back to everyone smiling, going back to their normal high school lives, and have a nice, relaxing 7th book. And, to be fair, so was the author. There is an extra-long afterword describing their thought process while writing this book, and you can see how the first, oh, third of the book is written by a very different person from the one who wrote the last two-thirds. Because the author is correct, that is what the characters want. It’s what the readers want. We do not want more angst. We want to relax. Unfortunately, for the sake of the story, the author cannot give that to us. And so… see the girl on the cover>? She’s a first-year. She’s spunky, cute, and loves the whole cast. And she’s also a bomb.

After the events over the summer, Chitose is hoping that everything will go back to normal. And, aside from Yuuko having the traditional “moving on” haircut, they do. Which means it’s time to plan for the culture festival, which is two months away and seems to involve both a sports day AND a culture day. Naturally, Chitose and company are very involved, especially since, in his first year, he was not in the right headspace to handle a festival. Now he and the rest of the group want to be on the cheer squad. They’re joined by Asuka, who is happy to do something with them before she has to graduate. They are also joined by Kureha, a first-year who has heard all the stories about the very famous Chitose and his very famous friends, and is star-struck. She rapidly becomes part of their group. A bit too rapidly. The reader gradually feels that things are about to go very, very wrong.

As our little bomb sent everyone into a coma over the course of the last third of the book, I noticed that Yuuko was pretty much absent. She’s not like all the others, after all. She actually confessed and was rejected. So Kureha can’t really do much about her. It’s worth noting that Kureha is being written as a horrible villain after the reveal, and the reader sees her as one long before that, but to all the other girls, she’s not. Particularly Yuzuki, who is on the cover of the next two books in this series, and I strongly suspect is going to step past Yuuko to steal the main girl spotlight. But the way that Kureha demolishes Haru, Asuka and Yua with “innocent” ease shows off that much as we’d like all the girls to be equal in their chances to win Chitose, that’s not how love works. You have to commit. You have to be ready to hurt others to get what you want. Yuuko understood that, and the hurt was devastating to her. Kureha is able to hurt far more easily, but so far only Yuzuki, who has always been the most aloof of the group, is ready to take things to the next level.

As the anime seems to be polarizing people, the novels are hitting another high point. Just… be ready for things to not be safe and fun.

Daily Check-in

Oct. 22nd, 2025 06:13 pm
starwatcher: Western windmill, clouds in background, trees around base. (Default)
[personal profile] starwatcher posting in [community profile] fandom_checkin
 
This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Wednesday, October22, to midnight on Thursday, October 23. (8pm Eastern Time).

Poll #33754 Daily Check-in
Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 23

How are you doing?

I am OK.
12 (52.2%)

I am not OK, but don't need help right now.
11 (47.8%)

I could use some help.
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans live with you?

I am living single.
8 (34.8%)

One other person.
9 (39.1%)

More than one other person.
6 (26.1%)




Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.
 

ST:TOS Drabble

Oct. 22nd, 2025 07:01 pm
senmut: A painted picture of Bones McCoy (Star Trek: Bones McCoy)
[personal profile] senmut
Musical Duel or read at Ad Astra (100 words) by Merfilly
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Trek: The Original Series
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Spock (Star Trek), Nyota Uhura
Additional Tags: Drabble
Summary:

Just a friendly improv session






Uhura smiled mischievously, and Spock let an eyebrow rise at the look. She shifted the tempo of the song she was playing on the dulcimer, and he adjusted his own on the Vulcan harp. The crew that were enjoying the musical duel-duet smiled approvingly.

The idea of it had settled into Spock's mind as a game. He played a few more measures, then changed the harmony, making Uhura adjust to him.

Back and forth they went, with encouragement from the crew, while Spock found himself rising to the challenge and Uhura enjoying it.

They were both winners in the end.

The gender of a key

Oct. 22nd, 2025 06:24 pm
[syndicated profile] languagelog_feed

Posted by Victor Mair

Julesy's knowledge of linguistics is not restricted to East Asia:

This video is titled "You are the Language you Speak: Evidence for Linguistic Relativity" (9/30/24).  Julesy comments:  "In this video, I provide evidence to show that there is a link between the grammatical gender of inanimate objects and the visual connection we make with those objects in real life.*

*The study has been replicated, but results show varied effects of linguistic relativity. 

On her Instagram channel, Julesy states:  

According to MIT researchers*, it all depends on your native language. In German, key is a masculine noun, so German speakers think of key as “useful” and “jagged.” In Spanish, key is a feminine noun, so Spanish speakers think of key as “delicate” and “pretty.”

What do you think? Is this some crazy discovery or complete BS?

*Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L., & Phillips, W. (2002). Can quirks of a language affect the way you think? Spanish and German speakers’ ideas about the genders of objects. Manuscript submitted for publication.

 

Selected readings

Sacré bleu!

Oct. 22nd, 2025 01:56 am
[syndicated profile] languagelog_feed

Posted by Victor Mair

I could write an entire post about this euphemistic French oath (lit., "sacred blue"), but I leave it to LL readers to figure out how it fits in to what follows.  Nowadays it is used more in English than in French.  (Wiktionary; Wikipedia)

Italian blasphemy and German ingenuity: how swear words differ around the world
Once dismissed as a sign of low intelligence, researchers now argue the ‘power’ of taboo words has been overlooked 
Ashifa Kassam, The Guardian (10/19/25)

The number and nature of swear words in different cultures reveals a lot about the predispositions of the people who speak the languages of those societies.

When researchers asked people around the world to list every taboo word they could think of, the differences that emerged were revealing. The length of each list, for example, varied widely.

While native English speakers in the UK and Spanish speakers in Spain rattled off an average of 16 words, Germans more than tripled this with an average of 53 words ranging from intelligenzallergiker, a person allergic to intelligence, to hodenkobold, or “testicle goblin”, someone who is being annoying.

The results, researchers say, hint at how the overlooked field of social faux pas – whether it be swearing, insults or other off-limit language – can help us better understand the values, boundaries and shifting norms that shape different cultures.

“These words can be more offensive, or less, they can be loaded with negativity or with irony,” said Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, a cognitive scientist and professor at Madrid’s Nebrija University. “But taken together, they offer small snapshots of the realities of each culture.”

One thing that needs to be considered in a study of slang in various cultures is that individual members of these cultures may have widely varying standards of what is beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior for his/her society.  For example, I have a colleague who is fond of hurling the f-bomb, even in faculty meetings, though no one else would dream of doing so.

When it came to the differences between Spanish and German speakers, Andoni Duñabeitia had two theories. German, with its seemingly endless capacity to build new compound words, could simply offer more options, he said. “But it could also be that some people [speaking other languages] just don’t have these words readily available, or it’s harder for them when asked to produce them in a very neutral environment,” he said.

The striking disparity of scatalogical vocabulary usage in various languages contrasts with words that seek to disparage women.  For instance, "bitch", turned up across cultures.  

“I think it comes down to the terribly sexist traditions of many countries,” said Andoni Duñabeitia, who was among the four dozen researchers involved with the 2024 study. “The vocabulary reflects the reality of societies where women have been mistreated, removed from everyday tasks and relegated to the background.”

Sexual terms also came up repeatedly, hinting at a near-universal discomfort with topics perceived to be private or indecent.

[h.t. François Lang]

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Posted by Victor Mair

Do you remember Charlotte, who was selling authentic French style crepes in a Taichung night market five years ago?  Judging from this recent video she appears to have done quite well; from a night stand she has now opened a full-fledged crepe restaurant and established a flower-cum-tea bag business for export to France on the side.

This link is to a news article on how foreigners are thriving in Taiwan. The first segment, which is slightly less than 12 min long, is about Charlotte.  All in Taiwan Mandarin.

 

Selected readings

[Thanks to Chau Wu]

What good are kanji?

Oct. 21st, 2025 11:48 am
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Posted by Victor Mair

Why Do Japanese Still Use Kanji? Complicated Writing System…

That Japanese Man Yuta was featured in "'Think' in Japanese" (10/13/25) a few days ago, where he raised some serious questions about kanji usage.  One that neither he nor we answered / confronted satisfactorily / adequately is that different "spellings" of homophones (e.g., おもう 思う / 想う) are written with different logographs / morphosyllabographs, not just different letters / phonetic symbols, so by nature they do not merely convey sound, but also, to one degree or another, convey meaning.

In this longer (12:19) video, near the beginning, Yuta emphasizes that katakana and hiragana are purely phonetic syllabaries with which you can write any Japanese word.  He writes some sentences in katakana and hiragana and says — already at 1:52 — that it is hard to read them because they don't have any spaces between words.

Well, instantly at that moment, I thought to myself, "Why not insert the spaces?  Then you wouldn't have to put up with the clumsy, difficult kanji."  (Think what has happened to hangul in recent years. also Vietnamese ["Not using space is uncommon even in instant messaging."])  Instead, Yuta stresses the efficacy of kanji in breaking up the flow of kana only text.

During the remainder of the video, Yuta continues with a fair appraisal of kanji, and points out more of its defects and deficiencies.  He mentions an American Marine Corps Major named John Campbell Pelzel ジョン・キャンベル・ペルゼル (1914-1999) in Japan during the Allied occupation of Japan.  Apparently Pelzel was one of the officers in charge of the kanji eradication campaign 漢字廃止論, but failed.  For more on the Allied effort to abolish kanji, see William C. Hannas, Asia's Orthographic Dilemma, pages 43-47, focusing especially on the work of Major Robert K. Hall.

James Unger:

I came across Pelzel's name while working on Literacy.  As I recall, there was something by Shibata Takeshi in which he recounted the episode mentioned in the Japanese Wikipedia article for August 1948.  I recall Shibata also mentioning that Pelzel wrote excellent Japanese but only in romanized form.
 
When I wrote Literacy, I didn't check out Pelzel further.  It seems he was really a China specialist and was appointed director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute in 1964.

Here's one of the earliest SPPs:

J. Marshall Unger, "Computers and Japanese Literacy: Nihonzin no Yomikaki Nôryoku to Konpyûta", Sino-Platonic Papers, 6 (January, 1988), 13 pp.

The Japanese romanization matches the English quite nicely.

Yuta even points out that early video games in Japan, which was a pioneer in this field, due to technical limitations, did have kana-only texts, with spaces, and it worked just fine.

In the end, though he recognizes that kanji have many drawbacks, Yuta admits that Japanese are loathe to abandon them because of their ATTACHMENT to these historical-cultural emblems of Japaneseness.  It's like an old couple who may have fought a lot with each other during their long marriage, but they've been through much together, so they'll continue to stick it out.  After all, they LOVE each other.

BTW, don't become too attached to the English subtitles of this video, because many of them are misleading or wrong.  They must have been done by speech recognition and translation technology.  For example, the subtitles often say "country" in English when Yuta says "kanji".

—————–

After I finished writing this post and was searching for "Selected readings", I realized that I had already partially covered it in this earlier post nearly a decade ago:  

"Character amnesia and kanji attachment" (2/24/16)

I've added much more here, and now we also have Julesy's take on the same question from a Chinese point of view.

 

Selected readings

Haun Saussy, "The Prestige of Writing:  文, Letter, Picture, Image, Ideography", Sino-Platonic Papers, 75 (February, 1997), 1-40.  If you've not yet had the pleasure and privilege of reading this pathbreaking, learned article, do it now while its before your fortunate eyes.

Spontaneities

Oct. 20th, 2025 12:30 pm
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Posted by Mark Liberman

Over the years, I've posted several times about the problematic word (and concept) disfluency — there's a too-long list at the end of "Spontaneous (dis)fluency" (8/27/2025). Among other ideas, I've suggested using the term interpolations (see this 2019 post for example). But as far as I can tell, this suggestion has had no impact on other people's usage.

So here's another try: How about making a list of the ways in which fluent spontaneous speech is not like fluent reading, and calling them all spontaneities?

Normal spontaneous speech is full of

  • Filled pauses (uh, um)
  • Filler words (you know, I mean, so, like… )
  • Silent pauses (and pseudo-pauses)
    not in a reading-style relation to message structure
  • Rapid initial repetitions (in- in- in the- the, …)
  • False starts (“that was my= uh the last time”…)
  • Non-speech vocalizations (laughs, sighs, grunts, … )

To enhance readability, transcriptions generally omit most or all of such things. And to study spontaneities, we need easy-to-use notations that can be easily counted. In my own practice, I use

  • __ for silent pauses in talking-typical places
    (e.g. between an article and the following adjective or noun)
    optionally with duration in milliseconds, e.g. _856_
  • final – for rapid initial repetition
  • final = for false starts
  • {laugh}, {sigh}, etc. for non-speech vocalizations,
    or {NSV} if there isn't a standard term

(It would be better to use a structure-oriented rather than string-oriented notation, but that would be much harder to use in typed transcripts…)

When normal spontaneous speech is accurately transcribed, 10-30% of all tokens typically represent such events. You can check the transcriptions in posts like this one or this one, among many others — though in those examples I've omitted the _N_ notations, e.g.

had lot of influence on how I think about- _534_
about history

My belief is that spontaneities are best seen as part of prosody, along with with timing and phrasing, emphasis, voice quality, intonation – all the stuff that is left out of written text, but is a normal and inevitable part of spontaneous speech.

Of course, there are genuine memory failures, like forgetting what you were going to say, or blanking on a word; and genuine “slips of the tongue”, like exchanges, substitutions, anticipations, perseverations of words, syllables, segments, features; and genuine problems at the level of articulation and sound. But I'll argue that most spontaneities are not like that, or at least not entirely like that. And even genuine blanks and slips should not be seen as a deviation from perfect elocution, but as part of the normal process of talking. Furthermore, our perception of spontaneity-full talking is the normal mode of speech perception.

In fact, if one of your friends started talking at you as if they were reading, your reaction would be "Who are you and what have you done with my friend?"

One reason that it's hard to evaluate these claims is that most (or at least too many) linguists and psychologists study only reading, not talking. In particular, almost 100% of empirical studies on speech production and perception use read speech.

Someday, that ought to change.

 

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Posted by Amanda

Workspace with computer, journal, books, coffee, and glasses.Welcome back to Links!

We’re about a month out from Thanksgiving and I’m slowly working on my share of the menu. For the past couple years, we’ve done an “all sides” Thanksgiving, because I don’t want to bother with a turkey. It’s just two of us and even a breast would probably be too much. I also think sides are the best part of the holiday anyway.

My partner is usually in charge of the carbs: mac and cheese and mashed potatoes. I usually do another veggie, dessert, and some other side that doesn’t require cooking.

Right now, I’ve got balsamic glazed Brussel sprouts, an autumn salad with fennel (love fennel!), and this apple cider donut cake from Smitten Kitchen (adjusted to be GF!).

Elizabeth let us know about this Kickstarter for a dark romance bookstore in Connecticut:

This seemed like something the SBTB community might be interested in. Ash is a wonderful human who has been doing pop up book sales of dark romance across New England (mostly Connecticut). They are now looking to open a brick and mortar store in Middletown CT, not far from Wesleyan University. It would definitely add some diversity and interest to the town – as well as bring some joy and stability to Ash’s life.

Humble Bundle has a deal on “momcore” games, which are cozy games designed to for short bursts of playtime. $10 for 12 games is a great deal.

Illumicrate is producing special editions of Murderbot. The sale goes live on November 20th. If you’re already a subscriber, presale starts a couple days before.

Previously I posted about the Hallmark birding romance movie. Well, birders are definitely displeased with all of the details they got wrong.

Don’t forget to share what cool or interesting things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!

Recent Reading: Private Rites

Oct. 22nd, 2025 09:30 am
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[personal profile] rocky41_7 posting in [community profile] books
Last night I wrapped up another Julia Armfield novel, Private Rites. This novel is about three estranged sisters who are pushed back together when their father dies.

Very sorry I can't give this one a higher rating (I gave it a 3.25 on StoryGraph), because I loved the last Armfield novel I read, Our Wives Under the Sea, and this book shares a lot of similarities with that one. Our Wives Under the Sea was a meditative, slow-paced exploration of an evolving grief which hit me quite hard, but Private Rites comes off, if I can be excused for phrasing it this way, like it's trying too hard. Private Rites obviously really wants the reader to think it's Deep and Thoughtful and Literary, and it shows this desire too clearly for it to work, for me.

What does succeed in Private Rites is the frustrating and heart-breaking portrayal of three estranged sisters struggling with the legacy of a complicated and toxic father. Isla, Irene, and Agnes are not particularly likeable people, and even they muse over whether this can be tied to their strange and un-childlike childhood, or if it's just natural to them. Armfield so captures the feeling of being trapped at a certain age around family, the notion that they are locked into their view of you at ten or thirteen or seventeen and never update that view to reflect who you are as an adult and how you may subconciously regress to fit that view around them. She also catches the frustrating feeling of knowing you are reacting irrationally to a sibling and not being able to stop yourself and how much emotional history undergirds these seemingly outsized responses.

The slow apocalypse happening in the background of the story feels like it ties in well with the emotional state of the three protagonists; a drowning of the world that takes place a little at a time over many years until things become unlivable.

However, as mentioned above, the book ultimately does not succeed to me at being engaging. It is incredibly introspective in a way that comes off as navel-gazing. The "City" portions of the chapters felt especially like Armfield begging us to find the novel artistic and creative, which was unnecessary, because there's plenty here to stand on its own.

The ending also felt like a complete non-sequitur. The seeds for it were sown throughout the book, but not prominently enough that I cared when it came about. Instead, I felt cheated out of an emotional denouement among the three sisters, which is cast off in a coup by this last-minute, poorly-explained plot point.  

I also felt like Isla gets an unfair share of grief, and it wasn't clear why she among the three of them was singled out to be exclusively miserable. 

Do love the queer representation here; Armfield continues to excel in that. 

On the whole, there is a lot of good meat here and it approaches grief from a completely different angle from Our Wives Under the Sea so that it doesn't feel at all repetitive if you've read that one, but it also drags more and I found the ending unsatisfying. 
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Posted by Amanda

The Geographer’s Map to Romance

The Geographer’s Map to Romance by India Holton is $1.99! Fingers crossed this deal lasts. This is book two in the Love’s Academic series and was released in April. Any thoughts on the series so far?

Geography professors in a failed marriage of convenience inconveniently reconnect for an emergency mission in this swoony historical-fantasy rom-com.

Professor Elodie Tarrant is an expert in magic disasters. Nothing fazes her—except her own personal disaster, that Professor Gabriel Tarrant, the grumpy, unfriendly man she married for convenience a year ago, whom she secretly loves.

Gabriel is also an expert in magic disasters. And nothing fazes him either—except the walking, talking tornado that is his wife. They’ve been estranged since shortly after their wedding day, but that hasn’t stopped him from stoically pining for her.

When magic erupts in a small Welsh village, threatening catastrophe for the rest of England, Elodie and Gabriel are accidentally both assigned to the case. With the fate of the country in their hands, they must come together as a team in the face of perilous conditions like explosions, domesticated goats, and only one bed. But this is easier said than done. After all, there’s no navigational guide for the geography of the heart.

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

The Siren of Sussex

The Siren of Sussex by Mimi Matthews is $1.99! This is book one in Matthews’ new series, The Belles of London. The description definitely piques my interest, but I feel like Matthews books don’t get as sexy for me as I want them.

Victorian high society’s most daring equestrienne finds love and an unexpected ally in her fight for independence in the strong arms of London’s most sought after and devastatingly handsome half-Indian tailor.

Evelyn Maltravers understands exactly how little she’s worth on the marriage mart. As an incurable bluestocking from a family tumbling swiftly toward ruin, she knows she’ll never make a match in a ballroom. Her only hope is to distinguish herself by making the biggest splash in the one sphere she excels: on horseback. In haute couture. But to truly capture London’s attention she’ll need a habit-maker who’s not afraid to take risks with his designs—and with his heart.

Half-Indian tailor Ahmad Malik has always had a talent for making women beautiful, inching his way toward recognition by designing riding habits for Rotten Row’s infamous Pretty Horsebreakers—but no one compares to Evelyn. Her unbridled spirit enchants him, awakening a depth of feeling he never thought possible.

But pushing boundaries comes at a cost and not everyone is pleased to welcome Evelyn and Ahmad into fashionable society. With obstacles spanning between them, the indomitable pair must decide which hurdles they can jump and what matters most: making their mark or following their hearts?

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

The Familiar

The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo is $2.99! We mentioned this one in Hide Your Wallet, and I believe this is a standalone. If there are any details about it being a series, let us know!

From the New York Times bestselling author of Ninth House, Hell Bent, and creator of the Grishaverse series comes a highly anticipated historical fantasy set during the Spanish Golden Age

In a shabby house, on a shabby street, in the new capital of Madrid, Luzia Cotado uses scraps of magic to get through her days of endless toil as a scullion. But when her scheming mistress discovers the lump of a servant cowering in the kitchen is actually hiding a talent for little miracles, she demands Luzia use those gifts to better the family’s social position.

What begins as simple amusement for the bored nobility takes a perilous turn when Luzia garners the notice of Antonio Pérez, the disgraced secretary to Spain’s king. Still reeling from the defeat of his armada, the king is desperate for any advantage in the war against England’s heretic queen—and Pérez will stop at nothing to regain the king’s favor.

Determined to seize this one chance to better her fortunes, Luzia plunges into a world of seers and alchemists, holy men and hucksters, where the line between magic, science, and fraud is never certain. But as her notoriety grows, so does the danger that her Jewish blood will doom her to the Inquisition’s wrath. She will have to use every bit of her wit and will to survive—even if that means enlisting the help of Guillén Santangel, an embittered immortal familiar whose own secrets could prove deadly for them both.

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

The Gingerbread Bakery

The Gingerbread Bakery by Laurie Gilmore is 99c! This is book five in the Dream Harbor series and released last month. All the books in this series are billed as cozy, small town romances.

From the international bestselling author of The Pumpkin Spice Café and The Cinnamon Bun Book Store, comes the highly anticipated Dream Harbor romance for 2025!

A wedding in Dream Harbor can only mean one thing, everyone wants to get involved!

With Jeanie and Logan set to tie the knot, and Kira desperate to hire out her newly renovated barn at the Christmas tree farm, everything seems to be going well. Annie has agreed to bake the cake, and Mac is responsible for, well… just being Mac. And as the whole of Dream Harbor comes together to celebrate the wedding of the year with the snow falling around them, can Annie and Mac put aside their dislike for each just long enough for the ‘I Do’s’ or is that one request too far…

The Gingerbread Bakery is a cozy romantic novel with an enemies to lovers dynamic, small-town setting and a HEA guaranteed!

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

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