/nəˈθænjəl/

I was aiming to send off fifty resumes a week but I think that may have been too ambitious. I think I've applied to the twelve jobs on LinkedIn I might be qualified for. Maybe I'll reduce it to twenty per week.

Live Laugh Love

Capybaras are guinea pig-adjacent

Have you ever seen Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World about life in Antarctica?

Well one person I don't know yelled at me for no reason as I was walking past but that's in keeping with my average of one insulting outburst from a stranger per mile walked in Denver.

You're probably going to be offered a promotion!

One of many questions that little tableau raises

Hopefully this will be the most unsettling thing I witness in Denver today.

Abandoned box of life cereal and quart of milk on a bench. Photo taken from train window

I can't think of a better place to enjoy a nice bowl of Life cereal than a bench at the Mile High RTD station.

The word "whit" is mostly preserved in the expression "to not care a whit." It is a descendant of OE wiht (/wixt/, [wiçt]), meaning a creature or thing. "Wight" is a descendant of the same word.

Not about machines but like a question about a paper at a conference or something.

On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. — Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher

I lived on Charles Babbage Rd in Cambridge for a year and never knew a thing about him and just came across this quote. Anyway I'd like to be able to respond to a question as he does here someday.

Apparently sēo is basically ruled out because it died out well before "she" appears, even though cognates of sēo turned into the similarly-sounding zij and sie in Dutch and German.

Very interesting read on where "she" comes from. "Sche" is an East Midlands variant of the 3rd per. fem. sing. I like the idea that maybe OE hēo > scho in the north got its vowel under the influence of "he".

✅ 10 jobs applied for
💯 100% of soul siphoned off

Interesting! Thank you. I was wondering if the pronunciations might have converged but wasn't sure what to do with that line of thought.

إن شاء الله

just drew the connection between gemination and gemini. brain expanded. perhaps even doubled

That all makes good sense. I don't usually have any specific answers when people ask me what pre-Islamic Arabians believed in! Although academia's reward system favors those who make up answers.

That's true, even with my three days of OE knowledge I should have seen that you can't shift stress in a monosyllable! So do you subscribe to the Shetland theory or sēo — or are there more up to date opinions on this?

I thought someone else might have an insight! Wiktionary says it could be from sēo "that one" in which case it would be cognate with sie and zij, but that that's "less likely"!

But apparently this doesn't account for the vocalism.

Apparently the etymology of "she" is not that clear. OE is hēo, and then, "with an irregular change in stress from hēo to heō /hjoː/, then a development from /hj-/ to /ç/ to /ʃ-/, similar to the derivation of Shetland from Old Norse Hjaltland" according to Wiktionary.

Kimp the black and white guinea pig, 3/4 angle.

Happy Monday

Pinky and the Brain meme: what are we going to do today Brain? The same thing we do every day: apply for jobs.

Also any time. Academia moves at a glacial pace.

If there doesn't seem like there's anyone you'd want to chat with in a department or probably isn't a good place to do a PhD.

That being said it's not a requirement, I would only encourage it if you have read some of their work and want to talk about something. Most professors are pretty happy to have a conversation about their subject.

I think if a prof considers it a nuisance to speak for fifteen minutes to a potential grad student who is considering spending years of their life studying with them for poverty wages that would be a red flag.

Probably everyone I know has already heard this cover of Melancholy Hill in Middle Scots

youtu.be/KXpa8gFJ2Eo?...