The fact that he uses the word Nazgûl [~““35:51] from the Irish (nasc) and Scots Gaelic (nasg) words meaning “ring” to take a linguistic dig at Irish is notable. He was probably motivated by his political views of the time rather than celebrating (as one should) the value and diversity of all languages.
Tolkien once termed Welsh ‘the elder language of the men of Britain’; this talk explores how the sounds and grammar of Welsh captured Tolkien’s imagination and are reflected in Sindarin, one of the two major Elvish languages which he created.
Via https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/medieval-welsh. For those interested on Tolkien, they’ve got a huge list of other scholarly content on his work: https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/keywords/tolkien.
‘Shut up!’ screamed Toad.
— Frog and Toad Bot (@FrogandToadbot) January 11, 2022
Other people are basically the ultimate memex
The success of a technological memex, is intimately + irrevocably intertwined with how well it supports your capacity to connect with other people, who are the ultimate memex of all
If your TFT isn't socially oriented, it's nothing
— Matt Jugo (@Jeanvaljean689) January 8, 2022
Is it no longer the case that “any publicity is good publicity”?
ironic that Norman Mailer, who’d deliberately hoped to provoke controversy, is being repudiated/ censored in an age in which “controversy” is unfashionable because it hurts some individuals’ feelings.
today, issues are not debated, just deleted. https://t.co/ViRY9hfxBx— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) January 3, 2022
A junior staffer can get a book cancelled over a controversial, 60-year-old essay that sparked a brilliant, nuanced and thoughtful response from James Baldwin when it was published. We studied both essays in grad school and you could never understand the one without the other… https://t.co/Sni94qr5rq
— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) January 3, 2022
EXCLUSIVE: Random House not moving forward with 2023 Norman Mailer book after staffer objects to his “White Negro” essay, from @MichaelWolffNYC @TheAnkler and confirmed by the author’s son Michael Mailer https://t.co/X261dOuB1Z pic.twitter.com/5WsnGHbB14
— Janice Min (@janicemin) January 3, 2022
In one superstition, people who pull up this root will be condemned to hell, and the mandrake root would scream and cry as it was pulled from the ground, killing anyone who heard it. Therefore, in the past, people have tied the roots to the bodies of animals and then used these animals to pull the roots from the soil.[2]
—Wikipedia citing John Gerard (1597). “Herball, Generall Historie of Plants”. Claude Moore Health Sciences Library. Archived from the original on 2012-09-01.
Today I learned that the phrase “run the gamut” comes from Γ ut or gamma ut, which is the lowest note of the hexachord system on the Guidonian hand and is also used to describe all the possible notes.
And for some somewhat related musical fun via John Carlos Baez:
Guillaume Dufay (1397 – 1474) is the most famous of the first generation of the Franco-Flemish school. (This first generation is also called the Burgundian School.) He is often considered a transitional figure from the medieval to the Renaissance. His isorhythmic motets illustrate that—their tonality is dissonant and dramatic compared to typical Renaissance polyphony.
