Writer's Block: B.Y.O.B. Holidays

[wire_mother]

[Error: unknown template qotd]

Yule, mainly, because axial tilt is the reason for the season.

Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, for the same reason.

I'd like to celebrate Krampuslauf and Perchtenlauf, and I think that we might be doing so starting next year. Why? Because Krampuslauf and Perchtenlauf are awesome.

Comments

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

Psst. Some friends and I have decided that Seattle must have at least one Krampuslauf in 2012. We'll begin planning in late spring.

[wire-mother.livejournal.com]

We should pool resources.

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

Absolutely.

Most of this group are involved in Spring Mysteries, so we'll be starting planning once we've recovered from that. Sometime in May.

[cwicseolfor]

Um. Really, REALLY random comment, sorry if this comes off unpleasantly lurker-y, but between your slightly gut-wrenching handle (spotted a mention in whatifoundthere's Skyrim posts and had to click) and your giggly blog title and your hilarious first line in this prompt response I got the impression you were vaguely awesome and might dignify a silly question with a response. I couldn't help wondering: what's your blog's subtitle from, if anything? Or is that your own? It sounds familiar, but that may be that I watch too much Chinese fantasy.

[wire-mother.livejournal.com]

They're all from Firefly. Let me see if I can remember which is which:

放縱瘋狂的結 is "a knot of self-indulgent lunacy" or something like that. It's in the episode "War Stories". It seemed appropriate for a Livejournal.

你他妈的世界所有的人都该死。 translates approximately as "everyone under the heavens ought to die", or as Google Translate would have it, "fuck you all who are damned world". This version is a slight variation of the one in the episode "Serenity, Part One".

And Это курам на смех is Russian which translates as "that makes the hens laugh", which is to say, more loosely, "that's ridiculous". It comes from the movie Serenity.

[cwicseolfor]

...I feel dense. I'd recognized River's code phrase as such, but it didn't even occur to me the others might share the same provenance. That would explain why it felt so familiar, and the change would explain why it didn't pop up in a quoted Google search. The combination of the obscenity into the main phrase changes the meaning to something much more like "Your damned world's whole population all deserve death," though, which strikes me much less casually misanthropic and far more measured and bitter, and ican'tbutbecuriouswhythechange although I'm humbly (and sheepishly) appreciative of this answer.

The journal's title elicited much laugher, twice, thanks to forgetting about it meanwhile. Appropriate indeed. And good luck with your Krampuslauf next year!

[wire-mother.livejournal.com]

I don't remember for certain why I changed it, though I think it was due to a conversation with a friend whose knowledge of Chinese was pretty extensive (she reads Chinese philosophy in the original for fun!) I don't, unfortunately, recall the particulars of that discussion.

[cwicseolfor]

That sounds very plausible. Like I said, the diction of the new version is pretty ominous, with what could be described as a mythic sort of tone to my ear - it was what prompted me to ask in the first place. The classics rubbed off on her.

If you ever study Chinese, though, reading poetic old texts is more an enjoyable exercise in vocabulary than comparable to the monstrous undertaking of, say, early middle English. The constancy of the written language has made it much more approachable, even for foreigners, and because their word order is fairly similar to English and arguably even more rigid, if you have a dictionary and a willingness to entertain multiple senses of each word you can usually hack through. I took Classical Chinese and Symbolic Logic concurrently in college and was constantly surprised at how much of the same parts of my head they seemed to require. And now I'm getting nostalgic for my school years, but that was the sum effect of the Firefly references combined with your username and icon, anyway...

Many thanks, again! I appreciate the indulgence of my curiosity immensely!