This tree observes the tide.
[daily log: walking, 1km; splitting wood, 1hr]
Day: June 27, 2020
Caveat: The Blogosphere’s Etymology
A person who goes by Tanadrin posted a fanciful etymology for the word “blogosphere”:
Blogosphera is naturally 1st declension (the medieval form of blogosphaera, from the Greek βλωγοσφαῖρα), blagosphera is actually the neuter plural of the rarely-attested blagospherum, itself derived from the earlier blagospes, “to check a blog in the hopes it has updated in the last five minutes, even though it almost certainly has not.” Blagh is the Umbrian reflex of the Greek βλωγοσ, both ultimately from Indo-European *bʰleh₁-, “to blow, be vapid; to be wrong on the internet.” The oblique form of spes (sper-) was altered by analogy, and the meaning of the plural in question shifted from “checking your list of blogs repeatedly” to “the blogs being checked.” Yet blagosphera remained the subject of plural verbs until the Late Latin period, when it was treated as a singular first-declension noun by scribes with a poor knowledge of Latin.
Blagoblag is actually unrelated; it comes from Proto-Germanic *blakaz, from the Indo-European root *bʰleg-, “to shine”, referring to the glow of a computer screen. The word entered English via Old Norse, which retained the reduplicated form (lost in the West Germanic languages, but not the North or East) from verb class VII, *blagoblagana, “to shitpost.”
I find it entertaining.
Caveat: Art #62
I made this charcoal figure sketch in my 1988 art class in Minneapolis.
Caveat: Poem #1427 “The slugs protagonize yet another poem”
ㅁ The slugs arrayed themselves across the road displaying spots to trucks and cars that passed. They tasted leaves and stones and felt the rain, and dodged, with careful slitherings, their fate.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).