CWs: impostor syndrome, work

I was thinking about the phrase “onward and upward” just now and wondered how that would work in Latin. Well, prorsum sursumque (“straight on and upward”) is probably the closest to that phrase. It’s a little trite but also perennially apt, the idea of moving on and leaving unpleasantry behind as well as one can. So it’s OK.

This has been a very long week, or at least has felt that way. I was on phones two days last week, then Monday, which is always emotionally exhausting, although most people were friendly, thankfully. And the past couple of days have been very busy as well, but I feel like I rocked Tuesday and today somehow, which is encouraging. I often have the worst bouts of impostor syndrome in my job, but days like yesterday and today make me feel good about myself and that I’m doing OK. And we’re halfway through the week, and the next couple of days will be pretty calm, as far as I know. And hopefully a calm weekend. My spouse has to work on Saturday, so I’ll be working on getting more Latin done for much of that day, but that’s OK. Maybe we’ll have a calm Sunday.

CWs: social media, politics, trump, racism & bigotry mentions

I’ve been thinking about this ever since my friend posted this on their blog recently. The only social media I have currently is Mastodon and LinkedIn (no, I am not linking that here, sorry), at least in terms of websites. I have a Discord account, but it’s not something I really publicize. Like many others, I used to have more social media, though. I had MySpace back in the day, yep, for many years, until it died its slow death and I fled elsewhere. I received a Facebook invite in 2004-05 sometime and took right to it. First found friends at my school, before it had opened up to everyone and literally their dog, and sure, built-in friends. I would give out my FB willy-nilly, because why not? It’s where everyone seemed to be, for many, many years. When I was on the tenure-track job market, I even had Twitter for a year or two, from probably 2014-16, before I gave up on that entirely.

“Love is a cunning weaver of fantasies and fables” -Sappho

I cannot for the life of me find the original for this “quote.” I found the quote on a list of quotes about “fantasy,” but I’ve looked at numerous translations and this is either an outright fabrication or a very loose translation. I don’t know Sappho’s corpus very well, so it could be operator error, but I liked the quote regardless.

I don’t know about you, but growing up in Oregon, we never went “to the beach,” but we were always going to the coast. I wonder if that’s a uniquely Oregonian thing. I honestly don’t know.

I like the word “coast” a lot. When I was growing up, I remember “Coast to Coast” hardware being a thing (I think it was a chain). We also talk of one “coasting” in a car, or a bike, as they let gravity kick in and don’t accelerate down a hill or whatever. I just looked it up, and “coast” in this sense has the root idea of travelling along the coast, but is a more figurative meaning.

I don’t have a snappy quote for you here, although I did do searches for “debt quotes” and found a lot of nonsense. I thought of using the Tyrion Lannister quote, but didn’t want that vibe necessarily (still a good quote!). So today I wanted to dive into the etymology of the word “debt.” Undoubtedly this is a topic often on many people’s minds, considering all the credit card and student loan and other debt out there (student loans are a sore subject for me, ugh). But I think the word is interesting and worthy of further study.

“There was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt…” - Radiohead, “Pyramid Song” (from the album Amnesiac)

In these uncertain and doubtful times, well, I thought it would be helpful to go through the etymology of the word “doubt.” Now, of course, before it makes its way to English, it goes through a lot of intermediary languages, but my concern is generally with penetrating back to the source. “Doubt” comes from Latin dubitare, which means “to be uncertain, to be in doubt, to waver in opinion or judgment” (L&S, i.e., Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary, s.v. dubito). More directly from dubitare, we get things like “dubious” (= “doubtful”), “indubitable” (= “undoubtable”), “indubitably,” “dubitation” (though that’s admittedly rather archaic; lit. “the state of doubting, the action of doubting”). And of course, once it morphs to “doubt” (through the French, which lengthens the Latin long -u- to the diphthong -ou), we get “undoubtedly,” “doubtful,” and I’m sure there are others I’m missing. English “redoubt” is not related, though; it comes, via French, from Latin reducere, “to withdraw, draw back,” meaning “a place of refuge” (= a place to which one withdraws).

CWs: US politics, trump, death mention

I’ve been playing a really nice mod for DOOM/DOOM II called Brutal Doom. I hadn’t played either game in quite awhile, but generally use a source port like Chocolate DOOM vel sim. if I do. Friends on the Classic Gaming Today Discord recommended it, and wow, it is a nice mod. I’ve played through all of DOOM and most of DOOM II at this point. But I think I’ve overdone it. Too many dark corridors and surprise ambushses. I think I might need to take a step back from it. I’ve been playing it a lot lately, between rewatching Seinfeld (I’m on season 5; I am rewatching the whole series, then plan on media mailing the lot of it to my sister, since I don’t want the DVD sets anymore) and doing whatever else in my free time.

“I just want to go back to bed and hibernate for the rest of the year”

Welcome to the first Ichneutymon post! I’d ideally like to do this roughly weekly, and I hope it will be fun but also informative for y’all. Since winter is kicking off in the northern hemisphere, well, I thought hibernate would be a fitting word to inaugurate this feature. Just like in the example sentence above, I love sleeping in and sometimes I envy bears and their ability to hibernate for ages at a time. At the same time, I really love doing things when I’m not sleeping, so it’s probably good I’m a human!

CWs: death, food, sex mention

“Where we’re from, the birds sing a pretty song, and there’s always music in the air” - The Little Man From Another Place, Twin Peaks 1x03, “Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer”

I learned of David Lynch’s passing, sadly, on 16 Jan 2025. Although he was a complicated figure, as many people are wont to be, it will be a great loss, not only for culture in general, but for myself more personally. I remember years ago, one of my friends spoke fondly of Twin Peaks, with random snatches of information about Agent Cooper and other strangeness within. I had heard of the show, naturally, but had never watched it. I remember the Fire Walk with Me theme being on Pure Moods back in the day (ha!), but I really had zero context for it. It was a weird pop culture artifact that had somehow passed me by, probably largely since it had come out in 1990-91, when I was around 6-7, and it was something I just never followed up on, although I love just about everything weird and strange. My spouse recently showed me a bizarro Sesame Street parody of Twin Peaks with Cookie Monster called “Twin Beaks,” which was pretty amusing, but undoubtedly everything would go over the children’s heads, unless their parents had them watching some weird stuff! Hollywood and the fandom in general have been mourning for the last few days, and understandably so.

I’ve been meaning to do this for awhile but haven’t gotten around to it. I’d like to start doing a regular(-ish) feature on etymology and my love for words in general. My focus tends to be on those with Greek and Latin roots, of course, since I can break them apart and put them back together pretty easily. As it’s the end of the week, I’m too tired to come up with one for tonight, but this is forthcoming.