We’re slouching towards summer now, it’s approaching too quickly for my taste. I’m tired after a long week (“they’re all long weeks” yep). It was lovely and gloomy today and cold, a nice Oregon-style day. We don’t get many of those here, as it’s sunny most of the year, even in the depths of winter with snow and ice. Supposed to be sunny and warmer this weekend, which is fine.

CWs: weird dreams (animal death, gore), food, mental health

I find nights and weekends to be “air pockets,” shelters from the storms of everyday life. I remember pretty vividly the first time I learned of the concept of an “air pocket.” In the early levels of the NES game Tiny Toon Adventures, there were some watery parts of the levels, and some sections were “air pockets” where you could find items or hide briefly from enemies in the water below. I’ve said this a lot, and it will continue to be a perennial phrase I drag out: “it was a long week.” My colleague in grad school said “you say that every week.” But it’s true. Every week is a long week. The weirdness of the world at large, and a stressful and intellectually and emotionally demanding job, coalesce into weird, long weeks. And it’s OK. It is all worth it. I love it, despite the stress and weirdness. But at the same time, then I safeguard and consecrate my free time away from at least the work side of things.

CWs: physical health, work, food, alcohol

Today is 11 April 2025, or, as the Romans would say, a.d. III idus Apriles (i.e., “3 days before the Ides of April”). The Romans counted inclusively, so we’re including today in that count (Friday, Saturday, Sunday). I kinda enjoy the Julian dates, and had to teach myself them for translating 17th-century Latin letters, where they were often still using Julian, rather than Gregorian, dates. Hence you’ll often see “S.V.” (stylo vetere), “Old Style,” and “S.N.” (stylo nouo), “New Style,” for dates. IIRC, the dates are about 10 days off, so you’ll often see dates like 11/21 Oct. 1650, the first date being Julian and the second being Gregorian. Apparently there was quite a bit of variation, however.

CWs: mental health, oblique politics

Well, here we are, a couple of weeks into Spring proper (at least in the Northern hemisphere). Yesterday we had light snow and rain most of the day, and today there was a decent amount of light snow, but as is the case with most spring snow, a few hours later it’s like it never happened. I’m OK with that. I love the winter but I’ve had enough snow over the past few months, and I’d like it to stay cold for a little while longer before we get into the ardor of summer.

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).