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five things meme
I have had a Day, most recently characterized by an hour-long telephone interview (for a study, not for a position) that ran for two hours. And then I returned to my desk to see Outlook reminding me that I had another meeting in twenty minutes. I'm kind of fried. Therefore, via ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kassrachel, a meme!
The idea is that you comment and I'll tell you five subjects or things I associate with you, and then you post them and elaborate. I may as well tell you all right now that I'm not very good at the follow-through part of this sort of meme, so if you comment here your odds that I'll give you five things are probably 50-50.kassrachel, however, gave me these:
And here they are.
1. curling
Curling isdatlowen's fault. I was out at dinner with mearagrrl and college roommate K, and mearagrrl said the last time she'd seen datlowen, he and jgesteve had got really into curling, and I said What? Here? and called or e-mailed one or the other of them to ask how I could get in on it, and the rest is history. And because it was datlowen who did the research and found the club after the 2002 Winter Olympics, he's the one who gets the great-great-grand-toaster for all y'all curlers on my flist -- from cmshaw on down the line. (Except flt and devilvern, who were there when datlowen got there, of course.)
It is a thoroughly bizarre game, and I adore it. Every year when the ice goes in, and a couple of times during the winter, I think -- my god, look what we do to our bodies. This is completely ridiculous. And it is! But it's wonderful. It's a genuine team sport, with very little specialization, and you do up to two and a half miles during a game (plus the sweeping, which I don't care what you say, is hard work), and then afterward there's beer. What's not to love?
2. England
I first went to England the spring break of my fifth grade year; I was not quite eleven. We visited London for a week, staying in a flat owned by ... I forget whose place it was, but it was some sort of colleague or associate of my parents' who wasn't there and allowed us to use the apartment in his/her/their absence. A family friend (and family) was there for the semester, and we saw them and also the usual London stuff -- Tower, British Museum, couple of West End shows, probably a good deal else that I don't remember now. I do remember -- as if it had happened yesterday -- that the morning of the trip, which of course we'd been planning for a while, my dad came in to wake me up, and said "What do you want to do today?" and I said "Let's go to London," and he said "You want to? Okay!" :-) Turned out that my father had gotten a Fulbright Exchange -- I'm actually not entirely sure when he found out he'd got it, but we left in August, so I assume they must have notified people by March or so -- and the London trip at spring break was a sort of dry run (and consultation with the friend spending the semester overseas). So the year I would have been in sixth grade, I was in first year at a grammar school in Lincolnshire.
I'll never know how much I learned that year. Some things I can identify, like the fact that I had French a year before any of my classmates back home, and getting the first foreign language in my head at eleven rather than twelve almost certainly did me worlds of good; but other things, I mean, who can tell how my life would have been different if I hadn't had a new school, lived in a different country, done all that traveling, at that impressionable age? My parents say that my brother, who was eight at the time, did fine, rolled with it (I do remember that he almost immediately adopted the local accent, and could switch between it and our accent depending if he was talking to his friends or to us), but was really too young to retain much of what he got from it -- but that I was a sponge, and watching me soak it all up (unconsciously, of course) was almost as gratifying as living there themselves.
Then I also lived in England from 2004 to 2006, of course, doing my MPhil at Oxford University (St Cross College). Ask me about stress in English noun-noun compounds. Go on, ask. :-) I honestly don't know if having lived in East Anglia as a kid prepared me in any way for living in the Midlands as an adult. It may have done, but who can say. Of course I'm more aware of the impression made by the longer-term, more recent experience than the shorter childhood one. I'm conscious of things that have happened to my idiolect, for example -- I don't think I'd have produced "may have done" five years ago, as I did above, though I'd have understood it fluently. Don't know if I'd have found it unremarkable, or if I'd have suspected that the speaker had been affected by (or was affecting, heh) a UK mode of speech. But actually I think the biggest effect of my two years in England was a musical one. I hadn't sung much since high school or at all since college when I got there, and before long I got mixed up with a couple of groups where I had good stuff to learn quickly -- and it turned out the high school training had left me a big whack of musicianship, and the choirs in Oxford honed it into some respectable sight-reading skill. It also helped that my voice is a more or less textbook English soprano. Doesn't help now, of course, that I'm singing for a director who keeps asking me if I can do it "a little less Anglican", but they loved me on that side. :-)
3. Yiddish
My father's mother's parents' first language was Yiddish. (They'd have learned Russian, probably, in school -- and they did go to school, though probably not to high school.) They came to America just about directly from their wedding, in the early 1920's, and spoke English to their children. So my grandmother grew up understanding Yiddish but never really speaking it; my father grew up hearing it but not understanding it; and I grew up with nothing, no linguistic connection to my great-grandparents (of whom I have no memory) beyond the few words many urban-ish Americans know, and a few more, and what the vowel really sounds like in "oy". In assimilating they gave up something they couldn't have guessed we might find valuable. So I'm trying to learn the language as best I can. It's like rebuilding something that has fallen down.
4. foxes
Oh, gosh. What about foxes. The red fox, V. vulpes, has the widest range of any terrestrial carnivore. The fennec is the smallest species of fox, and is even apparently suitable for keeping as a pet. The arctic fox has hair on its paws and can thus walk on the ice without freezing.* (= fox in socks.)
*Thanks, Uncle Wiki!
I am not related to any of these, nor to any of the more famous Foxes -- actors, singers, theologians, movie studios, fair and balanced news channels. We're pretty sure our Fox got that way when my great-grandfather arrived in New York. It seems to have been a different name in Europe.
5. knitting
Some time in the two or three years after we graduated, my college roommate got it into her head that she wanted to learn to knit, so she taught herself and tried to teach me. It didn't take. But then a friend of mine at Oxford -- Junior Dean S, for those of you who remember the characters from my second year there -- was also quite a knitter, had been knitting since she was a wee thing, and she taught me, and it stuck. She was teaching undergraduates as part of her financial aid package, and she taught me knitting the same way she taught them Russian: she made me do lines. She'd show me a stitch, watch until she was sure I was doing it right by myself, and then tell me to do five rows or ten rows or whatever and come back and show her. Muscle memory at work, y/n?
Sometimes people comment about the relatively recent vogue for knitting among younger women. I don't know if it's a recency illusion -- once you notice it at all, you see it everywhere -- or a real upsurge in numbers, but to the extent it's the latter, I have a suspicion that a lot of us are getting into it as our grandmothers are dying. Of course, this could just be because I associate textile crafts so strongly with my own grandmothers (one of whom is too arthritic to do much with her hands anymore, and the other of whom has been dead close to fifteen years). My mother's mother did a lot of embroidery, braided and hooked a lot of rugs (on genuine feedbag burlap and to her own designs, now; none of these kits with printed-color guides), and made a lot of tatted lace, which she is fortunately still able to teach us. My father's mother had switched entirely to crochet by the time I remember her making things with sticks and string, but in my father's youth she ran a knitting store, and my father goes a little googly when we (my sister-in-law knits as well) present him with hand-knit stuff. And a little googlier if he happens to be with us when we stop in a yarn shop. So I guess knitting is a little bit like Yiddish, in a way? Maybe. I'm certainly keenly aware right now of the fact that I've given heritage-related answers to both those questions. :-)
kassrachel, a meme!The idea is that you comment and I'll tell you five subjects or things I associate with you, and then you post them and elaborate. I may as well tell you all right now that I'm not very good at the follow-through part of this sort of meme, so if you comment here your odds that I'll give you five things are probably 50-50.
kassrachel, however, gave me these:- curling
- England
- Yiddish
- foxes :-)
- knitting
And here they are.
1. curling
Curling is
datlowen's fault. I was out at dinner with mearagrrl and college roommate K, and mearagrrl said the last time she'd seen datlowen, he and jgesteve had got really into curling, and I said What? Here? and called or e-mailed one or the other of them to ask how I could get in on it, and the rest is history. And because it was datlowen who did the research and found the club after the 2002 Winter Olympics, he's the one who gets the great-great-grand-toaster for all y'all curlers on my flist -- from cmshaw on down the line. (Except flt and devilvern, who were there when datlowen got there, of course.)It is a thoroughly bizarre game, and I adore it. Every year when the ice goes in, and a couple of times during the winter, I think -- my god, look what we do to our bodies. This is completely ridiculous. And it is! But it's wonderful. It's a genuine team sport, with very little specialization, and you do up to two and a half miles during a game (plus the sweeping, which I don't care what you say, is hard work), and then afterward there's beer. What's not to love?
2. England
I first went to England the spring break of my fifth grade year; I was not quite eleven. We visited London for a week, staying in a flat owned by ... I forget whose place it was, but it was some sort of colleague or associate of my parents' who wasn't there and allowed us to use the apartment in his/her/their absence. A family friend (and family) was there for the semester, and we saw them and also the usual London stuff -- Tower, British Museum, couple of West End shows, probably a good deal else that I don't remember now. I do remember -- as if it had happened yesterday -- that the morning of the trip, which of course we'd been planning for a while, my dad came in to wake me up, and said "What do you want to do today?" and I said "Let's go to London," and he said "You want to? Okay!" :-) Turned out that my father had gotten a Fulbright Exchange -- I'm actually not entirely sure when he found out he'd got it, but we left in August, so I assume they must have notified people by March or so -- and the London trip at spring break was a sort of dry run (and consultation with the friend spending the semester overseas). So the year I would have been in sixth grade, I was in first year at a grammar school in Lincolnshire.
I'll never know how much I learned that year. Some things I can identify, like the fact that I had French a year before any of my classmates back home, and getting the first foreign language in my head at eleven rather than twelve almost certainly did me worlds of good; but other things, I mean, who can tell how my life would have been different if I hadn't had a new school, lived in a different country, done all that traveling, at that impressionable age? My parents say that my brother, who was eight at the time, did fine, rolled with it (I do remember that he almost immediately adopted the local accent, and could switch between it and our accent depending if he was talking to his friends or to us), but was really too young to retain much of what he got from it -- but that I was a sponge, and watching me soak it all up (unconsciously, of course) was almost as gratifying as living there themselves.
Then I also lived in England from 2004 to 2006, of course, doing my MPhil at Oxford University (St Cross College). Ask me about stress in English noun-noun compounds. Go on, ask. :-) I honestly don't know if having lived in East Anglia as a kid prepared me in any way for living in the Midlands as an adult. It may have done, but who can say. Of course I'm more aware of the impression made by the longer-term, more recent experience than the shorter childhood one. I'm conscious of things that have happened to my idiolect, for example -- I don't think I'd have produced "may have done" five years ago, as I did above, though I'd have understood it fluently. Don't know if I'd have found it unremarkable, or if I'd have suspected that the speaker had been affected by (or was affecting, heh) a UK mode of speech. But actually I think the biggest effect of my two years in England was a musical one. I hadn't sung much since high school or at all since college when I got there, and before long I got mixed up with a couple of groups where I had good stuff to learn quickly -- and it turned out the high school training had left me a big whack of musicianship, and the choirs in Oxford honed it into some respectable sight-reading skill. It also helped that my voice is a more or less textbook English soprano. Doesn't help now, of course, that I'm singing for a director who keeps asking me if I can do it "a little less Anglican", but they loved me on that side. :-)
3. Yiddish
My father's mother's parents' first language was Yiddish. (They'd have learned Russian, probably, in school -- and they did go to school, though probably not to high school.) They came to America just about directly from their wedding, in the early 1920's, and spoke English to their children. So my grandmother grew up understanding Yiddish but never really speaking it; my father grew up hearing it but not understanding it; and I grew up with nothing, no linguistic connection to my great-grandparents (of whom I have no memory) beyond the few words many urban-ish Americans know, and a few more, and what the vowel really sounds like in "oy". In assimilating they gave up something they couldn't have guessed we might find valuable. So I'm trying to learn the language as best I can. It's like rebuilding something that has fallen down.
4. foxes
Oh, gosh. What about foxes. The red fox, V. vulpes, has the widest range of any terrestrial carnivore. The fennec is the smallest species of fox, and is even apparently suitable for keeping as a pet. The arctic fox has hair on its paws and can thus walk on the ice without freezing.* (= fox in socks.)
*Thanks, Uncle Wiki!
I am not related to any of these, nor to any of the more famous Foxes -- actors, singers, theologians, movie studios, fair and balanced news channels. We're pretty sure our Fox got that way when my great-grandfather arrived in New York. It seems to have been a different name in Europe.
5. knitting
Some time in the two or three years after we graduated, my college roommate got it into her head that she wanted to learn to knit, so she taught herself and tried to teach me. It didn't take. But then a friend of mine at Oxford -- Junior Dean S, for those of you who remember the characters from my second year there -- was also quite a knitter, had been knitting since she was a wee thing, and she taught me, and it stuck. She was teaching undergraduates as part of her financial aid package, and she taught me knitting the same way she taught them Russian: she made me do lines. She'd show me a stitch, watch until she was sure I was doing it right by myself, and then tell me to do five rows or ten rows or whatever and come back and show her. Muscle memory at work, y/n?
Sometimes people comment about the relatively recent vogue for knitting among younger women. I don't know if it's a recency illusion -- once you notice it at all, you see it everywhere -- or a real upsurge in numbers, but to the extent it's the latter, I have a suspicion that a lot of us are getting into it as our grandmothers are dying. Of course, this could just be because I associate textile crafts so strongly with my own grandmothers (one of whom is too arthritic to do much with her hands anymore, and the other of whom has been dead close to fifteen years). My mother's mother did a lot of embroidery, braided and hooked a lot of rugs (on genuine feedbag burlap and to her own designs, now; none of these kits with printed-color guides), and made a lot of tatted lace, which she is fortunately still able to teach us. My father's mother had switched entirely to crochet by the time I remember her making things with sticks and string, but in my father's youth she ran a knitting store, and my father goes a little googly when we (my sister-in-law knits as well) present him with hand-knit stuff. And a little googlier if he happens to be with us when we stop in a yarn shop. So I guess knitting is a little bit like Yiddish, in a way? Maybe. I'm certainly keenly aware right now of the fact that I've given heritage-related answers to both those questions. :-)
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That's kind of sweet of your dad.
My dad is pretty indulgent of my making a beeline for the nearest yarn-and-fiber store, and carries around a prayer card his grandmother crocheted a trim to in his wallet, so yeah, I think it is totally a generational thing.
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The conditional perfect tense (at least, that's what I think it's called in Spanglish) was a British import? :)
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Glad you asked? ;-)
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I'm aware, of course, that I associate you with foxes because of your (user)name, not because of any intrinsic connection. But I can't help it. :-)
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1147804/Pictured-Miss-Snooks-friendly-fox-bedroom-flat-complete-TV-piece-suite.html