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fandomcalendar Apr. 7th, 2026 05:37 pm)
littlefics posting in fandomcalendar Apr. 7th, 2026 05:37 pm)
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languagelog_feed Apr. 7th, 2026 08:22 pm)
languagelog_feed Apr. 7th, 2026 08:22 pm)Today's xkcd:
Mouseover title: "Communication is one of the most popular ways to transmit information, ahead of rivals such as"
The explanation and discussion on explainxkcd.
sapid (SAP-id) - (largely N.Am.) adj., perceptible to the sense of taste, having flavor; having a strong pleasant flavor, savory; (arch.) pleasing to the mind, engaging.
That last is an almost forgotten metaphoric extension, instead of the common pattern of the original literal meaning fading into the mists of time. Taken around 1630 from Latin sapidus, tasty, from sapere, to taste, and so a doublet of savory.
---L.
That last is an almost forgotten metaphoric extension, instead of the common pattern of the original literal meaning fading into the mists of time. Taken around 1630 from Latin sapidus, tasty, from sapere, to taste, and so a doublet of savory.
---L.
(bois_de_jasmin_feed Apr. 7th, 2026 11:02 am)
bois_de_jasmin_feed Apr. 7th, 2026 11:02 am)I’m back in Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine. We had 110 hours of air raid alerts over the past week alone. I’ve learned to sleep through the blaring sirens. I’ve seen what drones and mines can do to a human body. I’ve smelled the smoke and tasted ash on my lips. Against it all, life continues relentless. Every day a new flower blooms on the sidewalks and a new bud unfurls its sticky leaves. An apricot tree embracing the wall of the old synagogue blooms in such a graceful way that it looks like a Japanese painting of itself. The skies during the blackouts are full of stars so vivid and bright that they seem within reach.
I travel to the frontlines. I volunteer on the evacuation missions. I record people’s stories. And I make time to smell violets in the park, wear perfume and teach fragrance classes. I continue writing my Substack newsletter. Your support enables me to continue my work and help here in Ukraine.
74 Perfumes We Had to Learn by Heart at IFF
5 Things That Stayed With Me in February
Three Mini-reviews of New Perfumes (short videos)
Perfume Class 3: Structure, Tension, and Control
What I Learned From Memorizing 74 Classics
The Art of Seduction: Field Notes from a Perfumer and a Former Ballerina
Our “Recommend Me a Perfume” thread is open this week. You can use this space to find perfume recommendations, to share your discoveries and favorite scents, and to ask any questions about scents, aromas and flavors. Or you can just tell us what perfume you are wearing. If you received recommendations from this thread, please let us know what you sampled.
How does it work: 1. Please post your requests or questions as comments here. You can also use this space to ask any fragrance related questions. To receive recommendations that are better tailored to your tastes, you can include details on what you like and don’t like, your signature perfumes, and your budget. And please let us know what you end up sampling. 2. Then please check the thread to see if there are other requests you can answer. Your responses are really valuable for navigating the big and sometimes confusing world of perfume, so let’s help each other!
To make this thread easier to read, when you reply to someone, please click on the blue “reply” link under their comment.
Photography by Bois de Jasmin
The post Recommend Me a Perfume : April 2026 appeared first on Bois de Jasmin.
(otw_news_feed Apr. 7th, 2026 11:33 am)
otw_news_feed Apr. 7th, 2026 11:33 am)I. AO3 IS EXITING OPEN BETA
In early April, we announced that AO3 is exiting open beta!
AO3 has grown and changed a lot since open beta launched in 2009! We’ve gone from 347 users to over 10 million and from 6,598 works to over 17 million. We’ve also introduced many features in that time, including the tag system and tag wrangling, additional privacy settings that allow creators to restrict their works or comments to logged-in users, downloads for offline access to fanworks, and more.
Since AO3’s software has been stable for a long time, this change is mostly cosmetic and doesn’t indicate everything is finalized or perfectly working. Our volunteer coders and community contributors will still be adding to and improving post-beta AO3 every day.
For more information on AO3 exiting open beta, check out the announcement for details.
II. ELSEWHERE AT AO3
In March, we celebrated AO3 reaching 17 million works! \o/
Beyond exiting beta, Accessibility, Design & Technology also performed two important upgrades in March: updating Elasticsearch to version 9 and Ruby on Rails to version 8.1. With these two upgrades, AO3 is on the latest version for two of its most important pieces of software. They also published January’s release notes.
Systems published a postmortem on early March’s AO3 downtime.
Open Doors announced the import of SlasHeaven, a Spanish-language slash fanfiction and fanart archive, as part of their Online Archive Rescue Project.
In February, Policy & Abuse (PAC) received 5,674 tickets, which is over 2,000 fewer tickets than the previous month and marks the first decrease in PAC’s backlog since 2024. PAC also coordinated with Communications on a news post describing various spambots seen on AO3 and how we’re combating them. Also in February, Support received 3,031 tickets, and User Response Translation completed 42 requests from PAC and Support.
Tag Wrangling announced 31 new “No Fandom” canonical tags in their March round-up. On the @ao3org Tumblr, they announced changes to Critical Role fandom tags, creating an overarching fandom metatag for the Exandrian Universe and having specific campaigns or other media split into subtags. They hope these changes will help users better tag and filter for the works they want to see.
In February, Tag Wrangling wrangled over 543,000 tags or approximately 1,200 tags per wrangling volunteer.
III. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW
Communications has updated the OTW News by Email service! You can now subscribe specifically to recruitment posts. If you’re already subscribed to OTW News by Email and would like to change what emails you receive, please contact Communications via their contact form.
In March, Fanlore ran a monthly editing challenge inviting users to archive external links on a page.
Legal answered a number of questions about pending and newly enacted laws around the world, as well as dealing with internal requests from OTW committees.
TWC released No. 47 of Transformative Works and Cultures, a special issue on Gaming Fandom edited by coeditors Hayley McCullough and Ashley P. Jones.
IV. GOVERNANCE
Board and Board Assistants Team continued work on ongoing and newer projects, including making progress on the OTW website project with Communications, supporting Accessibility, Design & Technology with their documentation, and supporting Finance with streamlining messaging policies. They also began preparing for the next public Board meeting scheduled for April 18.
In March, Development & Membership caught up on their recurring donation gifts and put in more regular procedures for them going forward. In conjunction with Communications and Translation, they’re now preparing for April’s Membership Drive by getting graphics and new gifts ready.
V. OUR VOLUNTEERS
Volunteers & Recruiting conducted recruitment for three committees this month: Communications (News Post Moderation), Translation, and User Response Translation.
From February 21 to March 22, Volunteers & Recruiting received 160 new requests and completed 159, leaving them with 66 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below). As of March 22, 2026, the OTW has 992 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.
New Committee Chairs/Leads: Becca Bun and Jules Moon (Fanlore), Rebecca Tushnet and Stacey Lantagne (Legal)
New Communications Volunteers: LinnK, Jahnavi, and 3 other Social Media Moderators
New Fanlore Volunteers: 1 Policy & Admin and 1 Social Media & Outreach
New Open Doors Volunteers: Andrea T and 4 other Import Assistants; Kathy and 1 other Technical Volunteer; adyn, Seren, Claire M, and 2 other Administrative Volunteers; and 1 Liaison
New Organizational Culture Roadmap Workgroup Volunteers: 1 Volunteer
New TWC Volunteers: 1 Symposium Editor
New Volunteers & Recruiting Volunteers: miffmiff, PippaLane, and 2 other volunteers
Departing Committee Chairs/Leads: 1 Open Doors Chair, 2 Fanlore Chairs, and 1 Internal Complaint and Conflict Resolution Lead
Departing AD&T Volunteers: 1 Senior Volunteer and 1 Liaison
Departing Fanlore Volunteers: 1 Social Media & Outreach
Departing Finance Volunteers: 1 Bookkeeper
Departing Open Doors Volunteers: 1 Technical Volunteer
Departing Policy & Abuse Volunteers: 1 Volunteer
Departing Tag Wrangling Volunteers: 4 Tag Wranglers and Soppon (Tag Wrangling Supervisor)
Departing Translation Volunteers: Ito, Polyxeni Foutsitsi, and 3 other Translators; 1 Chair Trainee; and 1 Volunteer Manager
Departing User Response Translation Volunteers: 1 Translator
Departing Volunteers & Recruiting Volunteers: 2 Volunteers
For more information about our committees and their regular activities, you can refer to the committee pages on our website.
(opera_ramblings_feed Apr. 7th, 2026 11:42 am)
opera_ramblings_feed Apr. 7th, 2026 11:42 am)
Way back in 2018 I wrote about a CD called Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of WW2 (though I don’t think I wrote an actual review of the CD… I should fix that). Since then various participants in that project including UoT’s Professor Anna Shternshis plus the members of Payadora Tango Ensemble and Likht Ensemble among others have unearthed more lost songs from the ghettoes, labour camps, DP camps and so on. I’ve written about some of it and some of it features on Payadora’s Silent Tears CD. Other songs were released on the Yiddish Glory Youtube channel during COVID.
Now there’s even more thanks to Professor Anna Shternshis’ ongonig research and there’s a new CD ; Yiddish Glory:: The Silenced Songs of WW2 from the same archive (for the most part) as the earlier album and performed by mainly the same folks. It’s rather different though. While the first album was mainly about resistance and while often pretty grim was essentially hopeful, this one is songs from survivors of the camps and ghettoes and it’s, unsurprisingly, rather more depressing, though not without typically dark Yiddish humour in places.
Musically it’s quite varied. Some tracks get the full on klezmer treatment but most of it is not so upbeat. There are arrangements of folk tunes and a few pieces have very sparse (mainly) piano accompaniment.
It’s very well done. It’s an immensely impressive line up of musicians and the singing and playing is impeccable. It’s very well recorded too and the documentation is incredibly detailed with the provenance of each song as well as texts in Yiddish and English. It’s a digital release on Six Degrees Records available as MP3 or excellent lossless 44.1kHz/24 bit quality in the usual formats.
If one is interested in this music this is a “must have”. Appropriately it’s being released on Friday April 10th; Holocaust Remembrance Day.
(languagelog_feed Apr. 6th, 2026 11:42 pm)
languagelog_feed Apr. 6th, 2026 11:42 pm)Study of 1,700 languages reveals surprising hidden patterns
Languages may seem wildly different, but new research shows they follow surprisingly consistent—and deeply human—rules.
Science News, Max Planck Society (4/5/26)
Summary
A massive new analysis of over 1,700 languages shows that some long-debated “universal” grammar rules are actually real. By using cutting-edge evolutionary methods, researchers found that languages tend to evolve in predictable ways rather than randomly. Key patterns—like word order and grammatical structure—keep reappearing across the globe. The results suggest shared human thinking and communication pressures shape how all languages develop.
FULL STORY
The evolution of a word-order universal on the global language tree. In our analysis of the universal1 “With overwhelmingly greater than chance frequency, languages with normal subject–object–verb order are postpositional”, the absence or presence of the two features defines the ‘state’: state 11 (red) is the prediction made by the universal; in state 00 (black), both features are absent; in states 01 (orange) and 10 (light blue), one feature is absent and the other is present. The ancestral state reconstruction shows that in multiple language families and areas, pathways of language change repeatedly lead to the predicted outcome. Credit: © Verkerk et al. (Nature Human Behaviour, 2025)
Journal Reference:
Annemarie Verkerk, Olena Shcherbakova, Hannah J. Haynie, Hedvig Skirgård, Christoph Rzymski, Quentin D. Atkinson, Simon J. Greenhill, Russell D. Gray. Enduring constraints on grammar revealed by Bayesian spatiophylogenetic analyses. Nature Human Behaviour, 2025; 10 (1): 126 DOI: 10.1038/s41562-025-02325-z
Selected readings
"Where did the PIEs come from; when was that?" (7/28/23) — cf. the extensive bibliographies here for a different methodology, especially in the works of Donald Ringe
"Word-order 'universals' are lineage-specific?" (4/15/11)
[h.t. Dave Thomas]
(otw_news_feed Apr. 6th, 2026 06:12 pm)
otw_news_feed Apr. 6th, 2026 06:12 pm)NOTE: This is a living document and will be updated in response to changes and new types of spam as observed by OTW volunteers.
LAST UPDATED: March 30, 2026
As AO3 continues to grow, there has been an increase in the amount and variety of spambots that attempt to harass or scam users. Spambots may try to imitate other users and even AO3/OTW volunteers to appear more realistic. This post shares a brief update on how we’re working to combat this issue, what types of spam we’ve seen, and what you can do if you encounter spam comments on AO3.
What We’re Doing
Protecting our users from scammers and bots targeting AO3 is important to us, and we are actively working to combat spam on the site in a variety of ways—both visible and not. We will not share a detailed list of every change we’ve made (so as to not provide spammers with information about how to circumvent these measures), but some examples include introducing comment rate limits for logged-in users, changing the default comment setting on new works to “Registered users only”, spam checking comments and comment edits from new users, and making a variety of improvements to the admin tools used by our Policy & Abuse volunteers to handle reports and remove spam comments.
We continue to consider and undertake additional technical changes to help prevent and improve our response to spambots. However, it is important to us that any anti-spam measures we implement do not substantially harm users who are browsing or attempting to comment normally. Many more aggressive anti-spam measures would make AO3 less accessible, particularly for users using assistive devices such as screen readers.
In addition to taking technical steps to help address the issues, we continue to post updates about spambots and other important changes to AO3 on our Tumblr, Bluesky, and Twitter/X. We encourage you to follow us on these platforms to stay informed about what’s going on.
Types of Spam Comments
Below is a list of different types of spam comments that have been posted on AO3 over the last year. We intend to maintain this list and add new types of spam to it as they are identified; however, this list may not include every type of spam comment that could possibly be received. We encourage you to remain vigilant and follow internet safety best practices.
If you’re not sure if something is a spam comment, you’re welcome to contact Policy & Abuse for assistance. Before doing so, we encourage you to click through the links below to learn more about each type of comment and use your best judgement to determine if a comment appears to be genuine or could be a scam.
- Art Commission Spam: These comments come from both guests and registered accounts who pretend to be artists who want to make comics or illustrations for your fanfic. They may ask questions or praise your work to try and get you to reply to them, before convincing you to contact them off AO3 (often via Discord). They will try to scam you into paying for their art, which is either AI-generated or does not exist at all. (First reported August 2024, news post published December 2024)
- Deprecated Fandoms Spam: These guest comments claim that AO3 will be “deleting works to conserve server space”. There is no such thing as a deprecated fandom and there is no limit on the number of fanworks that can be posted to a specific tag. (First reported May 2025, Tumblr announcement May 2025)
- AI Use Accusation Spam: These guest comments will accuse you of using AI in your work. They may mention a particular AI generator or AI detection service, or claim that they “saw you remove the AI prompts from your work”. (First reported April 2023, Tumblr announcement November 2025)
- Harassing Spam: These guest comments will accuse you or another user of promoting discriminatory beliefs, deceiving fans, or similar behaviors. They often suggest that you “consider adding more diverse characters” to “repair the trust you’ve lost with your audience”. (First reported October 2025, Tumblr announcement November 2025)
- Praise and Unsolicited Suggestions Spam: These guest comments will compliment your writing but then offer ridiculous suggestions for how to make your work better. Similar to the harassing spam, they may ask you to add a minority character to your work or threaten to publicly expose you if you don’t do what they want. (First reported October 2025)
- Special Character/Keysmash Spam: These comments are usually long and consist entirely of emojis or nonsense, keysmash-style sequences of characters from a variety of non-Latin scripts or languages (e.g., Chinese, Cyrillic, Thai, etc). (First reported November 2025)
- Reporting To Authorities Spam: These guest comments threaten to report you or your work to the authorities or your employers. They also may allege security concerns like your email being compromised or spyware on your computer. (First reported December 2025, Tumblr announcement December 2025)
- Disparaging Spam: These guest comments insult you or your writing, claiming that you “wasted your talents” or “have no life”. They may also threaten suicide or tell you to delete your work. (First reported December 2025)
- PowerShell Spam: These comments present you with a piece of code to enter into your computer’s terminal/command line. While they claim that the purpose of the code is for your protection or security, the code in these comments would actually delete all documents from your hard drive. (First reported January 2026)
- Doxxing Threat Spam: These guest comments claim that they know where you live, have seen you in person, and/or threaten to meet you face-to-face. They often say that they have or will post your personal information (name, address, etc.) online or that they are stalking you in real life (e.g. “left a gift in a briefcase near your house”). (First reported January 2026, Tumblr announcement January 2026)
- Spam Impersonating OTW Volunteers: These guest comments claim to be AO3/OTW volunteers and say that there has been a data breach or that AO3 and other sites (such as Reddit) have been sending out fraudulent password reset emails. (First reported January 2026, Tumblr announcement February 2026)
- Downtime Spam: These guest comments claim that the March 2026 AO3 downtime was caused by hackers and AO3 has a virus that will destroy your device, and encourage reformatting your device or deleting all your works. (First reported March 2026)
None of the accusations these spam comments make are true. The bots are merely spamming false accusations in order to alarm or harass AO3 users. It is generally safe to ignore these comments once you’ve removed and/or reported them as outlined below.
What You Can Do
Do not engage in conversation with spam commenters. Do not provide your email or social media contact information to a commenter who asks for it. Scammers try to get you to talk to them privately, because it is often easier to deceive or manipulate people in a one-on-one conversation.
Do not click on any links, run any code commands on your computer, or search out and harass any users named in these comments. Scammers often copy the username of a real AO3 user on their guest comments to make them look more real. Pay attention to the “(Guest)” indicator which will appear next to the name of anyone who comments while not logged in.
For spam comments on your own work, the best way to handle them depends on whether they are from registered accounts or guests. Refer to the instructions below on how to handle Spam from a Guest User or Spam from a Registered Account.
If you see a spambot comment on someone else’s work, you can report the comment as spam to Policy & Abuse (even if it’s a guest comment) as you would a comment on your own work. You can also let the creator know the comment is from a bot and that they should mark it as spam.
Please don’t report comments that have already been deleted. As part of handling a report about spam comments (whether from guests or registered accounts), we will remove other comments made by the same bot. If the comments have been deleted, the bot has already been actioned and no further reports are needed.
Spam from a Guest User
If you receive a spambot comment on your work which is posted by a guest:
- Go directly to the comment on your work, either by clicking on the link in your email or in your AO3 inbox.
Note: The “Spam” button only appears when viewing a guest comment directly on your work. This is because the AO3 comment inbox is merely a copy of the work’s comments—deleting a comment from your AO3 inbox does not delete the comment from the work itself.
- Click on the “Spam” button to mark the guest comment as spam, remove it from your work, and help train our automated spam-checker to reject similar spam comments in the future.
Note: Marking guest comments as spam does not submit a report to the Policy & Abuse committee, but unless you are receiving dozens of guest spam comments in a short time period, there is no need to submit a separate report.
To prevent future guest spam comments, you may also want to consider disabling anonymous commenting or restricting your work to registered users only.
If you are reporting multiple guest comments, please submit only one report and include all comment links in your report description. (You can get the direct link to a specific comment by selecting the “Thread” button on the comment and copying the URL of that page.)
If you are receiving dozens of guest spam comments in a short time period, we recommend turning on comment moderation and providing us with a link to the unreviewed comments section of the affected work(s) instead of reporting the comments individually.
Spam from a Registered Account
If the spam comment is posted by a registered AO3 account:
- Select the “Thread” button on the spam comment. This will take you to the specific comment page.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and select Policy Questions & Abuse Reports.
- In the “Brief summary of Terms of Service violation” field, enter “Spambot”.
- In the “Description of the content you are reporting” field, enter “This is a spambot, their username is USERNAME.” (replace USERNAME with the account’s actual username)
- Optionally, you may also choose to block or mute the account.
Please don’t report multiple spam accounts in one report. Each account is actioned separately and listing more than one account per report delays our response to you.
Closing
In general, please follow internet safety best practices and be cautious of unsolicited advertisements or harassing comments on your work. For some advice on other ways you can protect your AO3 account, take a look at this internet security guidance from our Policy & Abuse volunteers.
(perfume_shrine_feed Apr. 6th, 2026 03:00 pm)
perfume_shrine_feed Apr. 6th, 2026 03:00 pm)photo borrowed via pinterestIncense scents are a beloved genre that reads well in springtime for me. Santa Maria Novella's Incenso is one such.
In Incenso, we have a great fusion of personal introspection and pleasurable outward accountability; the composition reads as both zen for a spiritual mood, but not too ecclesiastical or sombre. Beginning with a dense myrrh and rosy-spice mélange that is
In Incenso, we have a great fusion of personal introspection and pleasurable outward accountability; the composition reads as both zen for a spiritual mood, but not too ecclesiastical or sombre. Beginning with a dense myrrh and rosy-spice mélange that is
(larryhammer Apr. 6th, 2026 07:50 am)
larryhammer Apr. 6th, 2026 07:50 am)For Poetry Monday:
Sir Gawain Fucks the Green Knight, Kim Deyn
Here’s a tale ripe for telling. Can’t say where I heard it first—in pretty French or Dutch. Perhaps as a young lady walking longside the Rijn. I’ll spin it for you in an English tongue, fine as frost on lace, sweet as malmsey wine. So it goes that young Gawain, strength kissed into his limbs, fresh as the bright dawn, comes trembling down to the Green Chapel. You’ve heard this tale, I know. His breath makes peach fuzz in the air, fear into him like worm to apple. Christmas Morn is too soon, time is short. You have your own life to save, he says, picking through thorn and bough to an ivy-clad cave.
The creature is the Jack O’ the Glen / forest prince / the wood’s own laughter. Beard of lichen and eyes like dark elder. I need not repeat their exchange—my boy’s flinching heart—a songbird in a rattled cage. It is after the blows are dealt, he asks, what god is worshipped in these green trees? Boy, the Knight replies, boy, were you not just down on your knees?
The Knight is the tang of sap / bark rough and petal soft / everywhere leaves scatter / easily crushed / Gawain clings / hardly knows what he clings to / he is the forest and the flower / a turmoil of roots / where god and tree meet and melt / the birch the oak the fern the deer / mushroom maggot crow / here Gawain is branch and bud / blow returned for blow
Originally published in Queerlings Issue 7 (Apr 2023). I have to wonder whether the initial inspiration was the last line.
---L.
Subject quote from Don’t Leave Me This Way, Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes feat. Teddy Pendergrass (Thelma Houston’s disco cover is admittedly better).
Sir Gawain Fucks the Green Knight, Kim Deyn
Here’s a tale ripe for telling. Can’t say where I heard it first—in pretty French or Dutch. Perhaps as a young lady walking longside the Rijn. I’ll spin it for you in an English tongue, fine as frost on lace, sweet as malmsey wine. So it goes that young Gawain, strength kissed into his limbs, fresh as the bright dawn, comes trembling down to the Green Chapel. You’ve heard this tale, I know. His breath makes peach fuzz in the air, fear into him like worm to apple. Christmas Morn is too soon, time is short. You have your own life to save, he says, picking through thorn and bough to an ivy-clad cave.
The creature is the Jack O’ the Glen / forest prince / the wood’s own laughter. Beard of lichen and eyes like dark elder. I need not repeat their exchange—my boy’s flinching heart—a songbird in a rattled cage. It is after the blows are dealt, he asks, what god is worshipped in these green trees? Boy, the Knight replies, boy, were you not just down on your knees?
The Knight is the tang of sap / bark rough and petal soft / everywhere leaves scatter / easily crushed / Gawain clings / hardly knows what he clings to / he is the forest and the flower / a turmoil of roots / where god and tree meet and melt / the birch the oak the fern the deer / mushroom maggot crow / here Gawain is branch and bud / blow returned for blow
Originally published in Queerlings Issue 7 (Apr 2023). I have to wonder whether the initial inspiration was the last line.
---L.
Subject quote from Don’t Leave Me This Way, Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes feat. Teddy Pendergrass (Thelma Houston’s disco cover is admittedly better).
reddleman (RED-l-muhn) or ruddleman (RUHD-l-muhn) or raddleman (RAD-l-muhn) - n., a dealer in red ocher, used for marking sheep, etc.
Or so the dictionaries, but digging a bit, I learn reddlemen also dug up the ocher and processed it. The spelling ruddleman is most common, but outside of farming communities, most people encounter the word (if they do) from Hardy's The Return of the Native with its major character Diggory Venn the Reddleman, using the typical southwest England version. The word first appears in 1622 in a poem by Michael Drayton (and may have been coined by him) with the raddleman spelling (which is the least common dialect spelling), from reddle/ruddle/raddle, the red ocher itself, which goes back to Middle English form rodel, from rud/rude/rode, red/redness, from Old English rudu, redness, which also gave us ruddy.
---L.
Or so the dictionaries, but digging a bit, I learn reddlemen also dug up the ocher and processed it. The spelling ruddleman is most common, but outside of farming communities, most people encounter the word (if they do) from Hardy's The Return of the Native with its major character Diggory Venn the Reddleman, using the typical southwest England version. The word first appears in 1622 in a poem by Michael Drayton (and may have been coined by him) with the raddleman spelling (which is the least common dialect spelling), from reddle/ruddle/raddle, the red ocher itself, which goes back to Middle English form rodel, from rud/rude/rode, red/redness, from Old English rudu, redness, which also gave us ruddy.
---L.
(opera_ramblings_feed Apr. 6th, 2026 01:20 pm)
opera_ramblings_feed Apr. 6th, 2026 01:20 pm)On Saturday night I saw a double bill of works, inspired by memories of Hong Kong, for percussion, electronics and live video at That Art Box black box theatre on Dupont. It’s quite a large, very black space and for this show there were video screens on two adjacent walls wit the audience placed diagonally across from the corner between them. There were speakers all around and a drum and some other props in the middle of the space. The performers for both works were Thomas Li on stage acting and percussing withTim Roth and Fish Yu in the control booth doing live video and sound.
First up was Three Bagel-tales of DAIWAN by Fish Yu. This consisted of three vignettes about leaving home. In the first it was mostly live video of Thomas running around and mugging the cameras while manipulating various props including what looked like a paintball gun and doing percussion things with a drum, brushes etc while making amplified chattering noises. The second piece involved video of a spa and its staff interspersed with acupuncture charts and live video. There was more percussion and chattering and it got louder and busier as things progressed.
The third piece was a crazy take on a cooking show. Things banged around in a frying pan. Chopsticks chopping on a wood block. There were complex interactions of heavily processed live video and a busy soundscape of what felt like processed found sounds. It built up to a crazy climax with live Thomas cooking while prerecorded Thomas ate take out to an increasingly loud and frenetic soundtrack. Quite a trip really.
The second half of the show was a more reflective piece by Thomas Li and Tim Roth called PEDAL MEMORY. This was a bicycle based homage to Hong Kong past and present. While Thomas cycled around the stage area or made modifications to his bike video of Hong Kong scenes played accompanied by location sound recordings with live video blended in at times and images shifting from screen to screen as Thomas moved around.
Sometimes it was quite “pastoral” with images of cyclists on bike paths, rowers on the harbour, seagulls, a market and so on but it also got more narrative and more pointed. There was (quintessentially British) horse racing cut with Chinese New Year celebrations; the British army’s final parade cut with battles between democracy activists and riot police and so on. It was, perhaps surprisingly, both evocative and moving.
I’ve seen a few pretty experimental shows recently but this one would probably rank as the most far out. It’s terrifically brave and Thomas Li in particular seems absolutely fearless.
(maru_feed Apr. 5th, 2026 11:00 pm)
maru_feed Apr. 5th, 2026 11:00 pm)みりの家族記念にとったみんなの足型。 The footprint of MaruHana&Miri was taken as a family memorial for Miri. みりこれ覚えてる？ Miri […]
(languagelog_feed Apr. 5th, 2026 02:33 pm)
languagelog_feed Apr. 5th, 2026 02:33 pm)This post documents one small step in a larger plan for improved evaluation of prosody in reading. It compares word-level timing in a large number of recordings, from the Speech Accent Archive at GMU, of 3038 people reading the 69-word "Please call Stella" passage. 661 of these people are native speakers of English, with accents from all over the anglophone world, while the remaining 2377 readers have native languages from Afrikaans to Zulu. The reading and speaking level of those non-native readers varies a lot, and many of them have problems in decoding or pronunciation that affect their timing.
Automated analysis of such problems should be useful in foreign-language teaching. And similar analyses might help in early reading instruction for students in anglophone classrooms, whatever their native language.
Let's start with a quick comparison of word-level timing in the 661 native English speakers; the 85 native French speakers; the 99 native Korean speakers; and the 82 native russian speakers.
I calculated word-level time points for those 927 speakers, using a forced-alignment system originally developed many years ago with Jiahong Yuan — a summary of the technology and a few of its application can be found here (open-access version). Here's the output for speaker english1 — note that the segment ID sp means "silent pause".
The key conclusions:
- Time between word onsets gives a good picture of phrase structure, despite the many other effects on timing;
- Individual non-native readers, aside from being overall a bit slower, usually show lengthened inter-word intervals in unexpected places, due to decoding or pronunciation problems.
A crucial point: "time between word onsets" means that any inter-word silent pauses added to the duration of the pre-pausal word. Here's the beginning of the reading by speaker english1, with the inter-word-onset duration for "Stella" indicated in red. (As usual, click on the image for a larger version.)
This merges pre-pausal lengthening with silent pauses (if any), and results in word-level duration measures that geneally reflect the prosodic phrasing. The plot below shows the sequence of 69 median inter-word-onset times for all 661 native English speakers with labels on the 10 largest local peaks:
Please call Stella.
Ask her to bring these things with her from the store:
Six spoons of fresh snow peas,
five thick slabs of blue cheese,
and maybe a snack for her brother Bob.
We also need a small plastic snake
and a big toy frog for the kids.
She can scoop these things into three red bags,
and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.
The local maximum on Wednesday mainly reflects the fact that it's a long word, though it's also at the edge of a phrase. And the final word station is shorter in this measure because there's no following onset to establish the pause duration:
The overall median durations for the French, Korean, and Russian native speakers are similar:
As we expect, the non-native speakers are overall somewhat slower, as shown below in the quantile plot of all inter-word intervals:
However, when we look at the patterns for individual speakers, we see something different. Here's a plots showing the inter-word pattern for speaker russian1, compared to the median pattern for native English speakers:
As you can see, there are some unexpected local maxima, corresponding to places where the speaker's flow is interrupted by reading or pronunciation difficulties. Here's the same thing for speaker russian2, where the unexpected pauses are in different places:
And speaker russian3, who is more fluent than the other two:
It's helpful to compare the first three native English speakers (english1, english2, english3), whose differences are concentrated at the phrase-boundary pauses:
Here are speakers french1, french2, and french3:, who also introduce the problem of false starts, repetitions, and filled pauses (about which more later):
And speakers korean1, korean2, korean3:
This is only a small first step, but it suggests fruitful continuations. In particular, the recent flowering of natural-sounding TTS ("text to speech") technology means that we can calculate a plausible reference pattern for an arbitrary input text, without the need to record human speakers.
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