(no subject)

Body, I am disappoint.

So, yeah. There was no language yesterday because I was sleeping off one of those head colds that blows up your sinuses like little snotty balloons inside your face, presses against your teeth and your orbital sockets, and generally makes a misery of your life. Not quite to Oscar Wilde die-and-your-face-deflates proportions, but close. There will be no language today. Instead you get two rambles.

One, Neil Gaiman is awesome. I know, I know, and water is wet, but he really is awesome. I was rereading an old Nano pep talk of his earlier today (found here) and got to the part about his agent's response to his dire predictions of how terrible the novel would be and no one would want to read it, and about pissed myself laughing. Because I do that. And then my friend take's the agent's role of oh, you're at that part are you? And then sometimes my friends do that and I take their role. And it becomes ten times funnier when you're outside of it and watching it happen to other people. Particularly published writers. Double particularly with extra bonus whinging points when it's immediately post-rejection letter I mean what are you talking about. Ahem. I'm not thinking about that because I'm doing well and it didn't happen and I have other projects to work on anyway. Like self-publishing. Gleep.

So, Neil is awesome. Also because he got Adam Savage and Gollum on the phone with Gollum singing I Will Survive. No, really. It happened. It's like a bunch of fangirls, and not even LotR or Mythbusters fangirls or anything, just generic fangirls if such a creature exists, got together at 2 in the morning with the possible addition of margaritas and started talking. And then it actually happened.

Ahem. Two, is that the internet does really fucked up things to language. It's like the port city phenomenon where you have half a dozen different major languages, twice that many dialects or dialect groups, all smashed together into five or six different trade pidgins. Only faster. And bigger. The language shifts are, I think, faster. The colloquialisms change faster. There's more niche subgroups that use certain words, some of which migrate, so I guess that's a little like dialect drift, isn't it? Which means you then get people like Rachel Maddow sniggering endlessly over the Teabagger movement because they didn't know what teabagging meant to a small section of the populace. And suddenly now it's popular lingo. Or maybe popular isn't quite the word to apply to the use of 'teabagging' in that way, but you know what I mean. At least I hope you do. It's lonely down here in the gutter.

Anyway. This ramble about internet and linguistics brought to you by speculation on whether "I am amuse" is the correct opposite of "I am disappoint." (The answer is, it's "I am excite.") I don't even know where "I am disappoint" came from. But I know what it means.

In other news, I have somehow ended up co-modding witchesbigbang. Fear. And then join. But mostly fear.