Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]

An anarchist here to ask asinine questions about the USSR. At least I was when I got here.

she/xe/it/thon/seraph | NO/EN/RU/JP

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 18th, 2023

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  • Hahahhahahahahahha, yeah marge as in margarine. It’s not necessarily a standard term for it in my GenAm ass dialect but it is used in e.g. Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, Irish, and most notably British English, and I liked the sound of it, so I just decided to start calling margarine marge. Both Marge as in Marjorie Bouvier Simpson and marge as in margarine ultimately trace to an Ancient Greek word meaning “pearl”, as do the names of pizza Margherita and the margarita cocktail.





  • Sorry, you’ve misread the page, it’s actually claiming the exact opposite.

    Etymology sections in dictionaries can be kind of confusingly phrased sometimes, so I’ll break it down:

    also goddamn, late 14c.

    This means that the phrase “God damn” has been around in the English language since the late 14th century.

    from God + damn (v.).

    This means the phrase actually is, straightforwardly, from the English words “God” and “damn”.

    Goddam (Old French godon, 14c.) was said to have been a term of reproach applied to the English by the French.

    This part is saying that Frenchmen supposedly corrupted the English phrase “God damn” into godon (and variants like goddam, goddem) as a derogatory term for Englishmen — apparently mocking Englishmen for being foul-mouthed or uncouth, i.e. that Englishmen say “God damn!” so often that it might as well be their name.

    Hence French godan “fraud, deception, humbug” (17c.).

    This is to say that that French-language derogatory term for Englishmen, about three hundred years after the phrase “God damn” first entered the English lexicon, came to take on a new meaning in French of “fraud, deception, humbug”.







  • Well, I should note that the situation for myself is that my mom’s first language is American English, and her second language is Norwegian, and my dad was the reverse, however both he and my mom mainly spoke English to me growing up. So I ended up growing up with both English and Norwegian, but because of the language dynamics in my family and in Norway in general, and because I was comparatively socially isolated for a long time, and because of various feedback loops, my Norwegian skills ended up basically “lagging behind” my English skills. This means that my idiolect in Norwegian has a number of prominent proscribed or eccentric features. So that’s something to keep in mind for when I put my Norwegian through this Swedish “filter” — that the Norwegian being filtered is itself already “Americanized” for lack of a better term.

    Russian and Japanese are two languages that I have self-studied for a number of years. Neither of them are really up to the level I’d like, but I can still take pride in the effort I’ve put in and how far I’ve gotten, because even if my progress is slow compared to some learners, most hobbyist learners burn out and quit way sooner, right? Esperanto was one language that I tried to learn but quickly gave up on, but I’ve recently restarted learning that, and I hope and frankly expect that this time around I’ll make it to a much higher level, and it’ll become the fifth language I’ll say I can speak. And there are other languages still that I’d like to try my hands at eventually, and I’ve also been conlanging as a hobby for about a decade already, and languages are fuzzy things anyways, so just like anyone else I can sometimes understand individual words or sentences in languages I’ve never studied.



  • For whatever it’s worth, despite never formally studying Chinese, I managed to read both the Chinese sentences, albeit with the wrong tones. Like to be fair I have studied Japanese, and I am generally a bit of a weirdo with a knack for this sort of thing — but I do still have to wonder if more people are just going to start casually picking up hanzi just from exposure like I have, as China becomes more prominent. I could certainly see it happening.

    “China is the future” is a bit of a vague question, though. Just from my interpretation of it…

    I absolutely think that the USA is currently crumbling as the world’s hegemon — interestingly enough, the USA’s flag actually has stars on it to represent a “new constellation”, using the constellations in the sky as an allegory for the rise and fall of nations; so it indeed seems like the fifty-star constellation is beginning to fall beyond the horizon, as a new five-star constellation rises.

    This being said, I don’t think China’s behavior as future hegemon will be the same as the USA’s current behavior as present hegemon. I don’t necessarily know what to expect from the future, though, so it’s probably best to prepare for all possibilities until we gain a clearer understanding of the situation.