What's the news! Hope everything is great with you. It's about to become even better because I have a Fem Fri about linguistics for you. Plenty to enjoy here so let's dive right in.
This was inspired by reading a mini-obit of Lila Gleitman in The Economist. She was a vanguard woman scholar who built her career in the sixties when she had some fairly small children, one of whom inspired her research into how children learn and process language. Check this out, it's very cool:
As the learning process goes on, children deploy some remarkable strategies. They often seem to correctly guess what a word means after hearing it just once. The physical environment is an obvious spur (as when they hear “dog” and see one at the same time). But how would a child guess the meaning of the verb in “I believed that he lost his keys”? Gleitman noticed that the sentence structure is identical to those with other verbs that mean similar things (ie, refer to states of mind): saw, remembered, imagined, forgot, worried and doubted. More broadly, it turned out that verbs which are similar in meaning tend to turn up in similar sentence structures. This intuitive aid helps children learn astonishingly quickly, a process she called “syntactic bootstrapping”.
Jane Setter works in phonetics, and has written a book you would enjoy called Your Voice Speaks Volumes. Here, however, she tackles something that has bothered me for a long time, which is whether the sort of bready cake thing you have with cream and jam is pronounced "skoan" or "skon". My parents moved from a very-skoan place to a very-skon place and i was h o r r i f i e d when as a family we shifted from saying skoan to saying skon! I'm still not in love with it tbh. Here's a map and an interview:
“Our language continually reshapes itself,” she says. “New words appear. In addition, pronunciations of existing words alter. The word trap used to be pronounced more like ‘trep’, for example. Similarly pat was pronounced more like ‘pet’. Changes like these have been tracked in our dictionary for a century now – though very often when we detect changes, we really don’t understand why they have taken place.”
How are you. I'm back! Thank you Margo for a super Fem Fri last week. I had a lovely holiday, which included a trip to Wookey Hole caves where I saw an amazing/horrifying film about cave diving. DID YOU KNOW that more people have been on the moon than have been to Chamber 25 of Wookey Hole which is, literally, just there (gestures westward)?
As a treat this week, I have done a search for women cave divers and their amazing acheivements. It's a treat because it means that you, personally, do not have do do an internet search for "cave diving" which pretty quickly turns up articles called, for instance, TWENTY FIVE HORRIBLE CAVE DIVING ACCIDENTS YOU HAVE TO READ ABOUT NOW.
I mean, you get a sense of the danger from this interview with Christine Grosart, who is here talking about Wookey Hole. If you are claustrophobic, I'd honestly advise you to delete this email now, go through to the kitchen and make a nice cup of tea. Fem Fri will be about something different next week:
When I returned through the penultimate sump, which leads back to the dry Chamber 24, I couldn’t get back through the hole in the boulders I had come through. I had 4 bottles on and the hole was a different shape on the way home. In zero visibility I had several attempts but just kept getting jammed. I sat and thought about it for a bit. I could return back to the ‘Lake of Gloom’- a large airbell between sumps - but by which time I would not have enough gas to make another attempt and would have a very, very long wait for help which may or may not come. Or I could take some bottles off which would leave me with less gas. Or I could just keep trying.
Christine Grosart has also made a short (25m) film about cave diving in Croatia, which is a fantastic place so lots to enjoy here (again, if you are not claustrophobic):
Now here is Jill Heinerth, who has done some pretty extreme diving including under icebergs! It sounds beautiful and scary:
Icebergs are constantly moving and morphing, calving and rolling. The dives were unpredictable and risky. On the first exploration of an iceberg cave, Paul and I cautiously entered a deep underwater crevasse and found a gaping fissure that extended out of sight, and sheer white walls dropped interminably in a narrow crack. We swam into the fracture a good distance and drifted down to the seafloor. As we hit 39 meters, we discovered that the berg was undercut and we could continue our swim below the mass. We found a dazzling world of colorful tunicates [marine invertebrates], sea stars and curious creatures.
Hello! As promised/threatened last issue, I’m not Alex, instead I am your guest editrix Margo, usually found over in the archipelago of newsletters at http://tinyletter.com/threeweeks.
Of all the glorious subjects that I could cover, I have settled on housework. Domestic chores have long been one of the most unifying issues in feminist thought, as who among us hasn’t stared at a sink full of dirty dishes and considered rising up against the patriarchy just to avoid doing them?
Oregon artist Frances Gabe was clear-eyed on the issue, saying of housework, “It’s a nerve-twangling bore. Who wants it? Nobody!”
But Gabe didn’t just complain about doing laundry only to end up making a little nest out of dirty clothes to sleep in (not that I speak from experience. I’m immaculate). She invented a home that cleaned itself. Using different mechanisms across the house, made up of 68 separate inventions, she had self-cleaning rooms, cupboards, sinks, a loo, and a special cabinet for clothes washing. Built in the 1980s, it was a brief media sensation, but despite her best efforts she’d never see another one like it built. The New York Times wrote a celebratory obituary for Gabe after she passed away at 101: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/18/us/frances-gabe-dead-inventor-of-self-cleaning-house.html (alternative link: https://archive.ph/da12U). In a better world she would be twice as famous as Elon Musk and far richer.
Scale model of the Self-Cleaning House. Note the run-off pool on the bottom floor, also used as a dog bath
But one woman’s nerve-twanging bore can be another’s source of delight. In her poem Wednesday Afternoon, Karlo Mila witnesses it in her childhood home:
Sometimes doing “chores” is just a good excuse to get left the hell alone for a few moments. Even when we all have self-cleaning houses, I hope we can find spaces like the one in this painting by Mary Whyte, where we can look busy but just vibe out.
Hope you're well and happy this Friday morning. I have the day off today, and maybe I am wishing instead that I was in meetings because that seems to be what Fem Fri is about. Please keep reading as these are actually two of my favourite articles of recent times.
Firstly, I've been getting so much out of Sara Hendren's thinking, and so much clicked into place for me when I read her post about the "believing game" – assuming the best of an idea for a set period of time. This is a really fun thing to do and a good way to engage with the world and new possibilities. I keep trying to work it into work interactions that I have, let me know if you find a good way of using it:
But believing […] is a separate muscle entirely, a willed and practiced capacity to assume some idea in a text, or some possible technical choice, or some inkling held before a group, is worth considering as if it were full of truth, for a set amount of time. It’s not just the “yes, and” approach that improv-style brainstorming is famous for. Believing is granting some interpretation of what’s at hand a provisional but deep sense of rightness. For a set amount of time. For that time—for the length of the believing game—your whole self is devoted to this idea, to see if the space and breathing room you give it helps you to see it in its full possibility.
I also loved this article about coming out to your parents via powerpoint, which is the best of both funny and sincere. A proper Friday treat, click through for the whole thing:
I approached coming out as many people approach their wedding day: something that is designated “for me” in name, but also a performance in service of my loved ones. It was right for me. Using a slide deck allowed me to take control of a potentially awkward conversation, clarify in straightforward terms what I anticipated from them and use the simultaneous absurdity and aggressively on-branded-ness of the presentation format to add humor to the situation.
I've been reading Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey, and it's so good. The translation itself, but the introduction was also full of things I hadn't thought about and new ways to think about things I had. In a tribute to her work, this week's Fem Fri is about women who have translated the Classics.
Firstly, here's an interview with Emily Wilson that covers some of the things I've been enjoying in her work – the immediacy and, related I suppose, the desire to tell the story that she makes very felt throughout her work:
I used “modern times” for the Greek kai hemin “also for us.” So what does “also” mean, and who are “us?” I spent a huge amount of time grappling with how to deal with that. Because I could have just said “also for us,” but that doesn’t evoke anything particular. I wanted it to be clear that this—the conjunction kai, or “and” [denotes it]—has been something that has been told over and over again, but we, whoever we are, are going to get it. There have been other times this poem has been told, and now again for us, here is this time.
Now here's Alice Oswald's Memorial, which is a translation of the Illiad that focuses on the less famous people from the Illiad. A lot of people die in that poem who are not (spoilers, I guess) Hector, Patroclus or Achilles! her project is to foreground their stories. This is an interview but there's also some excerpts from the poem:
the passage of two millennia does nothing to soften the impact of all those lost lives, significant and unique and suddenly ended, which pile up as the poem progresses: "EPICLES a Southerner from sunlit Lycia" who was "knocked backwards by a rock/ And sank like a diver"; "AXYLUS son of Teuthras" who "so loved his friends" but "died side by side with Calesius/ In a daze of loneliness"; "POLYDORUS … who loved running/ Now somebody has to tell his father/ That exhausted man leaning on the wall/ Looking for his favourite son". The poem is structured like a lament, the soldiers' epitaphs interspersed with direct translations of Homer's extended similes
Shadi Bartsch's translation of the Aeneid, like Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey, uses only the number of lines in the original poem. This side by side shows the impact of that choice really nicely:
Take one popular and acclaimed translation, published by Robert Fagles in 2006. Fagles gives the epicʼs opening this way, making three lines into four:
Wars and a man I sing—an exile driven on by Fate,
he was the first to flee the coast of Troy,
destined to reach Lavinian shores and Italian soil,
yet many blows he took on land and sea from the gods above
In contrast, Bartschʼs translation tracks with the lines of the original, and reads with a decided punch:
There's also a good, longish article about Bartsch's translation here:
For all that pietas is a recurring word in the Aeneid, the clustering within these few lines of two instances of ‘piety’ and another of ‘pious’ is marked; our response to Aeneas’ actions and reactions is insistently framed by the word, the ideals it evokes, the way it may be mocked or exploited, and the question of whether virtue resides in character or is only realised through what someone does or doesn’t do.
I hope you're having a lovely Friday. I am, and I have a quite cool Fem Fri for you – it's a look at a women's magazine from July 1924, McCall's. It was a monthly magazine, aimed (as you will see) at quite young women, what they would at the time have called the young married set.
We know that they were in pretty much the middle of the Roaring Twenties, so does that mean that McCall's is all about the latest jazz, where to buy bootleg whiskey, the most daring vers libre? No it does not. Here's the opening article, a super judgemental piece called Educating Mother, on that perennial theme: YOUNGS ARE BAD. Based on the rest of the magazine I can only assume that this was what we now know as a "hate read":
Here's the pullquote:
You'll notice above the reference to fathers as suppliers of money only; note in this illustration of a later short story how supremely non-arsed the father looks at the prospect of his daughter motoring out to Stamford to marry Mark tomorrow morning:
Okay yes of course there is a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald in this issue, I am not just buying stuff at random. This is an incredibly charming story of his, I would rate it nine out of ten Zeldas, here's a picture of the eponymous spoilt heiress wearing a monocle as an affectation:
It's July now, so maybe this is relevant content; your guide to summer hospitality with lists!
Your basics for entertaining:
Why not go a little bigger this summer:
Big summer funtimes, 1924 style. Note that you can write in for a booklet entitled "Entertaining Without a Maid":
I just love this picture of a young woman lecturing a dog about housework. Airdales must have been a trendy dog breed in the 1920s, it's the dog Myrtle (is told she) buys in Gatsby:
Frocks! Beautiful 1920s frocks. I'm glad I don't live in this era as it's hard to imagine I'd look good in clothes like this. These ladies do though:
Finally, it's the section we all love; problem pages.
Mrs Wilcox wanted her advice to "bear the mark of modernity with some atoms of common sense":
Cheating: fine or nah:
HELP ME I'M TRAPPED IN A SCOTT FITZGERALD NOVEL:
I hope you have enjoyed this leaf through a magazine with me. I hope you have a beautiful weekend planned.
It's the time of year when I want to sit on a hill and drink mead, perhaps you are feeling the same? If so, here's a suggested soundtrack and some spooky stuff from the Nordics, where they know about long summer days.
This is a traditional Danish folk song, sung by Agnes Buen Garnas. It's really beautiful, my family got it on a free CD when they bought something else so I know relatively little about it, including what Målfri Mi Fruve actually means. Google translate is useless here. If you know Old Danish, I'd love a translation! And if you don't, this is still a lovely song:
Of course the hills I'd be sitting on would be in well populated and well lit areas, so I don't need to think about this, but here's an article on the scary ladies (or lady adjacent creatures) of the Scandinavian forests:
In Norway, the word huldrefolk or huldre (plural) derived from Old Norse huldr ‘hidden’ is used for all kinds of supernatural beings, sighted and talked about by the folk. Hulder, or Huldra in the singular, signifies a female forest spirit, even though she might as well appear in mountains. This is the same line of thinking that we find in Swedish folk tradition, were the forest spirit act and appear alone, not a part of a collective or families of supernatural beings, like vittra. In northern Sweden, the name vittra refers to a group of supernatural beings that lives underground that have many traits in common with fairies from folklore of the British Isles, as well as with the ellefolk in Danish tradition or the huldrefolk in Norwegian tradition.
Even scarier, today I found out the origins of the word nightmare! A mare is a frightening female spirit that sits on your chest as you sleep. Did you all know this already? I can't believe I've spent so much time thinking hmmmmm nightmare is a weird word! Wish I knew the origins of that one! when I could have looked it up and got a cool answer:
The root of the English word “nightmare” is the Old English maere. In Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, a mara was something known to sneak into people’s rooms at night, plop down on their bodies, and give them bad dreams. When the mare came to visit, the victim would feel a heavy weight—it might start at the feet, but it always settled on the chest—and lose the ability to move.
How are you doing! I hope all is well. I hope you've got something good on at the weekend, even if it's just pottering around quietly doing tasks. And before that happy time, here's a Fem Fri about the amazing women of mushrooms.
Lynne Boddy has devoted her life to mushroom research and found out (amongst other things) that they will design motorways like it's not even a big deal:
The mycologist Lynne Boddy once made a scale model of Britain out of soil, placing blocks of fungus-colonised wood at the points of the major cities; the blocks were sized proportionately to the places they represented. Mycelial networks quickly grew between the blocks: the web they created reproduced the pattern of the UK’s motorways (‘You could see the M5, M4, M1, M6’).
Anna Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World looks at capitalism through the lens of matsuke mushrooms, and here you can read her talking about how much you can find out about them with just your own senses. So yes you can definitely build scale model of Britain playgrounds for them, but there's no obligation:
You have to go underground. Under the ground, the social relations of plants and of fungi are at their most active and visible. If you want to see what I call “the city,” a dynamic scene where all kinds of organisms are working together, you can't stay above ground. When I was writing The Mushroom at the End of the World—an investigation into the matsutake’s ability to survive even in human-disturbed environments—I assumed that you needed complex skills and microscopes to see that underground world. What I didn’t realize is that you can learn a whole lot about the social life of fungi and trees with your own eyes and nose.
Of course we've not even spoken yet about how good mushrooms are to eat. Here's Chido Govera in a long interview about how transformative mushrooms have been for her community in Zimbabwe and beyond:
the power of mushrooms to transform waste into something positive is an analogy for how she has chosen to live her life. “I grew up in a community where it was easy for me to think that I would amount to nothing, almost like waste. Growing mushrooms in waste taught me that if I convert corn stalks into something valuable and profitable like mushrooms, I can convert my life from what it is today into something much better. That has really helped me change my perspective of how far I can go, what I can achieve.”
By the way I wanted to call this episode Shroooooooooooooms but also didn't want to get caught by your spam filters. Still, the intention was very much there.
I've been preparing to re-emerge into the world, which means that I've been thinking a lot about fashion and new pretty dresses. It's been fun! I suppose I'll let you know how the re-emerging into the world goes but at least the new pretty dresses are great. Here's a Fem Fri that's all about fashion and looking nice.
One really important part of the Fem Fri rubric is steering away from the genre (fairly huge, I guess) of articles that have the basic form THAT THING YOU LIKE: IT'S BAD. You might think that this article on Kate Winslet's hair in Mare of Easttown, but it's absolutely not – it's a really great invite into different ways of thinking about that show and standards of white female beauty:
It seems, from the photo in the Register (which features Mare’s face, not her famed basketball shot) that Mare was blond in high school (sun in?), so it could be that since then she’s either maintained or recreated that look; she’s pretty blond when Kevin and Carrie corner her in the bathroom. I think of Mare as someone not great about roots at the best of times — defining herself against her mom, who clearly gets her hair “rinsed” on the regular — but that just makes the blond more interesting. We could ask Brianna for her read on Mare’s hair, maybe; since Brianna’s post-crime back-up plan is to go to cosmetology school and do the hair of “rich main line women” and since she is mean, Brianna could likely generate some pointed observations about Mare’s grooming.
Of course, I'm talking about going out into the world like that's a cause for non stop excitement and joy, OBVIOUSLY I'M FEELING AMBIVALENT TOO, I'M NOT A ROBOT. Reductress has a guide to nude lipsticks that addresses ways through some of the things we might be feeling, for example, how can I maintain the alluring mystery that a face mask offers?
If you’ve gotten used to always wearing a mask such that technically no one knows if you have a mouth or not, and you want to keep that mystery going, then try this nude lip crayon.
From 
Here's the pullquote:
