I see the original post going around every so often and it saddens me a little that it’s never accompanied by this thread explaining why it’s completely understandable how a child would arrive at these spellings in accordance with english phonetics
what are some words that sound like they mean something other than their actual meaning? i’m obsessed with “pulchritude” which means “beauty” but sounds like it’s a measurement of how quickly an animal dies when you poke a hole through it
“lugubrious” describes something that looks sad but sounds like it describes a thick, slow-moving liquid
“bucolic” which sounds like some kind of hacking plague cough but which actually means, like, soft, lovely, pastoral. like when something is called bucolic my instinct is to recoil and then i’m like oh wait that’s like country life or something innocuous. i’m not about to catch something and die horribly.
well I mean you probably will, but at least it will be in bucolic surroundings.
“Natty” sounds like it should mean run-down and shabby, but in fact means neat and tidy.
I always thought hirsute means something like, vaguely intellectual. Like the kinda adjective you can apply to an opinion.
No, it’s hairy. It always was hairy why do I never learn
I’m still convinced it’s spelled hirstute
“doughty” sounds like it means fussy or maybe frumpy (like “dowdy”) but it actually means “brave and persistent”
“dreadnought” is what, “afraid of nothing”? but usually we put “dread” in fantasy names to make them sound scary, like “the dreaded nothing”.
Pusillanimous.
It means cowardly.
It sounds like it should refer to something somewhere on your body that absolutely should not be there and requires medical attention.
Vermillion should be a shade of green, not red (maybe it sounds too much like viridian, which does mean green).
And when I learned that puce means a shade of grayish red/purple, that also felt wrong. Puce should also be green.
“Crepuscular” means of or resembling twilight, but always looks to me like it means something to do with a blood infection or other debilitating bodily condition. (Probably my brain is making a false connection to “corpuscles”.)
“crepuscular” makes me think of geometry, for some reason.
“effervescent” means bubbly, but it makes me think of a cross between sparkly and iridescent.
What are projects for, if not to make them too difficult for yourself? That’s what a great philosopher never said, because he was too busy fucking around with a bunch of weird nerd shit in his shack and never got anything done. If you’re anything like me – and be careful, law enforcement is looking for any warning signs that you are – then you keep racking up new projects, because they seem hard.
This phenomenon goes above and beyond the “pound puppy” syndrome, where you see a dilapidated car or a slightly oceanworn Garfield telephone and want to lovingly nurse it back to a functional state because you feel bad for it. No, you could do a whole lot of those your entire life, and get really good at them to boot. That would probably be a satisfying existence. It is not for me, though.
What I love, like I just said, is the difficult stuff. Broken shit that someone else gave up on? Well, it just so happens that someone really badass just showed up and decided to take it on. It’ll be done in a jiffy, I tell myself, and then descend into hair-pulling madness for between eighteen and forever months of my life. Sometimes this works, of course, and then I emerge from my filthy shed with a working project. Working, that is, as long as you don’t look at it too long or lean on it hard or give it to a small child. And don’t touch that part if you like your fingers.
A psychologist would probably call this evidence of a gambling addiction. However, most of the shrinks around here have given up on me after I electrocuted my last court-ordered. Maybe one in a different town is looking to take on a really difficult project?
OP & craftblr really just went all in and said “the JFK Moon speech, but make it crafts.” I respect that.
Meanwhile at the Oriental Institute in Chicago, a demon is trapped at the centre of an Aramaic curse written on an incantation bowl. You can almost hear the tiny, indignant squawking.
simplicity is overrated. overwhelm me with details, fill the space up with noise, create a universe in a bottle, and let’s set sail. let me burst at the seams with colour and life. it doesn’t matter if it’s sad or bright or fiery or cold, add in a little something, an extra sprinkle of gold. less may be more, but right now, i think we need more.
“I don’t think existence wants you to be serious. I have not seen a serious tree. I have not seen a serious bird. I have not seen a serious sunrise. I have not seen a serious starry night. It seems they are all laughing in their own ways, dancing in their own ways. We may not understand it, but there is a subtle feeling that the whole existence is a celebration.”
