Acquainted With The Night

by Robert Frost

무시무시한

무시무시한 is a Korean word that, transliterated, looks like this: mushimushihan. 

Guess what it means? Hellacious, ghastly, horrific, and many other such synonyms. A word that sounds like "mushy"! (Of course, "Muschi" in German means vagina... You can imagine my classmates' reactions the first time I used the word "mushy" in English class...)

...That's pretty much all I have to say about mushimushihan. I just thought it was a neat word (and "hellacious" as well)! You're welcome?

Shakespearified Modern Slang

This is too good not to share. Here are some modern phrases, and how Shakespeare might have said them. I particularly like "talk to the hand" and "TL;DR" (too long; didn't read). Clever!

Revelation 6:8

Webster's Bible Translation:
And I looked, and behold, a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and hell followed with him. And power was given to them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

Other translations of this particular passage can be found here - it's really interesting to see the small variations. Personally, I like the Webster's Bible translation best, though I prefer the use of "Hades" instead of "hell". I think, following the version above, I like the New International Version best. Any thoughts?

Glaikit and Other Scottish Vernacular

Glaikit is a Scottish word meaning stupid, foolish, thoughtless or vacant. Here it's specified as being used often "of gadgies, minkers and schemies". It seems these nouns are used for people characterised by a lack of intellect, dress sense and money, and generally living in the Central Belt (the area of highest population density in Scotland, including Glasgow and Edinburgh, among others). They are not very kindly described in the above link, and a similar term, "midgie raker", is described as being "a manky, mingin, barkit, bastirt gadgie". From what I could tell, most of those words mean "smelly"!
I highly recommend skimming through the rest of the Scottish Vernacular Dictionary - it's hilarious and wonderful! I particularly like this entry:

Cow:
The worst, the VERY WORST insult you can give a Scots woman is to call her a cow. All other sweary words pale into insignificance beside this most-powerful of derogatory terms.
"Please Miss Magrit-Anne said a bad word"
"What did she say Condoleeza?, you can spell it out if you don't want to swear."
"She said ah wis a fuckin C.O.W. Miss."

Chutzpah

Apropos nothing, the word chutzpah - meaning audacity, self-confidence, courage, temerity, nerve, cheek, effrontery, impudence, presumptuousness, gall - derives from the Hebrew word ḥutspâ (חֻצְפָּה), meaning "insolence", "cheek" or "audacity". The first known use was apparently in 1883. (That's quite a few synonyms there, huh!)

Vocaloid

As put on the official website, "Vocaloid is a technology for singing voice synthesis developed by Yamaha, and the name of this software application. The software allows users to input melody and lyrics in order to synthesize singing. In other words, with this technology, singing can be produced without a singer.".

Luka, Gumi and Miku, three of the most popular Vocaloids.

This software started out small, but had a huge boom in popularity when Hatsune Miku was introduced, a female singer with two very long blue pigtails. Her voice is sampled from Japanese voice actress Saki Fujita, and her name can be read as meaning "first sound future" (hatsu 初, ne 音, miku ミク (a nanori reading of mirai 未来)).

By now there are many, many songs online created by using one of the various digital singers, with some very prominent songwriters, producers and illustrators in the community. The video below, with music and lyrics by Nem, vocals by Vocaloid singers Gumi and Kagamine Len, and art by Tama, is really fun. It has English subtitles, so check it out! The song style is not for everyone (it really does sound synthetic), but the animation is so sweet. It's called "Ah, It's a Wonderful Cat Life":

Now, there are a bunch of artists who cover these songs, and they go by the name of Utaite. However, I'm not very familiar with those artists yet, having only heard a few covers, and the only one I really know is 96neko (96猫), pronounced kuroneko. She has a rather deep voice, which is pleasant (and a bit odd) after listening to high-pitched synthetic singing. It's easy to find compilations on youtube - here's a 1 hour compilation of some of her covers (with videos):

There's also some very good fanart out there, so I've been having a lot of fun exploring in the past few days! I have some more "serious" tabs open, too, so you may next hear about Gilgamesh, sakko (a Japanese geisha hairstyle or German men's jacket, depending on the language you speak), or even flight tickets. Finally booked my flight to the States today, after much poking around. I suppose music's a more interesting topic to post about, but maybe I'll point out the top websites I use. For now, I leave you with vocaloids!

Celtic Songs

When I was younger, I fondly remember listening to a tape called "Women of the World - Celtic". The tape had a lovely compilation of very fine Celtic songs, some sung in English and others in Irish (Gaeilge).

Available on Amazon!

Some kind soul uploaded the songs onto youtube, and I was delighted to find them there! Here's the playlist for Celtic I, and the one for Celtic II. The songs are all wonderful, though of course some are more fond to me than others. (I happen to love Sovay, It Ain't Funny, Home Again In Eireann, Against The Wind, Treasure Island, Dulaman, and Song For Ireland. If you're curious who any of the songs are by, just ask and I'll tell you the artist names if I know them!)

Recently I went hunting for some of these songs/artists on Spotify (a platform for listening to music, for those who don't know) and was frustrated to have to search long and hard before finally finding the version of Dulaman I had grown up with. You see, some of these songs are traditional ones, with either varying text or tune, and particularly of Dulaman there are quite a few different versions! All beautiful, to be sure, but not the one I was looking for.

Other nice versions are by Celtic Woman (a group with beautiful female voices) and Anuna (whose rendition reminds slightly of a Gregorian chant, as they are an all male group), but the version I was looking for was the one by Altan - and thankfully, I did find it in the end.

Basically, Dulaman is about a young man come to court a young woman, but rather than refer to the humans as such, they are called seawead - Irish seaweed (dúlamán gaelach), to be precise. You can read the lyrics here, and listen to the song here; it really is a beautiful song, and I find myself singing it to myself at the oddest of times.

If you have a Spotify account, feel free to check out my playlist of Celtic songs here!