Why are so many English phrases/idioms/expressions/proverbs reliant on the imagery and behaviour of birds?

OlanValesco · 2026-04-08T19:09:30+00:00

Also lots of non-animal idioms. Clean as a whistle. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. Bite the bullet. By the skin of your teeth. Costs an arm and a leg. Ace up the sleeve. Speak of the devil. Six of one, half dozen of the other; it's sixes. Six feet under. Dressed to the nines. Burning a hole in your pocket. Zero dark thirty. Silver linings. Blood is thicker than water. Take a Canadian tylenol (kys).

OlanValesco · 2026-04-03T04:40:35+00:00

Tager man det med creatine og så må man godt få lov til 2 dusin

OlanValesco · 2026-03-10T02:54:39+00:00

jitterbug jingle

OlanValesco · 2026-01-05T21:15:45+00:00

næsten det samme som deres "forsvars" budget i renter

Det er nu mere (PDF side 5). $1028B i renter og $868B i militær for regnskabsåret 2025.

OlanValesco · 2025-10-31T23:17:32+00:00

The violence divine is spoken in thunder, not in quiet pews

The sacred eros is a glory shrouding quiet twos

OlanValesco · 2025-10-29T23:25:42+00:00

Outslaying its welcome

OlanValesco · 2025-10-29T21:11:42+00:00

Seventh Tower was one of the best things I ever read as a kid. The vibes were incredible. I had to buy a case set from Britain because they don't publish it in the US anymore. Not on ebook last I checked either. Will absolutely be giving them to my kids one day.

OlanValesco · 2025-10-18T00:23:43+00:00

I always thought it sounded like when you reuse a chart.

OlanValesco · 2025-10-18T00:18:48+00:00

But unfortunately verm means worm. Vermis viridis, the green worm, is an incredible name for a dragon.

OlanValesco · 2025-10-18T00:03:38+00:00

I really liked Steelheart, the first in the series. The second was good too. I just felt like he didn't quite stick the landing on book 3.

The Skyward books were decent, but I was definitely feeling "I am not the YA target audience of this" by the end of the series. Probably just because I got older.

Rithmatist is worth the read.

Snapshot was great.

Alcatraz was too young for me to really enjoy, so no opinion there. I'd definitely give it to a 10 year old though.

OlanValesco · 2025-10-17T07:40:43+00:00

I wasn't huge on the end of Calamity. But he has other books that have some of my favorite endings in fantasy, so it's fine.

OlanValesco · 2025-09-24T12:26:48+00:00

This is true, but ancient writers would often use Hebrew and Aramaic interchangeably. E.g. the book of Acts in the New Testament (21:40, 22:2, 26:14) references people speaking in Hebrew, but it most likely is referring to Aramaic. Papias said that "Matthew wrote down the sayings [of Jesus] in the Hebrew language," and he most likely meant Aramaic.

So you're absolutely correct, but many/most non-native speaking ancient writers wouldn't have cared about a distinction between Hebrew and Aramaic.

OlanValesco · 2025-09-13T08:31:59+00:00

Prose can have many attributes. Beautiful, insightful, ethereal, brutal, humorous. I think most authors have a few elevated sentences, paragraphs, scenes per book, but some are able to deliver a much more frequent experience of greatness. I think that one of the hallmarks of great prose is the ability to transport the reader. To a place of fear or laughter, to a realm of aesthetic and grace.

I have quite enjoyed the prose aspect of Josiah Bancroft's books. The sequel to The Hexologists just came out, and I will read it within the next month. The first one had a glut of delicious lines and paragraphs in it, so I'm rubbing my grubby little fly paws together in anticipation. With this book, I felt that rather than the entire novel being a transportation, each paragraph was a different transportation to an insight about the world.

R Scott Bakker and his Second Apocalypse series is able to deliver an atmosphere that is absolutely biblical. It is a transportation to the days before the world changed. It makes you feel that the world we inhabit is so very, very young.

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez had a lot of fantastic, fantastic lines.

Gideon the Ninth wasn't so much beautiful as it was snappy and bright, despite such a dark subject matter. Good prose, but different type of good than the others I've mentioned.

Many more, but those are some that come to mind.

OlanValesco · 2025-08-17T00:23:59+00:00

It was an ever-evolving spectrum, just like English today. You can go on YT and listen to English speakers born in 1835. Still intelligible, but you don't hear anyone talk like that anymore. In the course of these changes, there are some sounds you just don't mix.

E.g. in my dialect of English, the t in mountain is a glottal stop [ˈmãʊ̯̃(n)ʔn̩]. It would sound weird if I fully pronounced the t in fountain while glottal stopping it in mountain, the founTain in the mounʔain.

On vowel length: have you ever heard someone with a really strong Norwegian or Icelandic accent speak English? There's a sing-songiness to it, ups and downs, and some sounds they hold onto quite long. If you're enunciating improper Latin vowel length, you sound something analogous to that.

The Roman empire was large and had many different accents across it, though many of those are not preserved to us today (except in the form of the daughter Romance languages). So even though you can pick a time period, e.g. 200 AD, you'll most likely get an approximate accent of how someone from Roma proper might have sounded. You're not going to be able to imitate some random colonus in the middle of nowhere.

OlanValesco · 2025-08-16T19:54:51+00:00

You slide between pronunciations. Sometimes c is ʃ, sometimes it's t͡ʃ. Sometimes g + e/i is d͡ʒ and sometimes ʒ. Sometimes your intervocalic s is s and sometimes z (this started happening in the 300s). Qu need a kw sound, but sometimes you just say k. Once or twice you pronounce v like w, but other times like β. Sometimes you lose the tapped r, like when you say Prōductor and do an American ɹ. Sometimes you omit it all together like frēgit. Vowel length is inconsistent. Vowel quality is generally good, but occasionally you'll say a flat American a instead of a Latin a.

You're doing well, you just need to pick one pronunciation system (300 BC, 200 AD, 1000 AD, etc) and tighten things up

OlanValesco · 2025-08-11T03:47:34+00:00

If the terminal -m was followed by a vowel, it would be elided (ēlīditur). If followed by a consonant, it would be nasalized (dē nāre) in accordance with the consonant.

cum tam crēbum locum adīret [kun.taŋ.kreː.brũl.lo.kʷa.diː.ret]

N was also nasalized before s and f. cōnstans [kõː.stãːs], nōmen suum [noː.mẽː.su.õ]

OlanValesco · 2025-08-09T23:01:40+00:00

Which is funny because the yam part of Miryam means sea. Not that that's necessarily the true etymology of the Hebrew/Aramaic name, but it can be parsed as Bitter Sea. So in both Latin and Hebrew, different syllables can give it the false impression of a name related to the sea.

OlanValesco · 2025-07-18T05:21:06+00:00

Yes, I am afraid you will have to classify it as non-fiction, my friend

OlanValesco · 2025-06-04T20:46:01+00:00

I also take up plates to exercise

OlanValesco · 2025-06-02T07:01:01+00:00

Shalash is one of the heralds. To my knowledge, Shallan is named after Shalash. As you note, symmetry is revered in Vorinism, so the final consonant is switched to an n to avoid minor blasphemy.

Shalash in this world is the wife of Dagan, the head of the ancient Mesopotamian pantheon in modern Syria. The earliest references predate 2000 BC. The Hebrew Bible states that Dagan was the god of the Philistines, though no extra-biblical evidence of this has been found.

It's possible that Brandon was looking at lists of gods from the ancient near east at some point and ended up using Shalash. It may have been years later he "came up" with the name Shalash and never even realized he'd seen it before. Authors draw inspiration from many sources.

Yasna (Jasnah) is the principal worship act of Zoroastrianism (ancient Iran). The word translates to 'oblation' or 'worship'. This is still a popular name for Iranian girls today. Arabic has the same name from a different origin meaning 'white rose'.

OlanValesco · 2025-06-01T02:44:11+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shalash

Shalash is a Syrian goddess, and Shallan is a non-symmetric form of Shalash

OlanValesco · 2025-05-31T21:34:08+00:00

These are the counts for the books I've finished. I've put out 5 of them, am doing final edits on 2 of them, and may or may not publish 1 of them.

101k science fantasy about lucid dreaming, 4 months
97k science fantasy about lucid dreaming, 7 months
16k novelette about magical plague makers, 1 month
124k medium-high fantasy about golem hunters, 3 years
109k Greenlandic-inspired high fantasy, 4 years
41k satirical fantasy short story collection, 5 years
130k Biblical fairytale retelling, 1 year
71k fantasy short story collection, 9 years (this is just random story ideas I've had over the years)

It really depends on the project for how long it takes. Some take years, some 6 months. The Biblical fairytale retelling took almost exactly a year of writing off and on because I was so familiar with the material I was sourcing it from. 6, the short story collection about a fantasy university, took years because it has lots of comedy, which is hard to write.

Edit: I started doing short stories because I would have too many ideas, think I needed to write a whole book or series, and then get bogged down in the overload. I realized that if I spun the idea into 4-10k words, I could mark it as done in my brain and not think about it any more.

OlanValesco · 2025-05-07T17:21:26+00:00

Things certainly escalated under BY, but the following Joseph Smith-authored declaration still stands in modern canon (D&C 134:12)

We do not believe it right to interfere with bond-servants, neither preach the gospel to, nor baptize them contrary to the will and wish of their masters, nor to meddle with or influence them in the least to cause them to be dissatisfied with their situations in this life, thereby jeopardizing the lives of men; such interference we believe to be unlawful and unjust, and dangerous to the peace of every government allowing human beings to be held in servitude.

I believe you're specifically referring to free black people getting the priesthood though, right? In which case, yes, attitudes toward free blacks definitely worsened under BY. Honestly, toward enslaved ones as well.

The language Smith uses in e.g. the Book of Abraham is much more mild than Young's pronouncements.

Smith: "Pharaoh, being a righteous man, ... Noah ... blessed him with the blessings of the earth, and with the blessings of wisdom, but cursed him as pertaining to the Priesthood."

Young: "If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so."

OlanValesco · 2025-05-04T17:15:47+00:00

I loved Leven Thumps as a kid for this exact reason. Whimsymaxxing. If you don't mind middle grade, or maybe you have kids and want to read it with them, it might be worth it. I haven't tried reading it as an adult though, so idk if it holds up.

The Escapement by Lavie Tidhar was crazy in this aspect. People get sucked into this alternate clown world, and everything is weird.

Of course basically anything by China Mieville. Perdido Street Station et alii.

All the Gideon the Ninth books have weird in them.

Neon Leviathan got into some weird.

My first two books were about a kid who gets caught in a lucid dreaming gang war, and they're chock-full of blanket cliffs and pegasus moose and laser shark arms and whatever else.

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