Seven pages today

[desperance]

Pages: seven.

Words: 2193

Zokutou:

143,403 / 125,000 (114.7%)

Splish-splosh. Also, firestorms; and why is the only English word I can find for Chinese siege-weapons "trebuchet"? I can't use that! The Chinese gave them names like "Whirlwind", and I can't use that either...

Also: cupcakes. Not in the book. I has cupcakes. Because I can't have fruitcake, because it needs to sit awhile and ponder its sins of lateness. So I has cupcakes. Chocolate cupcakes. Tomorrow I may even ice them.

Also also: jiao zi. That's potstickers to you. Is there a law, about how many potstickers a man may eat? 'Cos I may have broken it already. Which would be why I am still working at this hour; I may never need to eat again...

Comments

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

There are no laws on potsticker consumption, save for this one: It is not possible to eat more potstickers at any given time than one has on hand at that time.

Which is good, because I'd be a felon otherwise.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I used to believe in a variant of this, which was that it was impossible to make too many roast potatoes: however many there were, people would always want to eat more.

And then I made too many. But it was a phenomenal effort.

[dedbutdrmng.livejournal.com]

Mangonel? Not very Chinarish though.

But it is one of my favourite words.

[jeremy-m.livejournal.com]

I take it you don't like words such as catapult and ballista either, but you could make up phrase names like 'Bolt Thrower', 'Stone Hawk Tosser' or 'God's Giant Elastic Band'. Just don't talk about pre-gunpowder missile weapons being 'fired' - oooh I hate that.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

'sokay, I'm very alert to the shot/fired dichotomy. It's like less against fewer; first you learn that there is a distinction, then you come to a screeching halt every time you hit the word because you have to check which it ought to be, and then finally it's second nature. This one's not quite second nature yet, I still have to work it out on my fingers. (It'd be so much easier if shooting was just for arrows etc, and firing was just for guns; but people shoot guns too, which is just unreasonable and leads inevitably to confusion...)

[jeremy-m.livejournal.com]

> It's like less against fewer

I used to work with a guy who was even more pedantic than me, and he took advantage of a supermarket's "How can we improve your shopping experience?" program to get their "8 items or less" signs fixed. So there is hope for the world.

Doing archery is good for the fire/shoot distinction, and for getting their more dangerous habit of shouting "Fast!" to mean "Slow down, you're doing something wrong and probably life threatening if you keep doing it for another few seconds". I like potentially fatal archaisms.

[yourbob.livejournal.com]

Chocolate cupcakes can be soaked in something too, like fruitcake is. Just sayin'.

Potstickers - The only law is that you can't eat any potstickers bigger than your head, in one bite. And it's just a physical law, so go ahead and violate it.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Chocolate cupcakes can be soaked in something too, like fruitcake is. Just sayin'.

Y'know? I am such an innocent. I would never have thought of that. Now ... I am. Damn.

Potstickers - The only law is that you can't eat any potstickers bigger than your head, in one bite. And it's just a physical law, so go ahead and violate it.

Thank you for clarifying that.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

The marquis, who Knows About Siege Engines, has had a rummage through his vast collection of books on militaria and is muttering about an unreasonable dearth of material on that precise subject. But depending on function, you might try catapult, mangonel, ballista, scorpion (all of which are, to quote himself, 'things which chuck things' as opposed to things like siege towers. He also wants to know what is wrong with the word 'trebuchet'?)

Henduo jiaozi bi yi ge jiaozi hen hao. But I've never really seen the point of cupcakes. Unless lemon. I like my cakes in slices, probably because that's the way they were in childhood.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Please to thank the marquis for rummaging?

Trouble is, all his rummaging leads to where all my own rummaging leads, which is back to the same short list. I like scorpion, but no reader will recognise that as a thing which chucks things, 'cos scorpions don't; and the rest of the vocabulary is inveterately western-mediaeval. Especially trebuchet, which is the right word for the device, but so inveterately w-m it's bloody French, isn't it? And I'm just not comfortable with using a French vocabulary in an English novel about a mythical China. It jars; and if it jars me, I worry about its jarring the readership in general. (Likewise inferno: can I use inferno to mean a conflagration, when it speaks so specifically to a fiery underworld which these characters wouldn't recognise?)

And so on. It's like that.

Cupcakes have no point; that is the point of them. I may yet ice the remainder with a proper eggy butter icing, just because.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

You could use the Chinese name with a gloss: 'the mighty NAME, the giant catapult, which flung fire'. I had to do this with 'traboule'.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Is true, and a reliable stand-by - but even then you have to be careful. One term I found for a Chinese trebuchet is "huihui pao" - but in this context (allegedly) "huihui" means Muslim, because this is the counterweight trebuchet that got taken back to China by the Mongols after the original version had gone the other way. (I have to interpose at this point that "huihui" does not exist as "Muslim" in the online dictionary I use.) Aargh. But "pao"(4) is translated here as "an ancient ballista for throwing heavy stones", so I guess...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Aha, I am stupid: I realise in my sleep that "huihui" means Muslim because the Hui people are Muslims and there is a process of backformative association going on (the Hui people certainly did not invent the counterweight trebuchet, but hey. Heyhey. Huihui...)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

The subconscious is a wondrous thing!