Diacritiques

Special Christmas offerings from my favourite blogs:

• Dr Dave, the unknown genius, has created a beautiful and heart-warming visual around the 友, which means “friend”.
• caelestis, the noble savage, rolls philology and linguistics into a single post about Luke 2:2, Christmi and Tagalog.
• Mark Liberman at Language Log tells scary stories about talking animals.
• Anne Archet notes down a very short and crunchy story (fr), which I am tempted to translate into English.
• Via Claude, who is blogging in Paris (she isn’t the only one), I found a site that tells everything about snowflakes and some Christmas tree psychoanalysis courtesy of the BBC.
• My erudite namesake at Mixing Memory wants to ban Christmas.
• Finally, Laurent at Embruns has posted a cat picture (fr). The sky is falling down.

For other reading material more or less related to the season, there’s Guy de Maupassant’s Conte de Noël (fr) (which I find scary; it is loosely related to the animal tales mentioned above), Jacques Prévert’s fairy tale Le dromadaire mécontent (fr) (something else I’d like to see translated), or, foreshadowing New Year’s Eve fireworks, Elizabeth Bishop’s poem The Armadillo, which you can read and listen to here.

This time of the year has never been an easy one for me. Even, or maybe especially, when I think back to when I was a child, my memories of Christmas celebrations are mixed and confused. I used to cry for every year that went out, too; and was glad when I could take refuge in the reassuring routine of school.

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!
O falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!