joyeux kismet

zeug·ma ˈzo͞oɡmə/

noun

a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g.,John and his license expired last week ) or to two others of which it semantically suits only one (e.g., with weeping eyes and hearts ).

bullet journal - obviously!! but if you already have one here are some more ideas… 

dream diary - i love looking back on my dreams, but do it in the morning before you forget them!

food journal - write down everything you eat for the day, maybe include water too!

memory book - write down your favorite memories to always look back on!

quotes journal - one place for all of your favorite quotes!

reviews journal - try a new restaurant? movie? book? food? write your review, how was it? did you enjoy it? would you do it again?

gratitude journal - write down everything your thankful for. 

daily journal - journal (almost) everyday. include anything you want, what you did for the day, what you ate, who you were with.

brain storming book - write down all of your awesome ideas in one place!

books of lists - if you love writing lists maybe you need a specific book to just write down all of your favorites!

recipe book - keep all of your favorite recipes here, or even recipes you want to try. 

wishlist book - keep a book of everything you want.

letters book - this could be rough drafts for letters, or letters you wish you could send to someone but know you’ll never have the courage to.

things to look up - have a space for everything you don’t want to forget to look up later or research more. 

news headlines book - write down the headlines from the day/week or important events that happened, how you felt about it. this will be interesting to look back on!

doodle book - are you a doodler when you’re talking on the phone or just watching TV? keep all of your doodles together!

Aries: Meraki- Greek // doing something with soul, creativity, or love

Taurus: Onsra- Boro Language of India // loving for the last time; that bittersweet feeling you get when you know a love won’t last

Gemini: L’esprit de escalier- French // the inescapable feeling you get when you leave a conversation then think about all the things you should have said

Cancer: Yuanfen- Chinese // a relationship by fate or destiny

Leo: Saudade- Portuguese // the feeling of intense longing for a person or place you love but is now lost; a haunting desire for what is gone

Virgo: Kilig- Tagalog // the heady-sublime rush you experience right after something good happens, particularly in love/dating. Like running into your crush, kissing someone for the first time, hearing someone you love tell you they love you too for the first time

Libra: Forelsket- Norwegian // that overwhelming euphoric feeling you experience when you’re falling in love

Scorpio: Ya’aburnee- Arabic // this phrase translates to “you bury me” ; the hope that the person you love will outlive you so you can spare the pain of living without them

Sagittarius: Mamihlapinatei- Yagan // a wordless, yet meaningful look between two people who both desire to initiate something, but both are too scared to initiate themselves

Capricorn: La douleur exquise- French // the heartbreaking pain of wanting someone you can’t have.

Aquarius: Kara sevda- Turkish // meaning “black love” this is a lovesick term for when you feel that passionate, blinding love for another person

The Latin alphabet was barely adequate for Latin by the time it got to the British Isles, but it’s what people were writing with, so somebody tried to hack it to make it work for Irish. Except, major problem: Irish has two sets of consonants, “broad” and “slender” (labialized and palatalized) and there’s a non-trivial difference between the two of them. But there weren’t enough letters in the Latin alphabet to assign separate characters to the broad and slender version of similar sounds.

Instead, someone though, let’s just use the surrounding vowels to disambiguate–but there weren’t enough vowel characters to indicate all the vowel sounds they needed to write, so that required some doubling up, and then adding in some silent vowels just to serve as markers of broad vs. slender made eveything worse. 

They also had to double up some consonants, because, for example, <v> wasn’t actually a letter at the time–just a variation on <u>–so for the /v/ sound they <bh>. AND THEN ALSO Irish has this weird-ass system where the initial consonant sound in a word changes as a grammatical marker, called “mutation,” so they had to account somehow for mutated sounds vs. non-mutated sounds, which sometimes meant leaving a lot of other silent letters in a word to remind you what word you were looking at.

And then a thousand years of sound change rubbed its dirty little hands all over a system that was kind of pasted together in the first place.

Let’s start with <bh>. Now, the Latin alphabet at the time didn’t have a letter for the /v/ sound, but it did have an alternative way of writing the /f/ sound, which was spelled <ph> when it was borrowed from Greek (for other historical reasons). Well, /p/ is a sound that’s produced by letting a burst of air out from behind your lips while your vocal cords aren’t vibrating (it’s a voiceless bilabial stop), and /f/ is a sound that’s produced by letting a small amount of air out from behind your teeth on your lips while your vocal cords aren’t vibrating (it’s a voiceless labiodental fricative). So <ph> is kind of like a more breathy <p> (/h/ is a fricative like /f/). And /b/ is the same as /p/ except your vocal cords ARE vibrating, the exact same way that /v/ is like /f/. 

So <p> is to <ph> as <b> is to <bh>. 

Adding <h> to a consonant to indicate a sound somewhat similar to the base letter was very common in post-Latin Europe: English, Irish, French, German, and many other European languages ended up with <ch>, <sh>, <th>, <gh>, <wh>, and so on. It just happens that some h versions are found in some languages and not others, and pretty much every language uses the h variations to stand for different sounds. (Especially “ch”). 

Now let’s get to vowels. There are two groups of them: /i/ and /e/ are one group, while /u/, /o/ and /a/ are another. The traditional Gaelic (Scottish and Irish) terms for these groups are that /i, e/ are slender and /u, o, a/ are broad, but linguists also split them up, as front and back vowels. 

Front vowels /i/ and /e/ tend to pull consonants along with them, in very many languages, especially /t/, /d/, /k/ and /g/. It’s a process called palatalization and there’s a whole Wikipedia article about it. So the <si> in words like “Sinead” is palatalized just like the <si> in Latin-derived words like “precision” (not to mention all the words in “-tion” and rapid speech pronunciations like “didja” and “gotcha”). Palatalization also explains why English has “hard” (=broad=non-palatalized) and “soft” (=slender=palatalized) pronunciations of <c> and <g>, which are split by the same set of vowels – compare “cat” “cot” “cut” with “ceiling” or “cite”. (The pronunciation of <g> is more complicated which is why no one can agree about “gif”.)

And English spelling also retains or adds a silent letter where it would cause palatalization confusion. Think about words like “peaceable”, “placeable”, “changeable”, “salvageable” – normally a silent “e” is dropped before -able (bribable, adorable), but it’s kept here. Or the “k” added in “mimicking”, “frolicking”, “picnicking” despite “mimic, frolic, picnic”.  

Mutation (changing the initial sound of a word for grammatical effect) does seem to be particular to the Celtic branch of the Indo-European family tree, although various kinds of mutations are found in other languages.