Lycanthropy

[hells_half_acre]

Tangentially related to Supernatural, I guess...

I love the concept of lycanthropy. It's fascinating to me. This is an absolutely excellent talk, by Deborah Hyde, about the history of lyncathropy in Europe.

All it needed was to end on my favourite Farley Mowat quote. Sadly, Ms. Hyde doesn't appear to know it, so allow me:

We have doomed the wolf not for what it is, but for what we deliberately and mistakenly preceive it to be - the mythologized epitome of a savage ruthless killer, which is, in reality, no more than the reflected image of ourselves. 
-Never Cry Wolf, Farley Mowat

Comments

[ratherastory.livejournal.com]

Oh, Farley Mowat, if only 99% of that book wasn't total fabrication... :P

[hells-half-acre.livejournal.com]

No kidding. Sigh.

Thankfully, the awesome quote is an opinion, so it doesn't matter that his account of living with the wolves is 99% rubbish. :P

[sylvia-locust.livejournal.com]

This sounds interesting! I will try to listen to it when my husband's not running power tools in the next room.

Also, your post reminded me of the time I pronounced the word tangentially--in a room full of coworkers--as tan-genital-ly.

So, yeah. Still not sure whether to laugh or blush, so I do both when I remember that incident :)

[hells-half-acre.livejournal.com]

Haha! That's a good one.

My mum always laughed at me because I pronounced (and spelled) "posthumously" as "post-humourlessly"...it made sense to me!

[sylvia-locust.livejournal.com]

It does make sense!

I listened to Nancy Pearl (librarian superstar) give a talk recently about the Pleasures and Perils of Reading.

And one of her perils was that people who go through life with their noses in books never know how to pronounce anything :)

[hells-half-acre.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I have a friend who has English as his second language - and he speaks it fluently and without accent, so any English-speaker meeting him never knows that it's not his mother-tongue. Except that he taught himself most of his vocabulary through reading fantasy novels...so, yeah, he knows a lot of medieval words and would often pronounce things as they are spelled rather than as they are said.

Of course, that was 10 years ago - he's since improved to the point where he doesn't make many mistakes anymore.