language craziness and what the heat's really doing to us all

One more reason learning a new language is an adventure:

This past weekend I was at a wedding and was one of the greeters/lead-you-to-your-seat-ers at the reception. After spending half the day in heels, my feet were hurting, so before anyone really got there, I took my shoes off. And once they did get there, I kept doing what I was doing without putting my shoes on. My gensec rebuked me later, barefooted pagan that I am, and made me go put them back on. And so I was telling this story to a(n American) friend last night over skype and got to the part about my gensec coming up to me and this is what came out of my mouth:

"Yeah, and then he came up to me and rebuked me for running around naked."

NOT SURE WHERE THAT CAME FROM. Barefoot! Not naked! Really red Sarawr.

There is a logical explanation--one I'm not fully convinced of--but there's this: in Romanian, for barefoot, you say picoarele goale. Bare feet, naked feet. If you were naked, you'd say gol--the plural feminine then is goale. (If anyone else wants to geek out with me about etymology here, feel free--although apparently our word goal comes from Middle English... and the sense of empty, like an empty goal, like a place you put a ball has nothing to do with bare/empty... kind of a stretch I guess but it's what my brain put together and made a lot of sense until I looked it up just now.)

The only thing that leaves me unconvinced is that when I'm talking about being barefoot in Romanian, I don't think 'being naked footed' or anything--I think not having shoes or socks on. I expect this is a good thing because it means I'm not translating in my head.

However that still leaves us with no explanation for why I said naked. Theories abound, some about American expressions, others more speculative. Powers of analysis. We'll get there.

But let's be real, y'all. It's hot here. And I have a deep love for pantslessness (and descriptivism, zing!). And my poor roommate and I are surviving the 100 degree days and 85 degree nights and no AC or fan (which is totally fine except that the apartment is not built for keeping cool), so this is clearly about a) brain addled from the heat and b) brain's suggested solution to relieve heat and prevent addling.

Well then. Suggestion noted. Will take into consideration.

the worst of earl

Actually it was rather pretty. Nice little breeze.
A

hurricane earl

Last night, Hurricane Earl maybe a few hundred miles off the coast, a few of us went down to the beach. Yesterday evening you could see the storm coming in some ways. There were faster moving, higher clouds, wispy like pulled-apart cotton, catching pink light way high up. And it was breezier--maybe it's my imagination or maybe you start to sense this sort of thing after years of hurricanes, but you could tell it was coming. It was clear for miles yesterday, less humidity than there's been, and so all day I was thinking about how it must have been before there were forecasts and weather.com, when one day it was blue and calm, then the wind picked up, and then the sky got dark. I wonder what the pilgrims thought when the first hurricane hit them.

Yesterday it was beautiful, and last night even moreso. Over the ocean in one direction it was so dark you couldn't see the horizon, but above us, between the fast strips of clouds, stars and stars and stars. And so we stood by the water, warm tropical breeze, watching what we could of the water but mostly listening. This part of the beach is at the end of a barrier island, right where the sound meets the ocean. There's a jetty to the left if you're looking out over the water and so it forms something like a cove. This isn't exactly the right word, but it's normally small and calm like a lake, still enough that at its calmest I've gone night swimming and have been able to see my feet waist deep with the moonlight. Last night the waves were slamming against the jetty, onto the shore. This sounds silly, but to stand on the edge of a continent waiting for a tremendous, powerful storm, the wind spinning off it, obscuring the southeastern horizon--well, perspective and scope are turned on their sides. I felt this way watching the Andes as we drove through them, winding past a mountain bigger than anything I've seen before. What am I next to an ocean and a sky that can churn up something so vast?

All that said, the ten year old in me who wanted to be a meteorologist--something for which I have hurricanes to thank--has been watching this storm since this weekend, hoping it heads this way. It looks like it's going to pass a few miles too far east of us to do much more than give us a squally, rainy night. But the plan is to open the blinds of our sliding glass door and lie on our backs watching the pines toss above the roofs, to keep an eye on the small river that tends to form between the apartments. If we get enough rain, I worry about flooding around the city. And if the power goes out, we have a few candles that smell like Christmas to further confuse our senses. It may miss us, it may not, and it's about twelve hours out from knowing. So we'll see. More to come!