#SaveOurInternet 20: blue-footed boobies

I wonder whether content published by official sources, like these boobies from Nat Geo, will be affected by Article 13...

A.S. Kline's Reflections on Hermaphroditus

Lastly there are the fascinating transformations of sexuality. Salmacis and Hermaphroditus merge bodies (Book IV:346): Ovid subversively both attests to the fluidity of sexuality, and to the possibilities of female erotic delight, even self-sufficiency.

Ovid evokes nature constantly through pastoral description, sheer visual charm that prompted later a wealth of Renaissance landscape imagery. There is Daphne pursued by Apollo, through the pathless woods and the windblown fields, and along the banks of the Peneus, in that vale of Tempe beneath Parnassus. The girl destined to be laurel: to hurl herself into ‘shining beauty’, into the silence of her own leaves, so that Phoebus held his cool immortal hand against the bark, to feel her still-beating heart (Book I:525). There is Narcissus by another ‘unclouded fountain, with silver-bright water’ that is untouched and inviolate, watching his reflection under the shadows of the trees, and falling for himself, chasing the fleeting and intangible image (Book III:402). Salmacis entwines Hermaphroditus in the pool ‘clear to its very depths’, clasping his ivory-white neck (Book IV:346). 

Mercury-Hermes, son of Jupiter and the Pleiad, Maia, is also possessed of intriguing attributes. He is a god of exchange. Trade: communication: theft, that not so subtle transfer of property: and the music of the reed pipes and the tortoiseshell lyre that he invented, trading the instruments with Apollo for a golden staff, and the art of divination from pebbles dancing in a basin of water, taught to him by the Fates. He is mental dexterity and cunning. He achieves his ends by seductive speech, and the swiftness of his mental passage on winged feet; having he gained his herald’s staff with the entwined snakes, the caduceus that brings sleep and healing, on the boundaries of wakefulness and illness. The tales of his early life reveal a strong link between him and Apollo, with echoes of Phoebus’s medicine, oracular power, and musical arts.

His son by Venus-Aphrodite is Hermaphroditus, with whom Salmacis falls in love and begs to be joined to him eternally. The gods grant her prayer and the two form a bi-sexual product of mind and beauty (Book IV:274).  

And Venus-Aphrodite is the goddess of the forbidden, the force that breaks human conventions. Incest is her dark doing. And surely it is only ‘human concern that has made malign laws.’ (Book X:298).

But Venus-Aphrodite is not merely lust, no mere sexuality. Though she is the prostitute and the goddess of prostitutes, she is the deeper movement of love also. She is committed passion that dies of love for its object: she is a tenderness that stirs to heart-broken mourning. She is the betrayed and the betrayer but also the faithful and the entangled. She is the body’s remorseless stirring, but she is also the mind and spirit’s sweet embrace. So Echo wasted away with love for Narcissus (Book III:359) ‘the more she followed the closer she burned’: and Salmacis fused with Hermaphroditus (Book IV:346) ‘hanging there’, twined round his head and feet: and indeed beauty may be loved by the beast, Galatea by poor Polyphemus. ‘Oh, Gentle Venus’, says Ovid, ‘how powerful your rule is over us!’ (Book XIII:738).

If she is exceptionally fortunate she will find love and affection, [···] or fused like Salmacis with her lover (Book IV:346).

I FEEL LIKE I'M GOING TO LAY AN EGG

Hens always get at least a little bit stressed when their inner clock signals it's time to lay an egg.
This happens to us human females as well, twelve times each year.
Today I've felt all weary for no good reason. Not merely lonely, not merely bored, not merely "since I can't get out of this place without leaving alone, better off to stay at home, but I don't feel like gaming or reading or listening..." WEARY. So weary. Like Hamlet at the start of the play. With the feeling of a lump or a frog in my throat, or rather a garrote wire. Like Joffrey after that last drink at his wedding feast.
Weary and powerless, or rather full of power but also of restraints for using it. I feel like getting drunk, dead drunk, but there's no liquor around I can drown my sorrows in.
And thus, I'm crying. I'm typing because I cannot speak a single word in this predicament I live in. Typing and shedding tears. Typing and shedding tears and feeling empty and weary.
Maybe it's because I just bled early this morning.
Or is there something more?
I wish the weekend were come to an end and I could get to the tennis court at university, to find a partner --on Friday I had none, resigning myself to running and serving and running and serving.
I wish to get word from Ser Uttam, whether in Kutztown or wherever he might be.
I wish my mum would get healed of her depression, or fourth stage of grief, or PTSD, or combination of all three above.
I wish for a lot of things.
And that's because they're out of my reach.
Which makes me feel powerless.
Which makes me feel weary.
Ich habe keine Lust...

But you can't make Hamlet without breaking a few egg-sistential certainties.
I have already talked about this topic regarding Ralf Hart and Zangra, but, given the biological underpinnings of this bout of weariness, I will offer a female example of such a crisis. From a Takarazuka-inspired anime, no less:

NANAMI NO TAMAGO (七実の卵)

There's this Utena episode where Nanami, the class queen bee, lays an egg.

It's largely a fascinating, surrealistic perspective on the subject of the female curse;

one that sounds like Hamlet crossed over with both Salvador Dalí and Takarazuka.

Nanami Kiryú is Hamlet(te). Try to figure out whom each and every character in her class equals their respective Elsinore counterpart...

CHARLES V SERIES: MY FINAL THOUGHTS

Esta es mi reflexión final sobre la serie Carlos que acabó ayer 25 de enero, con el Káiser expirando en Yuste, mirando yo hacia atrás y resumiendo toda la serie...

Hemos visto amores y odios, penas y alegrías, tolerancia y prejuicios, confianzas y traiciones, guerra y paz, victorias y derrotas, combates, envenenamientos y diplomacia, idilios e intrigas, injusticias y justicieros, a poderosos vulnerables y a mujeres de armas tomar ...todo cuanto la vida real puede ofrecer, en las cortes reales del XVI. :) Los Habsburgo, los Valois y los Tudor se han hecho huecos en nuestros corazones. <3 Cada muerte ha dado pie a reflexiones sobre la persona que fallece, cada escena de esta magnífica serie es un cuadro histórico. ENHORABUENA. Ahora, acta est fabula: ¡aplaudid y una gran ovación para todo el equipo de esta serie!

MORE ASSORTED MUSINGS

In one of his songs, Joaquín Sabina says he is "inútil como el semen de los ahorcados", as useless as the semen of hanged men. Yet there is the belief that mandrakes, those sentient humanoid tubers, grow from the semen of hanged men... Is that so useless, then?

Speaking of mandrakes, my second favourite passage in Genesis (after the Joseph story) is the "mandrake arms race" between Rachel and Leah: the beautiful, childless younger sister and the homely, extremely fertile older sister. When Leah's eldest son Reuben finds some mandrakes... Leah is not loved by her husband Jacob, who cheats on her and prefers her sister-in-law, whom he loves (the marriage to Leah was of convenience) in spite of Rachel's infertility. Till Leah bribes Raye to nearly quit Jake and Jake back into bed with the cunning use of mandrakes, which Raye LOVED (mandrakes to her were like panna cotta to me), and which allegedly were an aphrodisiac and fertility raiser. Turned out Rachel needed those mandrakes to have children, but to nearly no avail... The arms race escalates until Leah has her ten boys and dies, Jacob remarries Rachel and Joseph is their first child. Of course, the whole mandrake ruse had given as a result most of the ten older stepbros, and the stage is set for the Joseph story proper.

Speaking of Rachel, Joseph's mum had another heroic moment in escaping her parents' home to join her sister and darling brother-in-law for love's sake. So Raye's clan has got these household gods (lares, or whatever they might be), little figurines of fertility gods... She steals them from her dad Laban to bring them with her for good luck. Eventually, Laban catches up with Jacob, Leah, and a Rachel who travels with them, in their camp. And Laban is furious because the household gods of the estate have somehow vanished. So Raye picks the best hideout for the little figures: she sits on them! When dad inquires, she gives this clever excuse for why she can't stand up: "Sorry, I've got the period!" Laban fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

Speaking of uselessness, nipples on a breastplate are far more useless than the semen of hanged men.

Speaking once more of Sabina, his lyrics are so baroque and full of allusions that I warmly recommend them.

MUSING EVEN MORE ON LEXICAL THEMES

Calling the kettle black... okay, so where do I go from there? To how the fluent English spoken by a Spanish-bred person "on the street" differs from that of one born in the Anglosphere? To René Magritte's pipe and apple, and from there, to the signifier vs. signified dichotomy? To semes and sememes?

AUTOHYPONYMY, VERTICAL POLYSEMY, OR Q-BASED NARROWING is a feature of the English language that still baffles me in our days.

It's when a word itself is its own hyponym, depending of context. The cases referring to living beings and their anatomy below particularly puzzled me, since, having been born and raised in Spain, I grew up solely with the term being used for the hypernym, the so-called general sense, (not as a hyponym, for which there existed another, more scientific word, in Spanish) due to Linnean taxonomy being the most prominent influence on the "street-Spanish" (as opposed to "science-Spanish", in fact, both contexts use the same words)

To disambiguate, philologists usually number the words, using 1 for the hypernym or general sense and 2 for the hyponym or specific sense (by the way, each one of the senses of the word is known as an allosemon). Which I think is rather smart, not to get mixed up with both meanings.

It's such a shame that the words can't be numbered in everyday contexts...

I will never get this feature of the English language...

EXAMPLES

SHAPES

rectangle 1 (every quadrilateral with four ninety-degree angles)

rectangle 2 (every NON-EQUILATERAL quadrilateral with four ninety-degree angles)

LIVING ORGANISMS

fingers 1 (all digits of primates)

fingers 2 (NOT all digits of primates, opposable thumbs EXCLUDED)

animals 1 (whole kingdom Animalia, or all fauna)

animals 2 (ONLY TERRESTRIAL FAUNA: mammals and reptiles)

plants 1 (whole plant kingdom, or all flora)

plants 2 (ONLY HERBACEOUS FLORA: herbs, flowers, and vegetables)

Every case when the generic name of a species overlaps with the name of gender, for instance:

cow 1 (cattle, Bos primigenius taurus, regardless of gender)

cow 2 (ONLY ADULT FEMALE cattle or Bos primigenius taurus)

OBJECTS

shoes 1 (footwear in general)

shoes 2 (LOW footwear that COVERS THE WHOLE FOOT)

COLOURS

purple 1

purple 2 (a DARK shade, not mauve, not lilac, et cetera)

etc. (the list of colour autohyponyms is endless)

VERBS

close 1

close 2 (SOFTLY, AND WITHOUT LOCKING THE DOOR)

drink 1 (swallow any liquid)

drink 2 (swallow any ETHYLIC liquid)

etc.

Yet you can't number the words constantly for an ever-confused and baffled foreigner to realize which sense of the word is being used. Which means these words above are vague.

We have got the words, the pictures (both of which are signifiers), and the concepts (signified).

Plus, we can kick up a storm of questions that lean on the philosophical:

Is this a (smoking) pipe, or not?

Is this a picture of a (smoking), pipe or not?

Is this the word/lexeme/morpheme "pipe",  p-i-p-e, or not?

Is this a water pipe, or not?

Is this a penis ("dick" is "pipe" in French), or not?

 As word senses are here defined as contextually construed units of meaning, their autonomy is considered independently from their conventionality. 

As Horn points out, autohyponymy is very idiosyncratic historically.