Stan Carey

Your happy reminder that the excellent @susiedentwords.bsky.social made a series of short videos about the history of swear words, and you can watch them here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=L77g...

just heard a guy on youtube say "in the grand scream of things"

Grammarly was always ick, but this is obscene

That was great! A tricky thing to pull off.

It's a very effective balancing act

Orbital by Samantha Harvey, paperback copy published by Vintage. Cover art by Aino-Maija Metsola shows the Earth surrounded by colourful celestial bodies and lots of dark space. Most of the bodies are impressionistic blobs with fuzzy edges, not quite circular, and sometimes overlapping. There are also swathes of dots like spatter paint that suggest asteroid belts or the Milky Way. There's a Booker Prize 2024 winner stamp, and the following cover quotes: "Beautiful" (Sarah Moss), "Awe-inspiring" (Max Porter), "Stunning...an uplifting book" (Sunday Times), and "An extraordinary achievement" (Observer).

Not everything works, but there's some gorgeous, imaginative writing in this short book

A mug depicting KC Green's This Is Fine dog comic, but tragically faded

I've had my This Is Fine mug so long that the dog has become a ghost and all that remain are flames

I like Ray Cummings's description of time: that it's what keeps everything from happening all at once.

(And the anonymous corollary that space is what keeps it from all happening to you.)

Now that it has resolved, it does look like a delicious tart

Before I looked at the tart photo properly, and before I read the text at all, I had an exquisite moment of scalar uncertainty when I wondered if it was a macro shot of a flower head or a micro shot of blood platelets

bsky.app/profile/lito...

Picture of Marjane Satrapi alongside a quote from her. The quote reads: The world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don't know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same... - Marjane Satrapi, Iranian-French graphic novelist

Thinking about this quote from Persepolis creator Marjane Satrapi again.

I seem to remember it feeling less focused and effective than Daughters. But it is quite some years since I watched it, and it's probably a film that warrants a second look

A curious film. I wish it were better, but it has mood and style going for it.

The h in whoa goes wherever you want it: woah or woha or hwoa — they're all good. It's just a very accepting word

Yes, I think they're pragmatically pretty similar

You're now at least 4% Irish

A note on our use of the word ‘grand’ is here required. It might sound like a relative or good or great but in our usage it was something different. ‘Grand’ was how we acknowledged that something wasn’t good or great while also saying nothing could be done and there was no point going on about it. Ambrose relied on the word a lot at sea. ‘It’ll be grand,’ he’d say as the gear strained. ‘It’ll be grand,’ he’d say when the crew expressed concern over the ten-year-old engine. He was the same at home. ‘It’ll be grand,’ he’d say, scraping a dot of mould from a slice of white bread before sticking it in the toaster. ‘It was grand,’ he’d say when Christine asked him about his childhood.

On the peculiarly Irish use of "grand", from Garrett's Carr's novel The Boy from the Sea

More on that usage here: stancarey.wordpress.com/2019/06/27/a...

Seconded. I got Rule of the Land years ago as a gift from Sinéad Gleeson and was very impressed by it. Carr's novel is a whole other kettle of complicated fish and family, its village becoming a character in its own right in a sort of wry, John McGahern way. Both well worth reading.

I look forward to reading your thoughts on it. I figured the term could be interpreted broadly or more specifically, so I went broad – partly because several of the "canonical" titles in the '90s subcategory fall into my "mediocre" classification.

Sorry, Ray, I should have stuck to the script! I get overenthusiastic. Glad I didn't add a FOURTH list: J-horror films everyone goes on about but that I think are mediocre

Holy trinity suggestions:
The Ring
Audition
Pulse (or Cure)
Battle Royale
Ju-On
Noroi

Vintage classics:
Kuroneko
Ugetsu
Onibaba
Kwaidan

A few of my favourites:
Tetsuo
House
Paprika
One Cut of the Dead
Perfect Blue

February linkstack Icky brand names, new games, what "coded" means, and more.

February linkstack, with thanks to @kottke.org @logophilius.bsky.social @grammargirl.bsky.social @99pi.org @operativewords.com @stancarey.bsky.social @poniewozik.bsky.social @benzimmer.bsky.social and more. fritinancy.substack.com/p/february-l...

Didn't see it but doesn't surprise me

John Davidson Gives First Interview and Explains Tourette’s Tics After Shouting N-Word and Other Slurs at BAFTAs: ‘I Felt a Wave of Shame’ (EXCLUSIVE) John Davidson's explains Tourette's tics and the BAFTA N-word incident in his first exclusive interview with Variety.

"Tourette's can make my body or voice do things I don't mean, and sometimes those tics land on the worst possible words." variety.com/2026/film/aw... #BAFTAs

"Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill!" —Flann O'Brien, after reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

Origins of the kiss - DISI Exploring our world's diverse forms of mind—human, animal, machine—from diverse perspectives.

My interview with @manymindspod.bsky.social! Come for a deep dive into the evolution of kissing 💋, stay for the earth-shattering insights 🤯

"fish don't run" 🐠🏃

"monkeys tend to loll around quite a lot" 🙈

"chimps have moved on to grass-in-bumhole behaviour" 🍑🌱

disi.org/origins-of-t...

A review of Sirāt (2025) Hallucinatory mood piece that might have been more effective, and more interesting, had it not committed to Grand Guignol. Still, it's eye-popping (and ear-throbbing) work, richly ambiguous and unconv...

Mini-review of Sirāt (2025), a strange film that I mostly liked: letterboxd.com/stancarey/fi... #filmsky

Just remembered that the OED interviewed me about book spine poems and dictionaries in 2018. (I regret the Pinker.)
web.archive.org/web/20190822...

I bet their names for us are even more disparaging