{"id":17022,"date":"2020-02-15T23:01:20","date_gmt":"2020-02-16T03:01:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=17022"},"modified":"2020-02-15T23:09:22","modified_gmt":"2020-02-16T03:09:22","slug":"mermaids-poetry-and-the-scots-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=17022","title":{"rendered":"Mermaids, Poetry, and the Scots Language"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Currently reading:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. The Tail of Emily Windsnap<\/em> by Liz Kessler: this is a story about a young girl who discovers that she’s a mermaid. The book had good reviews, so I borrowed it from the library for Livia. She liked it enough to ask for the sequels. I decided to read it, too. It’s cute, but I do not love it. I’m glad that it’s short and that I’m nearly done with it.<\/li>
  2. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes<\/em> edited by Arnold Rampersad: this year I’m actively celebrating Black History Month by reading some works written by authors of color. In high school, I was assigned Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son<\/a>,” which I liked then and still remember all these years later. I haven’t read anything by him since, though, and it’s high time that I did. On a side note, I hope my high-school English teacher, Mrs. H., received some sort of karmic reward for being such a good teacher. The books and poems I read in her class had a profound effect on me, though it’s only now as an adult that I’ve come to understand that, and I am grateful.<\/li>
  3. Chairlie and the Chocolate Works<\/em> (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory<\/em> by Roald Dahl, translated into Scots): My progress on this book has been slow, but not because I’m not enjoying it. It’s actually a great deal of fun. It’s taking longer because I need to be near my computer when I’m reading, so that I can look up unfamiliar words. Scots is readable to me because it is, if not a dialect of English, certainly very closely related to English, but I don’t know all the vocabulary (BTW, some people argue that Scots is a dialect, and others argue that it’s a language in its own right, and I am not qualified to judge, so I’m not going to jump into the fray). I can guess at the meaning of most words, but for truly unusual words (e.g., “kenspeckle,” “glaikit,” etc.), I usually stop and look them up. It’s an interesting challenge to read the story this way, and I don’t mind the slow progress. <\/li><\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Currently reading: The Tail of Emily Windsnap by Liz Kessler: this is a story about a young girl who discovers that she’s a mermaid. The book had good reviews, so I borrowed it from the library for Livia. She liked … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[600],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17022"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17022"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17022\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17028,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17022\/revisions\/17028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}