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embonpoint (ahn-bawn-PWAN) - n., the condition of being plump, stoutness.

With a very strong connotation of "heavy but not unattractively so" -- so in the same range as voluptuous but applicable to men as well as women. Can also be used adjectivally, but this is not common. Taken in the 1650s from French, same meaning, a compression of en bon point, literally "in good condition."

---L.

galadhir

ugh, I am not feeling great today so I'm having a day off of cycling and weight lifting. It's spitting outside, so I would have normally not cycled anyway. I would have driven to the gym and done the weight lifting, but I have a headache and I feel sick and my limbs and back hurt, so maybe I could just not.

I have lost another half stone, to a total of 3.5 stone, ie 49lb (approx 25kg) and I am continuing with the diet (though I'm eating more and slowing down atm.) It seems more and more likely that by the end of June I will be too small for my nice blue belly dance dress. So, I have been busy combing the charity shops for skirts and making bedlah to wear instead.

The black one is the right size for me now, and I can pair it with a black trumpet skirt and be dramatic. This is the one I was making for the heavy metal solo that we still haven't decided music for.

black bedlah

This silver and African wax print set is uncomfortably small for me atm (and also not finished) but the possibility is that it will be the right size (and finished) in June. I would pair this with a layered white skirt that I also found at a thrift store.

wax print bedlah

This would require me to buy or make a white power-mesh thingy to cover my stomach, because I am not going out there with my stomach out (I possess a black one already.)

I am however very encouraged by the fact that Soheir Zaki (RIP) seems to have had many different colours of bodystocking which she paired to her outfits, so I have a good role model for refusing to let it all hang out :)

And if the black set becomes too big for me before then, I can just sell it. There are a lot of plus sized dancers out there who never get catered to by anyone, who would probably like a new set.

Doing belly dance costuming on a budget by making it yourself is the way to go if you don't want to drop £200 or more at a time for a professionally made set, and while I'm changing shape it would be stupid to buy anything really nice. The downside is that everything looks very hand-made. The upside is budget, but also that I am learning all sorts of new sewing techniques as I go.

badly_knitted posting in

fan_flashworks

Title: Parenting Problems
Fandom: Torchwood
Author:

badly_knitted
Characters: Ianto, Twins, Flufflets.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1322
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: Teaching the twins to be gentle and considerate is an uphill battle.
Content Notes: None needed
Written For: Challenge 514: Gentle.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.

( Parenting Problems... )

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my desk

osprey_archer

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Mark Helprin’s A Kingdom Far and Clear, a single book containing all three books of Helprin’s Swan Lake trilogy, the first of which is a retelling of Swan Lake (tragic mode), and the second and third of which are a continuation of the story based on the question, “But what if Rothbart wasn’t defeated at the end of Swan Lake? And also Rothbart wasn’t just a garden variety sorcerer, but a totalitarian dictator, but in a weirdly whimsical way where (for instance) our ten-year-old heroine spends an entire Joan Aiken-esque sequence working as a yam curler, wearing a special orange and black yam kitchen uniform to roll yams off the yam conveyor belts, and the yam kitchen is so gigantic it has 6000 employees?”

Bizarre. Bleak. Beautifully written! Beautiful but sometimes strangely static illustrations by Chris Van Allsburg. As a retelling I felt this was this not so much engaging with the original as using it as a springboard to deal with its own thematic preoccupations. ( spoilers )

Conclusion: books two and three could have done with a LOT more swans.

I also read Michiko Aoyama’s The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park, translated by Takami Nieda. Like Aoyama’s Hot Chocolate on Thursdays, this is a warm, gentle book about a series of loosely linked characters, linked in this case by the fact that they recently moved into a new condominium development near a park with a concrete ride-on hippo named Kanahiko, the eponymous Healing Hippo. He probably doesn’t actually have healing powers (this book has less of a fantasy undercurrent than Hot Chocolate on Thursday), but even just hearing about these healing powers helps people reexamine the problems in their own lives.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m reading Clay Risen’s The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century. I got to the part where the whole army starts converging on Tampa for the invasion of Cuba (Tampa had only one railway line and no port, but an entrepreneur had suggested using it at a staging ground and Washington said “Yes” without actually checking into the details), and the officers are hanging out at the hotel with thirteen silver minarets… “I’ve been there!” I shrieked. This hotel is now the flagship building of the University of Tampa.

What I Plan to Read Next

Michiko Aoyama’s What You Are Looking For Is in the Library, which looks similar to Aoyama’s other books in that it is about a bunch of loosely linked characters (connected in this case by a library) who figure out a way forward through their problems. Then I’ll be out of Aoyama books until Matcha on Monday comes out in July.

languagelog_feed

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73476&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=some-recent-articles-on-language-and-linguistics

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73476

"Does the Brain Really Know What Word Is Coming Next?" Antonello, Richard J. eLife 15 (April 27, 2026): e111163. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.111163.

"The Sound of Populism: Distinct Linguistic Features Across Populist Variants." Wang, Yu et al. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (April 27, 2026). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-06799-8.

"The Phonology of Sperm Whale Coda Vowels." Beguš, Gašper et al. Royal Society Proceedings B: Biological Sciences 293, no. 2069 (April 15, 2026): 20252994. https://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2025.2994.

"Name Use by Companion Parrots." Benedict, Lauryn et al. PLOS ONE 21, no. 4 (April 17, 2026): e0346830. https://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0346830.

"The Evolutionary History and Unique Genetic Diversity of Indigenous Americans." Castro e Silva, Marcos Araújo et al. Nature (April 22, 2026). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10406-w.

"The Semantics of Romance Geonyms: Cross-Linguistic Variation Meets Context Sensitivity." Samo, Giuseppe et al. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (April 15, 2026). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-07178-z.

[courtesy of Ted McClure]

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73476&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=some-recent-articles-on-language-and-linguistics

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73476

troisoiseaux

Read Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, which reads like how pressing on a bruise feels: poor doomed Giovanni, who you know from early in the first chapter to be fated "to perish, sometime between this night and this morning, on the guillotine" but not yet how he got there; the poor wretched narrator, who's rotting from the inside from internalized homophobia and willing to throw anyone and everyone else under the bus about it. Poor Hella, the narrator's girlfriend turned fiancée, whose brief period of being actually engaged to him reveals her to have such a nightmarish vision of midcentury heterosexual wedded bliss that it's almost a relief when the narrator's secrets blow up in their faces. An excellent novel, but HOO BOY.

In War and Peace, Nikolai Rostov— on facing the inherent contradiction of the top ranks of the Russian army being bosom buddies with the French now that peace has been negotiated between them, while wounded soldiers suffer in makeshift hospitals completely without resources, his friend Denisov faces a court martial for ""requisitioning"" a supply cart to feed his starving division, etc.; so many soldiers died fighting, and for what?— very nearly realizes that war is bad and unfair, but instead he gets drunk about it and insists that obviously whatever Emperor Alexander decides is best!!! So maybe we should all stop criticizing and complaining!!! (To the confusion of his drinking buddies, who literally did not mention the Emperor at all.) On the "paired scenes" theory of War and Peace, I had wondered if the parallel was between Nikolai getting goaded by Dolokhov into gambling himself into massive debt and Pierre getting himself talked out of his grand plans to liberate his serfs, etc., by self-serving estate managers; in fact, the parallel was that "all the plans Pierre had attempted on his estates—and constantly changing from one thing to another had never accomplished—were carried out by Prince Andrei without display and without perceptible difficulty."

nnozomi

Too much boring work to do (better than no work at all, but still), so of course I am escaping reality and posting here instead. (Also owe some comments on other people's posts! Soon, I hope!)

I went to the thrice-yearly used book fair* in Kyoto, which is always fun and frustrating in equal measure; it’s the usual used bookstore problem writ large, i.e. I know there is something I want there, but there are so many books arranged in such random order, there’s no real way to come across it other than dumb luck. Still, I found one book for me (oral history in Japanese) and one for my mom (Hamerton’s Paris, architectural essays published in 1892, in amazingly good condition and not at all expensive), as well as some cute postcards from past book fair posters, see below. In the past I’ve also come across things like a set of Chujo Yuriko’s complete works at about 2 dollars a volume (there are a lot of volumes, but still), some art I still have up on my wall, at least one of the books I use as a source for

senzenwomen, and my favorite piece of ephemera ever, have I mentioned it here before? a school directory for a Kyoto public junior high school from 1955, containing not just students’ names and addresses but also parents’ names, ages, and occupations, like a sociological map of the neighborhood at the time.
*(Of the three yearly used book fairs, the May one is the only one held inside; I usually skip the August one, because even in the shady precincts of the Shimogamo Shrine, Kyoto in August is too damn hot and humid to wander around outside for any length of time, and one doesn’t want to sweat on the books. October at Chionji (or is it Chion-in, I always forget) is much nicer.)

I’ve been watching a bunch of people doing reaction videos to songs/concerts on Bilibili, and found myself thinking, I could do this! Not showing my face, God forbid, just my voice and my terrible Chinese. I have things I want to say! It would be such good speaking practice! (she said innocently). Probably nobody would watch them, but so what? Except, I couldn’t do it, because I don’t have the relevant software/hardware and have never made a video in my life. Is that something you can just, like, download and learn? (Also I’d have to actually sign up to B站, but presumably that can be done…)

Considering some of the more varied uses of the character 美 in Chinese. 美甲, painted/polished/manicured nails; 美瞳, cosmetic contacts; 美声, bel canto (used, I think, as a metonym (?) for Western-opera singing in general, to distinguish it from Chinese opera). Also the phonetic ones: 美乃滋, Taiwan-Chinese for mayonnaise (the mainland uses 蛋黄酱, egg yolk sauce); 美式 is American-style and a 冰美式 is an iced Americano.
Other random Chinese stuff: 大肠发卷, a really delightful word which is literally “large intestine hairband,” ie a scrunchie; and the frequent online use of the English “ing”to mean, appropriately, “currently doing ~~” (I’ve seen “排练ing” and “考虑ing” among others).

Jiang Dunhao song of the post, 好的晚安, because the 转音 (melisma? do you call it melisma in a pop song?) get to me; also a bonus Zhou Shen version of the same song, up an octave of course (or rather JDH is taking it down an octave, Zhou Shen covered it first).

For the last orchestra concert, we had a different tuba player (the one before was a slight, fresh-faced young man who looked as if he might get sucked into his own tuba, a la Alice in Orchestralia); this one was a tall thin guy about thirty, with glasses and a short ponytail (still unusual in mainstream Japan). He looks like someone, I kept thinking, but I couldn’t pin it down until I saw him in his concert suit: Liu Sang!

Rereading the diaries of Nella Last, a mid-20th-c. housewife from Northern England, vibrant as always.

5/13/41: Men are so odd. I often feel I give up trying to understand them at all. Perhaps they feel like that about us!!
6/8/41: Today at Morecambe Bay two carfuls of happy people sat within earshot and I caught scraps of conversation…the rest of the talk seemed to be of ‘whether our Margaret should stand so much of Bill’s nonsense—girls were daft nowadays to bother about things like that.’ I was so curious about Margaret’s particular daftness!
4/23/42: Mrs Waite started off about ‘crawling snakes’ and ‘tricks her mother would have done’ and suddenly I got angry and said ‘If I wanted to leave I’d leave. Nothing would stop me. But if you want to make me grow tired of Hospital Supply, you will start bickering and nagging. What I do when I’m not at Hospital Supply is my own concern and to talk of “liking to be where men are” in that nasty insinuating way you did when I said I would rather work in the men’s Canteen than change over was quite uncalled for. I do like men best—I’m more used to them and anyway I’ve never heard a man say as many stupid childish things to another man as you did to Molly Diss. You are a very peevish cantankerous old thing and I will not be spoken to like that.’ There was dead silence and then Mrs. Waite said mildly ‘I cannot see us doing without a bit of fire for a week or two’ and Mrs. Higham got up and went out. Later she said ‘I went off to have a mild attack of hysterics…’
12/18/45: And there’s a thing people tend to forget. One of the strongest cornerstones in American society as a whole is bitter resentment, either to their own country or another, which compelled them to seek a fuller life overseas.
3/7/47: Shan We [Siamese cat] seemed to lose his head—he took a header [from the window] into the deep snow and disappeared, except for the tip of his brown tail. I leaned forward and heaved and we both fell backward into the hall, bringing a pile of snow. The cross-eyed look of reproach he gave me and the anxious look he gave his tail, as if surprised to find it still on, nearly sent me into hysterics of laughter—helped by the same ‘Why should this happen to me?’ look on my husband’s face as he shovelled snow.
2/3/50: Then the elephant keeper ‘had a go’ [on the eponymous radio program] and in a perfectly serious voice, answering Wilfred’s ‘Why do elephants marching along a street hold on to each other’s tails?’ said ‘It keeps them decent’! not pausing to realise he meant decent in the Northern Irish idiom meaning ‘tidy.’ … I was in the lounge and my eyes fell on a little carved coconut wood elephant. I felt chuckles begin in my throat and a vision of five or six elephants swinging down the Strand, with their ponderous yet ‘mincing’ tread, so smug and confident in their ‘decent’ appearance as trunks gripped tails! My husband put his head round the door and said ‘What are you laughing about?’ and I said ‘Decent elephants’ and he laughed too.
2/27/50: Luckily I didn’t mention going to Ireland, for my husband said quickly ‘Ah, Nell can have a good rest [while he would be away]. I’ll soon be back and she will have to write lots of letters to me…’. I sniffed as I said to Mrs Howson ‘So, if you see a cheap line in chastity girdles, let me know.’ He wondered why we both set off laughing. He said ‘You’ve just got new corsets. What do you want another girdle for?’
6/26/52: I’d have awarded top place for oddity, though, to a gentle old world type of man who could have been a country parson or doctor. In Lyons he had a glass of lemonade with ice cream dropped in, and a double portion of ice cream, with four wafers, and by his look enjoyed his odd lunch.

Photos: Miké-chan in the park; two from the regional jazz festival over Golden Week, one mostly sky and one a performance in a shrine (look close to see the sax and trumpet); iris, maple, and strawberries, the latter from my veranda; two from a recent Gaudí exhibition, because I can’t resist dragons, or mosaic (especially as a tiny model); and four postcards of past used-book-fair posters. Maybe the Heian lady is that girl whose name I can never remember who was so thrilled when her aunt gave her the latest chapters of the Tale of Genji?

Be safe and well.

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Posted by The Dreamstress

https://thedreamstress.com/2026/05/a-pastoral-picnic-1780s-style/

https://thedreamstress.com/?p=24857

I’m so far behind on blogging that I haven’t shared any images from the Historical Sew & Eat Retreat 2024, much less 2025!

For 2024, our theme was 18th century. We escaped up the coast to the charming town of Foxton, known for its Dutch windmill (imported from the Netherlands and reassembled there), and history of growing and processing harakeke (New Zealand flax), mostly for ropes, in the 19th and early 20th century.

While on retreat we took a drive to Palmerston North to visit Greenhaugh Gardens, where we spent a pleasant (but very hot) day having an 18th century pastoral-inspired picnic, enjoying the grounds, and slowly melting.*