emotional rescue

We acquired the extremely useful term gigil just recently and have long been captivated with needful words and those with no English equivalent, but are really indebted to Futility Closet for introducing us to the notion of emotional granularity, which failed to register with us earlier despite having come across the same good feeling thesaurus ourselves previously. Having the vocabulary to articulate finer distinctions in one’s psyche imparts mental well-being and has tangible benefits, like greater emotional resiliency and lessens incidence of dependency and abuse. Coarsen up your way of talking about feelings—some will certainly resound for us and we’ll recognise those positive qualities in others—at the links directly above.

donbass

Disconcertingly the Russian prime minister has issued a statement in reaction to Dear Leader’s reluctant signing into law a bill continuing sanctions against Russia, North Korea and Iran (Dear Leader had reservation because he believed that Congress was undermining his executive authority and as a businessman who founded a company worth many billions, he was far more qualified than the legislative branch to negotiate a deal with foreign powers) that characterises the decision as a trade-war.
Dear Leader could have tried vetoing the bill but given almost universal bipartisan support to levy the embargo, which began in 2014 in response to the annexation of the Crimea, but that would have been even more damning confirmation of collusion and there was support enough to overturn any attempts to block its passage. The previous US administration expelled dozens of Russian diplomats and commandeered some of their property holdings that weren’t accorded extraterritorial status, but at the time, the Russian response was not symmetrical or immediate. Instead, Russia barred US citizens from adopting Russian orphans, ostensibly, over gay marriage—with adoption understood as code for sanctions throughout. Just now, the American mission to Moscow is being told to reduce staffing by half and its properties are being seized. The continued embargo foremost jeopardises the profitability of the Russian energy sector by making it harder to seek investors and business partners for its natural gas pipeline to western Europe. The broadly accepted narrative holds that Russia was motivated to interfere with the US presidential election with an aggressive social media campaign of sophistry to make Dear Leader appear to be the more palatable alternative.

conjuring

It’s always frustrating when I go to download an episode of Fresh Air with Terry Gross and end up summoning a demon. Is anyone else experiencing this? After this opening interlude, the show proceeded as normal—and we suspect that the currently available version has been duly exorcised—and was a really good one, in fact, with a profile of the performer and composer behind the quite timely School House Rock! number “I’m Just a Bill” and a captivating deconstruction of The Doors’ “Light my Fire.”

common parlance or twenty-three and me

My Modern Met shares an engrossing graphical representation from National Geographic’s senior editor that depicts the distribution and relative population size of the world’s twenty-three most spoken languages with a format of immediacy that teases out some interesting demographics and linguistic trivia. The criteria for inclusion was languages whose speakers numbered fifty million or above—and leaves out the over seven thousand extant minority ones. One fact that always strikes me is how a handful of majority languages are self-contained—like Japanese or Telugu—but others have broader representation. Acquaint yourself with more facts about language and the legend of the chart at the link up top.