|
About This Author
Come closer.
|
Carrion Luggage
Carrion Luggage
 
Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem.
This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it.
It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans.
It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier."
I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination.
November 19, 2025 at 9:07am November 19, 2025 at 9:07am
| |
Everyone's a nerd about something. Here's a language nerd with some negativity, from Upworthy:
Learning about language—whether diving into newfangled phrases taking over the current zeitgeist, or examining the unexpected threads that tie seemingly unrelated languages together throughout history—is endlessly fascinating. All at once, clues about humanity’s past, present, and future are revealed.
As with many things, I find this stuff fascinating, but I still have a lot to learn.
For instance, why do so many words with a negative connotation begin with the letter “n”? Sure, there are obvious exceptions, like nice, nifty, neat, etc., but when you think about not, never, nothing, nihilistic, nought, and yes, even the word negative itself…seems like a lot.
I have heard that "nice" started out kind of negative. It had the denotation that's now its sarcastic connotation, and wasn't at all a good thing to say about someone or something.
Also, this is one reason why I insist that the first decade of this century should be called the noughties.
In a short-and-sweet video, he explains that in the days of Old English, the word “ne,” meaning “not,” was used to negate, or give the opposite meaning, of virtually anything. N + one + “none,” n + either + "neither," and so on.
Spoiler: I didn't watch the video. I'm not giving clicks to portrait-oriented video. It's my little act of naughty rebellion.
Even with English words that were borrowed from Latin, as well as other non-English languages like French, German, Russian, and Sanskrit, we see this pattern. That’s because the Proto-Indo-European language, the mother of all these languages, also used the word “ne” to negate meaning.
As far as I know, French is the only surviving one of these languages to still use the word "ne." It also features double negatives as standard grammar, which I'm sure pisses off math nerds. Oh, wait, I'm a math nerd, too, and it doesn't piss me off.
If there are other languages that use it, feel free to contradict me there. Like I said, I still have a lot to learn.
However, just to complicate things a bit, we also see this in languages that did not originate from Proto-Indo-European, like Japanese and Vietnamese. This prompted a linguist by the name of Otto Jespersen in the late 1880s to theorize that there must be some primal association of negative feelings with the “n” sound.
I'd call it more "hypothesize" than "theorize," but I'm also a science nerd.
Over a hundred years later, researchers tested the theory, and found that this correlation was more of a coincidence.
So it never reached the level of "theory" as used in science.
Obviously, the biggest takeaway from all this is a new level of appreciation for the Knights that say Ni!
Well, obviously. Duh. |
© Copyright 2025 Robert Waltz (UN: cathartes02 at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
Robert Waltz has granted InkSpot.Com, its affiliates and its syndicates non-exclusive rights to display this work.
|
Comment • View 5 comments 
