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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.
September 19, 2025 at 7:45am September 19, 2025 at 7:45am
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This might not be helpful to anyone else here. It's barely helpful to me. But, despite it being a Popular Science article, I might have learned something.
I'm still working on French. The thing I struggle most with now is pronunciation, so the article caught my eye. I'm also not very good at following spoken French, but, to be fair to myself, I need subtitles on my screen to follow the English.
In your language-learner dreams, you may be asking a local what time the train is coming in a perfect Parisian accent, or ordering scialatelli as if youâve spent your entire life vacationing on the Amalfi Coast.
I'll settle for just not being mocked for my accent.
You know the brand Lululemon? I've never bought anything from them, but even as someone who goes out of his way to avoid ads, it pinged my radar a while back. I was curious why it was named that, so I looked it up, and the claim is that the founder called it something with three Ls so he could laugh at Japanese people trying to say it.
Dick.
If youâre learning a language that doesnât share roots with your mother tongue, pronunciation can be hard. So hard in fact, that it may hinder the learning process altogether.
It's certainly an obstacle, especially at my advanced age. Not letting that stop me, though.
Mother tongues can also make picking up new lingo simpler or more difficult; itâs easier for an English speaker to learn the similarly-rooted German, and harder for them to learn Italian.
I have my doubts about this claim, but I haven't really tried to learn either. What I do know is that so many of our words come from French (or Latin via French) that English might be more properly classified as a German-French creole. It's considered a Germanic language, as I understand things, because of the grammatical structure more than the words themselves.
Consider the words âthisâ and âthese.â For Spanish speakers, these words are tricky because the âIâ sound in âthisâ doesnât exist in their native language. They tend to pronounce it as âthese.â
And, apparently, so it is in certain British accents. I always used to rag on the Eurythmics for rhyming "this" with "disagree," but that was before I found out about this concept.
The song still sucks, though.
The same happens with the French âRââit sounds lovely, but if you have a hard time pronouncing it, youâll still probably be able to communicate with locals during your trip to the Pyrenees mountains.
No, I won't, because the Pyrenees are *shudder* outdoors.
The article dives into specific tips for certain languages, including the bold claim that "Japanese is very similar to Spanish," which I guess is true from the point of view of what sounds are in the language.
The thing that learning another language has really done for me, though? Besides being able to ask a French person what color their cat is, it's that I've become more patient with people for whom English isn't their native language, and speak it with a heavy accent. Though it's embarrassing to me that I was ever not patient with that. |
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My wife can't and so I'm always teasing her about whether she's talking about "but" (pero), "dog" (perro), or "bird" (parro).
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