word nerd

I’ve been thinking about words a lot this week, their power and usage. Yet again I am congratulating myself on cunningly arranging to have myself born British in this life, as English would be a bugger of a language to learn if I wasn’t. The nuances of meaning you can describe within a single sentence, simply by the words you choose to include or omit, are virtually limitless. Partly this has been sparked off by some frenzied discussions on the Ravelry forums this week, regarding censorship and the lack of it, and whether there should be any or not – I’ll probably write about my thoughts on that another time.

There are some things that I wish we had words for though, and where English speakers tend to describe a noun by surrounding it with adjectives, other languages simply make up a word, by inventing one or compounding existing words. Some of my favourites are:

• Japanese: “bakku-shan” – describes a girl who appears pretty from behind but not from the front.
• Dutch: “uitwaaien”, which means walking in windy weather for fun.
• German: “Kummerspeck”, which literally means ‘grief bacon’: describes the excess weight gained from emotion-related overeating.
• “Backpfeifengesicht”: a face that cries out for a fist in it.

The Germans are especially good at it, I’d have to know more about German to know why, but I think it’s generally to do with word order in sentences meaning that it’s easier to make a compound word than using lots of adjectives. Or something like that. I remember at school learning that the longest German word was “Der Vierwaldstätterseecapitänsmüetzensternlein” (why I learnt it, I don’t know, I suspect I was a word nerd even then). It means ‘the little star on the cap of the captain who drives the steamship across Lake Lucerne’.

Germany actually has awards for the longest words – apparently the longest word in current usage is now – “das Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz”: “beef labeling regulation & delegation of supervision law” – sparked off by the BSE crisis.

So now you know.

the A-Team strikes back

More about my weekend of making household objects work for me!

I have been working on the Gretel Hat for a Xmas present for my cousin, and I was scared I was going to run out of wool. I’ve been using some silvery-grey yarn I bought off eBay before I discovered the joys of expensive natural fibres, although actually it’s lovely and soft, even though there’s a bit of mohair in there somewhere. No ball bands, no idea of yardage, etc etc, I just knew I was running a little short by the end.

Originally I’d made a small shawl with this stuff, which I never used, and was a big ol’ heap of stockinette with a few garter stripes. It had big holes in it and was relegated to the scarf cupboard. So I decided to unravel it to reuse the yarn. It took me a while to find a perfect unravelling point, as I’d managed to get it extremely knotty at the bound-off edge, but once I got past the first couple of rows I was motoring along. To get it into vague skein shapes I wound it round the legs of my little blue table:

But even after a bit of a stretch there, it was still all kinked up from being in shawl form so long:

So all the skeins got dunked and soaked in the bath:

and then excess water removed with towel-squeezing and a bit of drip-drying, before winding round the table legs again to dry.

And I’m happy to say that now that it’s all dry & wound into balls, it’s perfectly rescued and will ride again! Which meant that I got to finish the Gretel Hat! I screwed up the decreases round the top slightly, but it doesn’t show toooo badly to a non-knitter (I hope!), and I’m really happy with it:

Extreme cable close-up:

I love this hat! I’d show you a pic of it being worn, but I already want to keep it, and might not take it off again if I do that, it’s so soft and squishy … that’s the trouble with knitting nice things for other people, you always end up having to do another for yourself!

if you have a problem…

if no one else can help… and if you can find them… maybe you can hire – The A-Team.

Ah, classic shows from the 80s. This post has nothing to do with them at all. It’s just that my weekend has been more creative than usual, in a ‘making do with what you have’ way, and it just reminded me of how the A-Team would always create, say, a tank, out of a shopping trolley, some callipers and an umbrella. And welding, there was always lots of welding.

I finished the red scarf, made from the SoHo wool lovely Bruno got me for my birthday, using 3 balls, because I wanted to save one of them to make either a matching hat, or.. something else. Not sure whether it was the stitch pattern that used up the yarn, or whether the yardage is just a bit rubbish, but 3 balls would normally make me a nice long scarf, and this turned out a bit disappointing.

I’m normally too lazy to block scarves, but I decided to take an ultra-aggressive stance with this one, partly because a/ it’s wool, and it just might work, b/ to open up the stitch pattern a bit, and c/ I didn’t want to use another ball and I was bored of knitting this scarf anyway so I had to stop.

So – unblocked, this scarf was maybe 3.5, nearly 4 feet long at most. I soaked it in a shallow bath with a bit of hair conditioner for a good 10 mins or so, to make sure everything was wet, then gently squeezed the excess water from it, and rolled it in a towel for more gentle patting and water removal. For the non-knitters out there, the gentleness is key, or you will end up with a big ball of red felt. I didn’t want to just lay it flat on the bed as I normally would, I wanted to stretch this bugger and keep it stretched till it dried in that shape.

This is where the A-Team bit came in. Ta-daaa! My home-made scarf-lengthenerer.

That is my mum’s old sewing stand thingy with a thick wadding of towel on it (it has inlaid wood on top and didn’t want to bugger it up with any damp), scarf draped over, and – here is where the cunningness comes in! – I wanted to weight the scarf at both ends to stretch it. After a bit of proper thinking, and an examination of the tools available to me, my monkey-brain came up with this – knitting needles in the ends of the scarf (so they weren’t pulled into points), crappy wire coathangers hooked onto the needles, and then the dullest, heaviest books I could find wedged onto the hangers to pull & provide some tension. Not exactly ‘end of series 2 of Battlestar Galactica’ tension… but very effective. So cunning you could pin a tail on it & call it a fox.

Finished scarf – extreme close-up and extreme.. um.. not so close-up.

I will definitely do this again next time I make a scarf! It’s now 5 feet long! My cunning A-Team plan gave me well over a foot of extra length.

*rubs hands together and lights cigar*

Now if only that trick would work for everything…