šApril Goat Fool 61
10Wow, what a month, huh?
Iāve previously said I would explain a few things, but didnāt ever get to it during my official reign.
Iām pretty sure that if I put if off any longer, itāll never happen.
Not that I owe you guys anything, but Iāll feel a little more complete if I wrap this up. Iāll also get to check off another item in Habitica.
1 ā Iāve been a goat my whole life
I was born a Capricorn ļø, which of course is the [western] zodiac sign of the goat
. (By the Chinese zodiac, Iām the rooster
ā just two years off of being doubly goat.)
āBut so what?ā you probably say. Or rather, āMeh?ā
Okay, so that doesnāt make me any goatier than about a twelfth of everybody here, probably.
(The general population is not spread exactly evenly across the zodiac, but itās pretty close. More importantly, Mehtizens are just a sample of the total population, which will mess up the accuracy even more. So āabout a twelfthā is as accurate as I care to estimate.)
More meaningful than my zodiac sign: as a toddler I was nicknamed āPukkiā by my family. Itās a Finnish word meaning ābilly goatā and they called me that because I climbed everything.
(Pukki is pronounced like Pooky, Garfieldās teddy bear.)
As an aside, the āFinnish Santaā is called āJoulupukkiā (āYule Goatā) and was originally not the jolly Santa we know now. Traditions have shifted over time so now Joulupukki has basically become the Finnish name for Santa. He travels on a sled or sleigh pulled by reindeer (which are a regular animal in Finland), but they donāt necessarily fly. (Although this particular video shows flightā¦ ĀÆ\_(ć)_/ĀÆ )
2 ā Pronouncing xobzoo
Fast-forward a couple decades to my next name of interest: XobĀ Zoo. I got that from a Hmong community I spent some time with. Most accurately itās pronounced [sÉĢ ŹÉÅ]
, but more Englishly I would write it āSaw Zhong.ā Hmong is a tonal language; my name has a high tone (marked by b
) in the Xob
/Saw, and a neutral tone (marked by the absence of a tone marker) in the Zoo
/Zhong.
Of course, this simplification assumes that you will recognize āzhā as the sound the S makes in āvisionā or ātreasureā (or J
in French).
I donāt expect anybody to pronounce the tones, even once theyāre aware of them. And Iām used to people saying āzob zooā if they have occasion to say it out loud. Ultimately, itās okay if you pronounce it wrong; I know itās not a natural word/name for most people.
As an aside, Iāve always felt the standard Hmong Romanization is kinda broken. At least, there are some things I would have assigned differently if I had been in charge of making it. For example, I think X
and S
are swapped (since X
sounds like english S, and S
sounds similar to English SH). But if it were done ārightā (according to me), people would probably call me āS.O.B. zooā or āsob zooā (both of which sound more wrong than āzob zooā).
Iām rambling now, so itās time to move on.
3 ā Spoon is all you need?
Less than a week before my coronationā¦
Mediocrebot shared the āSpoon Is All You Needā video. At just 10 seconds into that video there are two dubious claims made:
- āknife cannot scoop ice creamā
- āfork cannot eat soupā
I challenged those unnecessarily belittling claims, for which I was ostensibly nominated as the king goat fool.
If I was a proper goat that kept up on my duties, I would have more (and better) pictures to go along with this, but you get what you get (and you donāt throw a fit).
First, knives can be used for ice cream. I immediately thought of a prime demonstration for that, and as luck would have it, an example occurred during my reign as goat! One of my kids had a birthday and we made an ice cream cake for him (nothing like this other Red Velvet Ice Cream Cake). Here is a lousy picture from when we were cutting and distributing ice cream with a knife:
(If you think you notice the tip of the knife missing, I want to assure you thatās not the ice creamās fault. Thatās from when one of the other kids was too impatient for a tub of frozen applesauce to thaw out, and he thought it would be brilliant to stab it with the largest sharp knife he could find. Iām not bitter about it. We pretend heās smarter than that now.)
Okay, so thatās one. But what about the other? How can a fork possibly be used for soup? Ramen. On top of that, chopsticks can even be used (and are traditional). In fact, in many cases a fork or chopsticks are better than a spoon for ramen (or pho). No need to be exclusionary about it.
(This is another spot where I wouldāve added a picture demonstrating usage of a non-spoon utensil, but Iāve been too lazy to take a picture of my own, and even too lazy to bother searching for one online. And Iām afraid Iāll get too distracted if I try generating one with /showme
. I also assume that everyone has seen ramen eaten with chopsticks or at least a fork.)
As another fun aside, the Hmong language has a part of speech called a āclassifierā which I think is really useful. I donāt know how many languages have classifiers (theyāre somewhat common in southeast Asian languages), but English is not one of them. (ASL does have them, but theyāre possibly not quite as robust as in Hmong.) They function partly like articles (a/an/the) and partly like reverse-prepositions and partly like pronouns. I know, thatās confusing. At times it sounds needlessly complex, but it simplifies a few things, too.
For example, there is a classifier for ātoolsā or āthings with a handle and held in the handā (e.g. scissors, knife, gun, musical instruments), and another classifier for pairs. When using the ātoolā classifier, a fork is a fork. When using the āpairā classifier, a pair of forks is actually a pair of chopsticks. Cool, isnāt it?
There are actually very few cases where swapping out the classifier changes the meaning, but forkāļøchopsticks is one of them. And chopsticks came first, so itās actually āa chopstick is a fork, and a pair of chopsticks is chopsticks.ā And there are also other words that can mean āforkā ā but I like my example, so itās staying in.
Thereās so much more I could say about how classifiers are used, but Iāve already accomplished the point I was introducing them for. Eating soup with a fork or with chopsticks is roughly equivalent, right? (in that both are non-spoons and neither carries liquid very well) Okay, thatās a bit of a stretch for excusing that large side trek, but it was fun (for me).
TL;DR
- full goatĀ āĀ born a Capricorn, raised a Pukki (the goat portion of Santa Claus)
- pronounce
xobzoo
Ā āĀ āSaw Zhongā - spoon is all you needĀ āĀ but knife and fork are no slouches, either
I intended to spread this out into at least 3 posts during my reign, but I failed. I blame the goat for that.
- 4 comments, 3 replies
- Comment
Thank you.
Very enlightening!
Oh you do habitica? I was really into it for a while, I even ran a reasonably good guild for a while. Itās a fantastic āgameā!
@DLPanther Yep. Iām sad they took the guilds away. Or annoyed. Or disappointed. Something unpositive.
It doesnāt change the fact that I make to-do lists just fine but forget to look at them before starting. But it makes me do a little better at it, since I check in [almost] every day. So Iāve at least had a reminder of the things I didnāt do today.
Iām surprised no one has said anything about the K-pop in the middle.
Fwiw, that was
audience reaction to being rickrolled with k-pop music
.