Groundhog Day (and other nonsense)

Phoebe was so excited that today was hedgehog day (I mean groundhog day) and I meant to do some fun activities with her...but it ended up being a much busier day than I had bargained for. But she had a lot of fun creating her own mythology around what groundhog day means. 

According to Punxsutawney Phil, we're getting six more weeks of winter, but these kinds of prognostications mean very little when you're this far south. 

Our county had a digital learning day while we continued to recover from the weekend's snowstorm. 

And our friends in Durham have had kids home from school since January 23rd! 

I think everyone's aching for life to go back to normal. I hear they're even protesting against ice in Minnesota. So that just goes to show how much people would like the winter weather to pack up and go home. And maybe it should.

Phoebe was actually terribly upset when she looked out the (sunny) front window and saw no snow because she had eaten a big salad with her dinner last night (of her own making). Andrew had made some delicious pizza and we had salad fixings on the side, but Phoebe created a huge salad for herself, which she mentioned looked like a bowl of ice cream, with sprinkles on top (all kinds of peppers that she cut into small pieces). 

There's some inside joke about getting a large bowl of ice cream...if one has had a large bowl of salad...between Andrew and his dad. So they joked about that and then Phoebe was like, "Ice cream...sounds like a good idea."

We don't typically have ice cream in our freezer, though, so I told her she could lick the snow if she wanted to.

She did not want to...because it was dark. 

I told her she could lick the snow in the morning, but then there was no snow left in the front yard!

So we checked the (shady) back deck and there was still snow out there so she licked it before breakfast...to celebrate both her large bowl of salad and groundhog day (or hedgehog day or whatever funny animal day we were calling it...quizzically something to do with both snow and shadow...what is this nonsense? She had no idea but was more than willing to play along).

*****

Anyway...this evening Phoebe insisted on doing my hair while I was reading an article. She recently figured out how to open little alligator clips by herself. 

"Are these hair clips...electric?" she asked me. "Because it seems like if I do a little pinch then they open really fast and then they always close all-go-matically."

"They aren't electric," I told her, "but they are have a little spring in them, see? And that spring holds what's called potential energy. You activate that energy with your fingers and then the spring expands and contracts making it seem like the clip is doing things automatically."

"It's like it has a battery."

"It's almost like a battery, because they both hold energy for later use, but the spring holds mechanical instead of chemical energy. So it's a little bit different."

"These are very cool clips."

"They are so cool."

*****

Today we learned about the taa marbuuTa in Arabic, which is not part of the alphabet, but which is more like a...grammatical marker. In our discussions we likened the taa marbuuTa to both an apostrophe (which can tell you that you're contracting a word—as in you're), which isn't part of the alphabet, but which is still a functional part of our orthography. 

We also likened it to the the word a(n). 

Similar to the word "a," you have to know when the word "a" should really be the word "an."

A seagull.

An eagle.

With the taa marbuuTa, a word (generally a feminine word) ends in an "ah" sound...unless it's followed by any kind of suffix...in which case you have to stick a /t/ sound in there...because the taa is tied to the word (that's what taa marbuuTa means). 

So, habibi means "my love" (if you're talking to a boy), but if you're talking to a girl, you'd say habibati (because habiba is a girl, and habib is a boy, I guess).

One of the words we practiced with was 'ustadha (أستاذة), which means "professor." That /dh/ is a voiced /th/, so it's said like "ustatha" (or even more like "ustaza" in Egyptian Arabic). 

So we wondered about its connection to "usted" in Spanish (since Arabic and Spanish spent quite a bit of time intermingling), but it turns out that there isn't really a connection. The Spanish usted has a rather well documented etymology, stemming from Vuestra merced. The Arabic 'ustadha...is possibly more connected to Persian...but who knows?

Anyway, thinking about all of that made me think about the word for lips in Polish—which is usta! 

(Usta means either "lips" or "mouth" in many Slavic languages, actually).

None of this is pertinent to anything. I just was thinking about it. 

Perhaps I'll write a poem one day with usted/'ustadha/usta/used to...