@Gigili Hi, yes, it is quite popular here.

So you think the bike you got is of a poor quality?

Maybe you could go to Swapfiets and have them test / adjust it?

Maybe the saddle is too low: that makes it require more labour to cycle.

You should be able to stretch your leg while cycling.

@RegDwigнt You forgot do support and generous use of progressive verb forms. Also no gendered nouns. Even French has those, albeit only two genders.

@Cerberus Why is my bike so slow? It's either me or the bike.

I don't think it's the saddle, My feet can barely reach the ground in a stand up position.

Merriam-Webster announced Tuesday that it has chosen “they” as the 2019 word of the year. The singular “they” is a pronoun used to refer to a person whose gender identity is nonbinary, a word that itself was added to the Merriam-Webster.com dictionary in September of this year.

@Robusto well I did say "no grammar". It's a technical umbrella term.

If there's no English grammars, where'd me dad come from?

@Robusto I think you'll find it's meenoosha. cc @Cerberus

Last night I got my first taste of what it's like to make lyrics fit the music, rather than the other way round.

Wait, that's a dumb way to put it. Let me start over.

Basically think SATB. Where every voice is singing a completely different line, not just in terms of pitches, but also in terms of rhythm and the overall number of notes.

So the lyrics for each voice have to be different, too. But in the end everyone's line needs to make sense in its own right, as well as occasionally get back in sync with everyone else somehow.

Like, one voice sings a long held "Aaaa-veee", and another one "ave, ave, aa-vee, ave", and a third one "ave verum corpus natum de Maria virgine". But in the end everyone has sung the whole thing, or some subset thereof, or some superset, that is still perfectly comprehensible and complete on its own.

Anyway you get the point. Basic stuff, right. I see all those Bachs and Mozarts do it all the time, and I've always wondered how they'd do it. But I'd never done it myself.

Then last night my new trombonist friend who's working on that orchestration of The Fog asked me to add the Russian lyrics to it. He can sort of type in Russian, but not really. It's a nuisance.

So I said sure, lemme just type up the lyrics real quick.

And started doing it and suddenly realized, FFFFUUUUU. I can't just type up the lyrics real quick. Everyone's singing completely different things!

The altos will sometimes leave out an upbeat. The tenors do something else entirely. And the basses just sing, well, the bass line.

So I had to massage the lyrics for each voice accordingly.

That was great fun, let me tell you.

Like, sometimes you can just leave out a word. Or repeat it. But other times you have to be very creative and come up with new lyrics on the spot.

In retrospect I'm glad the arranger didn't do it himself but asked me to. Because obviously you having the Russian keyboard layout is not enough for that kind of shit. You have to be actually fluent.

I couldn't do that for a text in Portuguese, say.

You can't just repeat some word willy-nilly, or go looking up random synonyms in a thesaurus to shoehorn them into the stress pattern.

So yeah. Basically I've discovered my new favorite thing.

So I then went and as an additional exercise started scoring our Blueberries romance for SATB.

And that just felt like solving a giant sudoku.

Combines my love for music with my love for language with my love for maths with my love for LEGO. All tied up in a nice Christmas package that I now have to find a way to unwrap.

Shit's fascinating. I could do it for hours on end.

@RegDwigнt That's progress. Now you can start writing your own stuff. Your own [own own own] stuuuuuuuuuuffff!

Do continue. I have to go get breakfast.

Yeah do that. I have to go practice the violin. Only got it from the luthier's yesterday. And my next lesson is later today.

I was about to make a screenshot of the score for you, then realized I can just give you the link to the draft. Nowhere finished, but brings the point across more so than a PNG or the wall of text above.

musescore.com/user/27897310/scores/5885194/s/IvCVLV

@Cerberus I find your “hexenbutter” (well ok, heksenboter) to be just the cutest word imaginable for that familiar yellow slime we call the Seventh Soot, Fuligo septima!

speciesfungorum.org/names/Names.asp?strGenus=Fuligo

I wonder what the first six soots are.

@tchrist Hmm and apparently it can move around!

@MattE.Эллен Hmm not mai-?

@RegDwigнt You may not be aware, but the imperative "do that" in AmE is often used in a way that is patronizing, hostile, antagonistic or condescending. Especially in constructions like "Yeah, do that" and (worse) "You do that." It's possible to inoculate it against such things, and tone of voice usually draws the distinction more clearly, but that is unavailable in text.

Thought you'd like to know.