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Dec. 17th, 2025 11:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynCanceled my Duolingo subscription today. I've been using Babbel for Italian and I think it works better in terms of getting concepts across; Duo's basically vocab practice and trying to use it to start learning Dutch is kinda slow going for everything except pronunciation. Gonna start working on the copy of Dutch for Dummies I bought from Thriftbooks a while ago.
Meanwhile, on a different linguistic front, I am perfectly happy to allow older, sexist language to persist in the lyrics of one specific Christmas song. I've said it before, elsewhere, but it's Hark The Herald Angels Sing. This is because when I was a wee little sprog of about eight, I read C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. All of them, all the way through, in the original order (as written, not as events chronologically happened). And that same year, we sang all the verses* of Hark The Herald Angels Sing at church. And we got to the third verse, and I hit these lyrics:
Mild he lays his glory by
Born that Man no more may die
Born to raise the sons of Earth
Born to something something something
I stopped listening at that point because I had just had the sudden experience of being informed, in church, that Jesus was born for both humans and dwarves. Given that Lewis had casually informed the reader in The Horse And His Boy that they could look up certain facts in 'any good history of Calormen at your library', this was kind of an odd moment.
My mom explained it to me later that Lewis was the only one who meant dwarves when he said 'sons of Earth', and also pointed out that 'veiled in flesh the Godhead see' did not mean the equivalent to those Jesus statues with the Sacred Heart on his chest, but... for a while there, dwarves were a thing.
So Hark The Herald Angels Sing gets to keep the male-oriented lyrics in my book. Because dwarves.
*A bit on the unusual side even at Christmas for Catholics; most Masses I've been to have generally done one or two verses of any given song or hymn, versus the handful of Protestant services I've been to where they sang every single verse of every single song
Meanwhile, on a different linguistic front, I am perfectly happy to allow older, sexist language to persist in the lyrics of one specific Christmas song. I've said it before, elsewhere, but it's Hark The Herald Angels Sing. This is because when I was a wee little sprog of about eight, I read C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. All of them, all the way through, in the original order (as written, not as events chronologically happened). And that same year, we sang all the verses* of Hark The Herald Angels Sing at church. And we got to the third verse, and I hit these lyrics:
Mild he lays his glory by
Born that Man no more may die
Born to raise the sons of Earth
Born to something something something
I stopped listening at that point because I had just had the sudden experience of being informed, in church, that Jesus was born for both humans and dwarves. Given that Lewis had casually informed the reader in The Horse And His Boy that they could look up certain facts in 'any good history of Calormen at your library', this was kind of an odd moment.
My mom explained it to me later that Lewis was the only one who meant dwarves when he said 'sons of Earth', and also pointed out that 'veiled in flesh the Godhead see' did not mean the equivalent to those Jesus statues with the Sacred Heart on his chest, but... for a while there, dwarves were a thing.
So Hark The Herald Angels Sing gets to keep the male-oriented lyrics in my book. Because dwarves.
*A bit on the unusual side even at Christmas for Catholics; most Masses I've been to have generally done one or two verses of any given song or hymn, versus the handful of Protestant services I've been to where they sang every single verse of every single song
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