Am I the Infidel? (It'll Be Easy)
Dec. 1st, 2007 12:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jheti
Kitana. On being unable to marry her true love while she has a monster in her closet. I suppose it's m/f if you squint? Mostly just her logic spiralling in circles.
Contains big words that are probably unsuitable for minors, on grounds that they might actually have to do their homework to understand them. The HORROR.
The truth changed the color of their silence instantly; this was to be expected. The unsaid carried twice as much weight as the spoken. She knew this and lived by it. It had been drilled into her head before she could walk, almost before she could speak. The two events had not occurred simultaneously.
She had been too frightened to say a word.
Liu could remember neither of these milestones in himself. Humans rejected a great deal of their memories as they aged. It was, she thought, probably because they grew faster and died so soon.
But Mileena remembered, and her life would not be so very much longer than his. She couldn't ask her, however. Not now. Not now that there was truth between them.
It was just another piece of the pattern. Another wrinkle in the sheets. As it were.
She'd hated that phrase early on. As it were, as you were, the ring of militarism and pretense. Extra syllables--noises, her sister would have said--and they served no purpose except to make the person speaking them seem grander than they were.
So much of pure vocabulary in her own language was based on impressing others. Or so it seemed to her. She had a facility with words. She'd had no choice in the matter.
It was just as well.
And now all she could do was think in truisms and cliches, smooth assurances without inherent meaning or power or hope.
She knew a little Nomadic, now. It was composed entirely of threats, mandates, and exceedingly vulgar feminine couplets. Rhyme and meaning were separate, making Edenian wordplay impossible and Earth wordplay a bit clunky.
Among the ideas that did not translate: peace, love, and adjustable interest rates.
She'd tried it, using the only dictionary she could find--a week spent in dust and paper; she still itched from the memory--and these things came out as "enforced armistice", "desire", and "usury".
She'd heard rumors they had a sixteen-letter alphabet. A few of the boys in cryptography wanted so very badly to impress their princess.
It couldn't be true--their syllable structure wouldn't support it. Explaining that took greater intellect than she was known for. Kitana never deviated from her popular image: graceful, cultured, pleasant...and stupid.
It had saved her from her father's anger too often for her to abandon it. Besides, it put her female competitors at ease. She was no threat to them as long as she was a moron, and it gave men cause to open doors for her--they were as transparent as they were predictable. They'd do anything to protect a pretty idiot, because pretty idiots eventually lifted their pretty skirts for dashing gentlemen.
At least in theory.
They had to have at least twenty complete signs or so, in order to generate compound nouns. Gerunds occurred frequently, and there did not seem to be a single-sign fashion for communicating the change, as there was in Edenian. The process took three signs in human English. It stood to reason, as English was syntactically similar to Common, and what little of Nomadic she'd seen was more like Common than Edenian, that there were at least two distinct signs for the process of nouning a verb in the mutant language.
They must, of course, lack punctuation. Any language without a concept for love could not possibly contain something as sophisticated as tonal grammatical markers in the visual sense. And no language without a functional noun for something as sacred as peace could claim to be civilized in the least--they were, at the maximum, barbarians. Educable, to a point, but entirely irredeemable in the long term.
Given a choice, given a chance, her sister always defaulted to the motivations of her true nature, the least of which were spontaneous aggression and unnecessarily coarse language. Still, it had to be a choice. It had to be voluntary. There really couldn't be any intrinsic factor to it--there must be some motivation, provocation, some external factor based in deliberate, malignant free will. Choice was an absolute. It was not an illusion. It was real and functional and inescapable. Thus, every instance of her disagreeable or undesirable behavior was both premeditated and ineffably wrong.
There had to be some way to bring them to heel--to make them behave as they could and should, if only they would accept enlightenment.
It was altogether unfortunate that her father had done away with the theocracy, Shadow Priests notwithstanding.
Then again, under the present regime it was, purely legally, possible for her to be handfasted with Liu.
Now, if only the truth would get out of the way and let them get on with things.
It's based in syllable count. *Smug.*
I leapt two and a half (in some cases, four) grade levels in the filter entirely by adding extra syllables. (This is especially amusing when one considers that the computed average syllable length for this block of text is something like 1.28 on the money.)
I used to write naturally at whatever the top obscurity rating on the filter is. Seems to come from passive voice, mainly.
Contains big words that are probably unsuitable for minors, on grounds that they might actually have to do their homework to understand them. The HORROR.
The truth changed the color of their silence instantly; this was to be expected. The unsaid carried twice as much weight as the spoken. She knew this and lived by it. It had been drilled into her head before she could walk, almost before she could speak. The two events had not occurred simultaneously.
She had been too frightened to say a word.
Liu could remember neither of these milestones in himself. Humans rejected a great deal of their memories as they aged. It was, she thought, probably because they grew faster and died so soon.
But Mileena remembered, and her life would not be so very much longer than his. She couldn't ask her, however. Not now. Not now that there was truth between them.
It was just another piece of the pattern. Another wrinkle in the sheets. As it were.
She'd hated that phrase early on. As it were, as you were, the ring of militarism and pretense. Extra syllables--noises, her sister would have said--and they served no purpose except to make the person speaking them seem grander than they were.
So much of pure vocabulary in her own language was based on impressing others. Or so it seemed to her. She had a facility with words. She'd had no choice in the matter.
It was just as well.
And now all she could do was think in truisms and cliches, smooth assurances without inherent meaning or power or hope.
She knew a little Nomadic, now. It was composed entirely of threats, mandates, and exceedingly vulgar feminine couplets. Rhyme and meaning were separate, making Edenian wordplay impossible and Earth wordplay a bit clunky.
Among the ideas that did not translate: peace, love, and adjustable interest rates.
She'd tried it, using the only dictionary she could find--a week spent in dust and paper; she still itched from the memory--and these things came out as "enforced armistice", "desire", and "usury".
She'd heard rumors they had a sixteen-letter alphabet. A few of the boys in cryptography wanted so very badly to impress their princess.
It couldn't be true--their syllable structure wouldn't support it. Explaining that took greater intellect than she was known for. Kitana never deviated from her popular image: graceful, cultured, pleasant...and stupid.
It had saved her from her father's anger too often for her to abandon it. Besides, it put her female competitors at ease. She was no threat to them as long as she was a moron, and it gave men cause to open doors for her--they were as transparent as they were predictable. They'd do anything to protect a pretty idiot, because pretty idiots eventually lifted their pretty skirts for dashing gentlemen.
At least in theory.
They had to have at least twenty complete signs or so, in order to generate compound nouns. Gerunds occurred frequently, and there did not seem to be a single-sign fashion for communicating the change, as there was in Edenian. The process took three signs in human English. It stood to reason, as English was syntactically similar to Common, and what little of Nomadic she'd seen was more like Common than Edenian, that there were at least two distinct signs for the process of nouning a verb in the mutant language.
They must, of course, lack punctuation. Any language without a concept for love could not possibly contain something as sophisticated as tonal grammatical markers in the visual sense. And no language without a functional noun for something as sacred as peace could claim to be civilized in the least--they were, at the maximum, barbarians. Educable, to a point, but entirely irredeemable in the long term.
Given a choice, given a chance, her sister always defaulted to the motivations of her true nature, the least of which were spontaneous aggression and unnecessarily coarse language. Still, it had to be a choice. It had to be voluntary. There really couldn't be any intrinsic factor to it--there must be some motivation, provocation, some external factor based in deliberate, malignant free will. Choice was an absolute. It was not an illusion. It was real and functional and inescapable. Thus, every instance of her disagreeable or undesirable behavior was both premeditated and ineffably wrong.
There had to be some way to bring them to heel--to make them behave as they could and should, if only they would accept enlightenment.
It was altogether unfortunate that her father had done away with the theocracy, Shadow Priests notwithstanding.
Then again, under the present regime it was, purely legally, possible for her to be handfasted with Liu.
Now, if only the truth would get out of the way and let them get on with things.
It's based in syllable count. *Smug.*
I leapt two and a half (in some cases, four) grade levels in the filter entirely by adding extra syllables. (This is especially amusing when one considers that the computed average syllable length for this block of text is something like 1.28 on the money.)
I used to write naturally at whatever the top obscurity rating on the filter is. Seems to come from passive voice, mainly.
