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the turtle moves
Jun. 29th, 2023 11:47 pmEarlier today, on the local buy-sell-trade group for fountain pens, a listing went up: a Nakaya (fancy brand) raden ("decorated with lots of tiny chips of iridescent shell, arranged by hand") Milky Way (i.e. intended to evoke the experience of looking at... the Milky Way).
... with a pair of sterling silver turtles as the roll stop (a decorative adornment in the place you'd normally expect to find a clip on a pen lid, except it doesn't clip and instead serves purely to ensure that the pen doesn't roll off whatever flat-but-not-100%-level surface you put it down on).
The Turtle Moves, I thought. AND APPARENTLY THAT WAS INTENTIONAL.
Totally unrelatedly, obviously, today Duolingo gave me the sentence "this pen is very expensive" to translate into Turkish! And I have now finally worked out how I am going to remember the Turkish word for "pen", which is kalem; my brain was only willing to supply "kelime", meaning "word", which is sort of conceptually related but also, crucially, Different. But. I remembered. That poking around in pen fandom had introduced me to the term qalam, "a type of reed pen ... used for Islamic calligraphy"! and Turkish likes Arabic loan words, so hopefully that one can now move into my active vocabulary.
But also: good grief this pen is indeed Very expensive...
