User:Soap/gumption

04:52, 11 September 2022 (PDT)

See also Orphaned languages of Teppala.

GUMPTION words are a catch-all term for a word with a very specific meaning not recoverable from its etymology. They are fairly common in Play, but especially well-known in Late Andanese. Because of a longstanding mutual respect for each other's distinct cultures and languages, Play and Andanese seldom borrow words from each other, but instead use calques or coin new words. This holds true even for speakers who are fluent in both languages, because all citizens belonged to only one tribe, even if they were fluent in both languages or in a mixed marriage. Thus, many gumption words are pairs, but it is most often Andanese that coined the word first.

This section is very disorganized because the terms in each section also share traits with terms in other sections, and as a result all of them are difficult to categorize.

Play and Andanese often translate doubly foreign words (that is, words that are foreign to both languages) through a cipher rather than attempting to represent the complex sounds of various languages like Leaper.

Type I Gumption words (culturebound)

These terms are considered culturebound, even if they are not. There is a much larger number of terms that are also culturebound because of politics, but typically have short lifetimes. Examples of longer-lived words follow:

Champions

• Play's "champion" word, kapipāsuaa, or something even more specific, referring to an all-around champion who is fond of competing in one particular sport (or other competition) but is so good in general that they can beat others at their own favorite sports.

Taapau

• Play taapau, often considered an ideal masculine trait; may have various definitions even inside Play because of different men having different ideas of what it means to be taapau. The overarching concept is to be helpful to others without taking criticism from those who are being helped. Possible finer shades of meaning follow:

• "utilitarian and ugly", which is one interpretation of the bare word taapau rather than a compound based on it. Note that taapau is an AA compound, not BB as one might expect. The Play and especially Andanese scripts were considered very taapau, and even feminists took pride in this despite their conscious acknowledgment that the scripts were masculine. These women subscribed to a type of feminism in which men were not seen as harmful or inferior, but were considered expendable in times of scarcity, and so the taapau ideal served them well.

Child superheros

• A word for a child superhero, literal or metaphorical, particularly one whose behavior is more stereotypically adult-like than that of most adults. Play would have žafaa for this word if it were inherited directly from the Gold ancestor gahʷaʕ, but it is not clear that such a concept would survive more than 2,000 years of language change. The Gold word is in turn from MRCA ìka mfʷògo, showing it was originally a compound. The earlier MRCA word mfʷògo meant a child superhero by itself, but with a different concept that did not get refined until near the maturation date of Play.

The earlier definition was comparable to pušeže.

(More can be found in the GUD dictionary, intended for a draft of Andanese in which such word formation is normal although the words are compounds.)

Butterfly

• "go back to the only place i have left" (the gumption word would be "one's own refuge" as in the word for butterfly. in Play this is an ordinary content word, but in other languages it might need to be named after a person, or alternatively just calqued from Play using the borrowing language's own word for butterfly)

• This is often used by people at the bottom of society, but whose sole comfort — a safe place to live — seems to never be in jeopardy. For example, one among a group of people forced to live in the wilderness would say they were going back to the campsite using the butterfly verb. Because these people are otherwise very poor and troubled, their sole refuge is very important to them, and the name of the safe place might be considered even more comforting than the Play word for home (nuīs).

The city without work

• a city in which nobody works or goes to school, and people are poor but all needs are nonetheless taken care of. Not the same as the butterfly refuge above, because the butterfly habitat is real, and only provides one thing (shelter) without providing food and well-being.

• The Play name for this city was Ŋapata Ŋūa, where ŋūa means to make a toy of something and is also used in words related to child care. Thus Ŋapata Ŋūa was a city where everyone was like small children, even younger than the youngest school-age children, and yet their needs were taken care of.
• The Late Andanese name for the city is Upuayaha. This has no connection to the Play name because both cultures shared the concept and neither needed to loan its name from the other.
• Although this is not the same as the butterfly habitat, some common bonds unite them.

• For example, both places are described as materially poor, yet in at least one way better off than the richer society around them.
• People living in both places may have only a narrow connection to the outside world, such that they don't conceive of their own living situation as extreme, but instead see the outside world as exotic. A common item from the outside world might be treated as a treasure in Ŋapata Ŋūa, but not as an item of temptation; it would thus be then quickly discarded as something not worth seeking more of.

• Both Play and Andanese speakers agree that the city has a definite location in Play territory, but would be reluctant to place it on a map.
• There are similarities to the Big Rock Candy Mountain song, in that the pleasures never run out, but also are limited to individualistic elemental pleasures rather than pleasure derived from monetary wealth or from exploitation of other people. Not everyone would be happy in Upuayaha, but those who live there are glad to have found their paradise and have no desire to leave. Note that the Players and their forebearers specifically defined pata "play" as being fun for all involved, and with no one suffering to provide another with pleasure.

Frog Pond

• A state of mental clarity which brings perfect peace. Commonly believed to be a physical place, even by adults who have studied their religion.

Type II Gumption words (painful emotions)

Some of these words are unlikely to be common enough to use in Play or even in Andanese.

Waiting

• "are you still waiting for ___", either

• said to comfort someone when the person/thing clearly will never arrive, or
• pretending not to notice something is wrong, so that the listener can realize the problem without the visible embarrassment of being confronted

That horrible town

• Emotional distress and temper tantrums expressed only when one's living situation improves, whether because it was unsafe to do so in worse times or because nobody was around to listen

• In particular, a delayed and seemingly disproportionate negative reaction caused by early trauma. As in English "once bitten, twice shy", seen from the perspective of an outsider who either did not witness the original event or did not understand its effect on the other person at the time.

• Sympathy for a person undergoing the above, just after rescuing them or taking them in. May be associated with certain words in English, as in e.g. We wont go back to that horrible town ever again, where the speaker does not name the place spoken of.

Unsorted emotions

• depression in small children may have a distinct word

• chemical and situational depression may also have distinct words, despite the total lack of psychological knowledge throughout the entire planet

• the emotion felt by parents upon sending their child to live in the adult world, realizing the child is not ready but that the time for parenting has run out. In many societies, the government rules even inside the home, and parents cannot keep their children (especially boys) in the household past a certain age

• Sometimes triggered by seeing the child attempt to use a children's solution (ninapasua) to solve an adult problem (tatūataša). This latter word is not cognate to taša as in a temper tantrum, which derives from thrusting one's thighs.

• to perform a pleasurable activity for the last time

• to abstain from an activity after realizing it is no longer pleasurable (e.g. "to put away the game controller" etc)

Positive emotions

• nuen — to deny the existence of immoral behavior in an enemy, deflating the argument for righteous war. not restricted to war or even to politics. Often describes an attempt to calm down a friend with a feud against a third party. The angry friend will come expecting his listener to side with him, but the listener will say, "you know, I havent seen him do that" etc

other words

These are the least likely to have established usage in Play and may end up in my diary or autobiography if I ever actually write one.

• Billy joel CD

• This is related to that horrible place above but in a manner difficult to explain

• to deny reality by incorrectly repeating what one has heard
• turkey family cellphone store
• Victoria Beach incident

• similar to English no good deed goes unpunished, but showing those who are doing good things for others are vulnerable to attack specifically by third parties, not by the person being helped (though the person being helped may not care in the least for their hero's suffering). For such a complex definition one might expect to see a proverb, but gumption words are precisely those whose meanings are not recoverable from their etymologies

• novotrade. possibly a subsense of taapau above.
• triple action soap
• something more extreme than what was already thought to be extreme. Often seen as good, such that citizens of Upuayaha would talk about a second city with an even more luxurious lifestyle, and how they did not feel jealous because Upuayaha was good enough
• Newburyport temper tantrum
• herpes
• joshi
• Salem 78 ... e.g. "last month was terrible, so next month will be good"
• rsdefensehall
• acmoore reach end of store. possibly the same as waiting but from the other point of view
• nupy nutu: "to ask for help, helplessly"
• th ... an emotion only felt by authority figures
• staples 10 .... describing how e.g. small children will talk to others their age even if adults are far more numerous in a gathering of people. also describing the action of peering around, with some difficulty, to find other children in the crowd of adults, whose larger figures make it difficult to see. metaphorically, also used for adults seeking their own kind when surrounded by others they dont feel comfortable with. compare also in science fiction (and with some wry sarcasm in modern online environments) humans struggling to find another human amidst a crowd of a thousand robots.

Eponyms

Eponyms are named after people, and are not considered gumption words. This is not a third category, but rather a subset of the other two. Possible examples of eponymous concepts could be

• to approach a loyal customer asking them to buy even more, while ignoring potential new customers in the perception that they will be more difficult to convince
• to use someone else's property because you have more need for it than they do; often causative ("X assigned Y's Z to W"); a possible quadrivalent verb
• the original "gumption" word set, relating to items whose price does not relate to its value

• might be derived from a single eponym or several. Alternatively, it could just be a set of words calqued from Andanese or even native to Play, so long as they behave as a set

• a tourist. even the richest nations produced few tourists, either coming or going, because transportation was both slow and inconvenient.