The Fold: Micro Languages

I love a language that’s just for a few people. Whether it’s a code, jargon, slang, or just a loose agreement among friends, I like hearing it poking into everyday life. Here are some language-related tidbits that have delighted me recently.

I was watching the highly bingeable new Hulu series A Thousand Blows. It’s a historical drama about the Forty Elephants, an all-female gang that terrorized London in the late 19th century. Occasionally, the characters slip into Thieves’ cant, a cryptolect used among criminals to leave police in the dark.

Blueprints to Bed Covers: Visual Languages in Fiber Art

If you’ve spent any time making or admiring quilts, you’ve probably noticed that quilting and mapping go hand-in-hand. Here are several fiber artists who celebrate this overlap in their work.

​Carolyn Friedlander drew on landscape design vocabulary for her Architextures fabric line.

​Valerie Goodwin uses the visual languages of mapping and architecture in her quilted work.

​Ekta Kaul uses stitching to map her family history and personal life experiences. I took a workshop with her in the Nook community and I have her book Kantha: Sustainable Textiles and Mindful Making. She’s a wonderful artist and educator. The image at the top of this email is inspired by her instruction.

Tomoko Kubo’s Hiragana Embroideries Double as Japanese Language Learning Devices via Colossal ​

Japanese illustrator and fiber artist Tomoko Kubo embroiders hiragana characters using imagery corresponding to that sound. In this way, the embroidered illustrations become a phonetic learning tool.

Speaking of symbols…

Recognize that? You probably saw it last time you went to a doctor’s office. It’s the biohazard symbol, indicating the possible presence of viruses, harmful bacteria, or other things dangerous to human health. It was developed in 1966 by Charles Baldwin for the Dow Chemical Company. Baldwin and his team had the task of designing a symbol that was:

• striking in form in order to draw immediate attention
• unique and unambiguous
• quickly recognizable and easily recalled
• easily stenciled
• symmetrical (in case, for example, a container got turned on its side)
• acceptable to groups of varying ethnic backgrounds

Tall order, huh? Looks like they did a great job meeting all those criteria. And although Baldwin has said that “this symbol was not designed to be used sartorially,” you can get it as a pantograph for longarm quilting.​

From The Department of Untranslatables

Fulskap*, or a cabinet where you put ugly things so you don’t have to look at them. Source: The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning by Margareta Magnusson. The author recommends hiding undesirable gifts in a fulskap. She says, ”If aunts and uncles see their gifts on show, they will only give you more!”

*Etymologically similar to foolscap, a word meaning a jester’s hat, that we now use to describe certain sizes of paper. I couldn’t discern where in history one term becomes the other, but I’ll take Magnusson’s word for it.

Aconchegante, a Portugese term roughly equivalent to “cozy.” Maybe kin to hygge.

For more micro-languages, argots, and cryptolects, check out In The Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent. ​

My Name Showed Up In a Video Game

Apparently there’s an Atlee Street in the video game Grand Theft Auto V. “The street is one-way between Strawberry Avenue and Sinner Street. The one-way section is home to a large number of small jewelry stores.”

And now a poem.

Amazing
how short the distance
from Strawberry to Sinner
but so many jewels
along the way

[bow demurely, wait for applause to stop]

A Video For Those Who Read This Far

​Elle Cordova gifts us with a grammatical showdown. Click here to watch her video on Instagram. ​

Thank you for looking at little things with me.

xoxo Sarah