Bear Opinions – Freyjland

Beary Good Words

Today, on the little side of the internet that we find ourselves in, we talk about words. Why? Because this is MY side of the internet and I wanted to talk about words! (also words are fun and made this whole article possible) (thanks words)

First, a definition

What is a word?

According to the Cambridge Dictionary a word is “a single unit of language that has meaning and can be spoken or written”. It isn’t the only meaning of word in the English language, but it is the meaning I will be concentrating on as the others are less relevant to my current rambling.

According to Wikipedia, there is in fact no proper consensus between linguists about the proper definition for word in terms of linguistics, so I leave you with the page with all the discussion and various sources about what is a word according to various sources. It is a fascinating topic in itself, but I have to stop somewhere, otherwise this rabbithole is never going to end and I will never post anything on this blog.

As a side-note (and this will probably be filled with a lot of side-notes), some things can be words but still not feel very word-like in my opinion. For example, words that are hyphenated feel like many words to me (like single-minded, self-service, mother-in-law and so on), not like a single word. Even though they fully enter the definition of the Cambridge dictionary.

Words as meaning

Words have meaning, obviously, it’s in the definition, but some words are very specific in meaning and others are more general and that is a big part of what makes language fascinating and varied, is how detailed or vague we can be in our expression. It all depends on how much we want to put an emphasis on something, or how we want to skim over details.

There is also the amazing effect called semantic drift, where a word will change meaning through usage, and it gets another meaning. Sometimes it replaces the original meaning completely, even going in the complete opposite direction. Like terrific meaning something inspiring terror and now is often used for something good. It is fascinating because it is something that can be observed in real life.

Words as sounds

Some words to me are funny or interesting just because they sound peculiar. Either the sounds they are composed of make for a funny noise (which is most definitely very subjective), or they feel very easy to speak.

Like shenanigans is a very fun word, both in meaning, and in sounding. Why? Because it feels that way to me. Feel free to share your fun words if you don’t like mine! It won’t make me change my mind but maybe I’ll add to my list!

Words as history traces

Words usually have a story of how they came to be and how they came to stay in the language, and we tend to study it in its own topic, etymology. It is a fully fascinating topic in itself because you can find a lot of history and a lot of small details in some words. Like the amount of words that have been introduced by Shakespeare in English ¹ is amazing, but also some words coming from other languages through borrowing mark the exchanges between cultures.

From words in a language plainly adapted into another like vasistas^{(French wikipedia, the english explanation would be here)}, being a transliteration into French of the German Was ist Das ?, to loanwords like taksi in Finnish, we see the traces of exchanges between populations into the language themselves. It’s also sometimes a nice clutch for people who have a basic level in a language, to be able to borrow words from another language and understand them easily.

It also leads to false friends, as some words may be very similar but have very different origins and meanings that would turn a sentence upside down from its original meaning in the speaker’s mind. An example that drove me a bit crazy when first learning English was actually not meaning actuellement at all in French. Actually means En fait, and actuellement would be currently. The number of times I used them wrongly is disappointing to me!

My Favourite words

Maybe it is the remnants of having spent a lot of time reading and studying linguistics and languages, but I do have favourite words in various languages, for different reasons.

I really like shenanigans in English, as mentioned earlier for its peculiar sound and fun aspect in its meaning, that I feel is reflected in the sound of it.

A rhododendron bush, with pink and red flowers, from Wikipedia's page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhododendron#/media/File:Garden_with_Rhododendrons.JPG

For French, rhododendron is one I really like, one because it makes for pretty flower bushes, and two because it is a bit raspy to sound out and almost sounds unreal to me. I am pretty certain I could find other words like that if I spent enough time on it.

In German I enjoy Waldeinsamkeit a lot, mostly for its meaning that has no one word equivalent in other languages, because I too feel the need to be alone in the woods, quite often. Maybe it is the Bear in me that speaks like that.

I could keep writing more words to add to this wordy page on words, but I feel like I have taken enough of your time if you have read all this, and enough of my time to post these rambling thoughts. Therefore, I free you from this page and bid you a beary good time!

for words introduced by Shakespeare, https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakespedia/shakespeares-words/ ↩︎

New year, new me?

Who’s there?

It’s June 2026, and I would like to try and enjoy this little oasis of Internet that I call mine. This is going to be a new blog start, and we’ll see where this goes (hopefully I’ll stick to it this time).

The world is going fast around here, and maybe blogs are outdated ways of conveying meaning and sharing stories, but I still feel like they are a neat way of carving a little space and painting those scenes.

Lately I’ve been enjoying the slow pace (and yet remarkably stressful at times) of the NEBULOUS: Fleet Command game with some friends.

The light Cruiser Long Lance and Destroyers Through Valor Alone & I Stare Transfixed after a slightly tough fight.

I really enjoy the names (that we do not have an option to choose) of the various ships we recover. It does feel like we’ve angered someone at our Navy Command, because the game starts as we are sent as “Read Admiral” on a very dangerous mission and from a 300 ship task force we end up with 2 ships at the first mission because they get scattered all over on their FTL jump. I feel like a Midshipman promoted only to end up on a nightmare mission.

We’ve had a first run through the campaign on Medium that got cut short rather quickly, and are now proceeding through the campaign on Easy because we’d rather have fun than suffer hell.

Can’t wait to see if it’ll be enough for us to accomplish our task 😀

Thanks for your time and may your time be chill and peaceful, unlike these missions!

What makes a Tuesday more like a Monday?

_{Or how Bear rambles about week days and drives readers insane, maybe…}

*Bear trying to fight off writer’s block.*

In theory, for someone working an office job with regular business hours, a work week could be seen like this:

Monday, as either the “what’s my job again?” day, or the “oh no, everything is breaking everywhere again!” day, since one such person would be coming back from a hopefully nice weekend back into work. Being so far from the weekend (in fact, the furthest of the week) can make it very dreary sometimes. But mostly it can offer a new perspective on past work issues, as one would have been able to disconnect and recharge one’s batteries.
Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday as sort of ‘in the thick of it’ days, where it’s work this, and work that, and when’s the weekend, and so on.
Friday, also known as FriYAY¹, because the weekend is just around the corner, and one anticipates exciting activities, or even just peace from neverending requests. And also, it is the day where it can be perfectly reasonable to delay certain actions to next week because of their possible impacts that could not be mitigated over the weekend.

And yet, despite this sort of common week feel (for the Bear, YMMV, of course) we get sometimes hit by a second Monday. You had a Monday that was of the exhausting variety, with plenty of things to deal with, you try to unwind and spend a nice evening. The next morning has you checking your phone for a possible Groundhog Day ² or something because it’s Monday all over again, disguised as a Tuesday.

*Bear after reading an incantation to solve the second Monday* issue

For those who have been cursed³ for real, this experience can repeat itself throughout the entire week, leaving one feeling both crushed and stretched thinner than Bilbo after holding the Ring for so long.

There is sadly no easy cure for this. The Bear does not recommend trying out spells randomly, as the cure may become a bigger problem. It could especially becoming the type of problem that stares back at you in the void, without it being your lovely black kitty. Of course the difference between your cat and a summoned horror lies in the number of eyes you can count in the dark. We advise not to count them, just in case…

The best course of action is the same as most illnesses:

Be kind to yourself,
Breathe,
Drink water,
Change your socks,
Throw work related problems at colleagues, with a decently crafted excuse (even better if you have a good reason to do so, such as “this is your area of expertise”, “I need your opinion on this”, etc…)
Keep up the hope because, as you all know:

The sun will eventually set on a new week!

Of course, this is all very much my opinion, so take it with a grain of salt, as I don’t think you should trust blindly a Bear over the Internet. You can always share your own views on time perception through the comments!

I just learned it’s a somewhat accepted word: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Friyay ↩︎
If this movie reference doesn’t speak to you, maybe this TV series one will. If not, there is always this more recent TV series episode. If you still don’t know what I’m getting at, it’s a time loop. Just a loop, not a “wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey” as some British Alien said, once or twice. ↩︎
For doing something terrible in any life, or angering a witch, a Great Ancient, stepping on a Lego brick, not petting a cat, saying bears are not nice, how could I know the real reason? This is beyond my skillset. ↩︎