I’m a little obsessed with how little there is to this joke with the carriages and hangers and canons. Like, I get that the funny part seems to be imagining a guy walking down the street with canons hanging off his lips. That is the funny part. But it would be a whole lot funnier if the hangers were an aspect of the joke. If it could somehow also be making a hangman joke (a hanger being another word for an executioner – another way to say hangman) or if it were a dirty joke. To have the centerpiece of the joke be canons at the hip…I don’t know. It feels a little simple for Shakespeare. He is not wont to go so far for a one image joke.

German comes from germaine – which is related to being of a family – of the same parents or grandparents. But the people of Germany – that German – comes from a totally different root somehow? German being Latin. Germaine being French. Which of course comes from The Latin. So perhaps german has some German roots, too. But the funny bit of language is that a German could be german.

Carriage is a funny word to have lasted all these years. It seems to have begun as a sort of cart – like – anything as wheels. And then anything that carries something else, as in this case, with the sword belts carrying swords and now we use it similarly for train cars, for baby carriers, for the fancy horse driven conveyances that people take through Central Park.
But it sounds as though carriage here is a not common usage.
It might be Osric prettying up “sword holders.”

Classic joke. Just. Classic.
I feel like I want to do a study where I ask comedians to analyze and breakdown the jokes in Hamlet. (And possibly some other plays as well.) Like – what would we call this? Does this type of joke have a name? I’ve written a couple of jokes into my novel for young people and they’re not quite this style but they have a style similar to each other and I wonder if those jokes have a category.
Is there a book of lazzi for the modern age? A book of verbal zingers – a collection and/or taxonomy of language based jokes?

Certainly the better I know others, the better I know myself. When I see others clearly, I see myself in counterpoint or in affinity. I recognize that a trait that I hadn’t even noticed in myself is not universal, that it IS a trait. When I see others behaving in ways I can’t imagine, I can see some of the ways I diverge from them and could never imagine making their choices.

As a highly empathetic person I have often been unable to distinguish between myself and others. I used to not be sure which desires were mine and which belonged to others, so fused with them I felt myself to be.

But the more specific one gets about people, the more our beautiful diversity and divergence comes forward.

And, of course, he does compare with him in excellence. They are, in fact, fairly evenly matched and Hamlet knows it. But it suits him to play the humble man. He stands to gain more from that.

You’d think those years of teaching would have taught me how to do a really high quality school marm look and tone. And I can do the voice. I can do the look. But even so, I find it hard to call it forth when talking to grown-ass men who need to be called out. It might be a little easier to conjure than the wolf growl I’ve been working on.

I feel as though, all my life, I was seeking approval from those who were unworthy of my regard. Being thought intelligent by the unintelligent would not have been any great feat – or even being thought intelligent by the intelligent but clueless or intelligent but misogynist. If I had been thought of at all by these dudes in power, it would have only been due to my physical attributes – my fuckability, perhaps. So – their approval would not have much approved me.

That is the thing that is so infuriating, really. It’s like – my whole life I’ve been aware of sexism and I have never not been a feminist. But the level of the way things are stacked against women, still, still…well, it is astounding. What I realize when I really look at so many of the statistics laid out is that my abilities are, in fact, completely invisible to those in power and those in power are almost all men. None of them know I am not ignorant – even with pages of evidence before them, they would still be blind to anything I have to offer.
I would that they knew I was not ignorant, just the way Hamlet would that Osric knew he was not ignorant despite having said so. But alas.

I like the way dialogue doesn’t always operate logically in time. That is – here in Hamlet answering Osric’s question with Horatio’s line in between. The timing is such that the through-line could probably hold between them but reading these sentences the way I do, that is, once a day, it takes a moment to figure out the through-line. That is, this line does not answer the line that came right before it – rather it answers the sentence before.