The Feeder Feed: unhappy edition (with a REQUEST… and some useful Latin)

This is not my shot.  I found it on the Twitter feed of Glacier National Park via Disputations.

Behold, Sialia pissedofftica, aka the Bluebird of Unhappiness.

It is the winter that will not end.

With that… if you use Twitter and you don’t already follow my feed… would you please follow my feed?   Thanks!

I am especially grateful to those who retweet tweets about my blog entries.

By the way, Latin has various words for tweeting and tweets.  For example, pipo, pipare and pipio, pipire are both useful verbs for “to chirp, tweet”.  A pipatio (from pipo) is “a piping, chirping, whimpering” (which can be used to describe what people do, too). Even better is pipatus, us, m., one of those fun 4th declension nouns like senatus, meaning “a peeping, piping, chirping”.  Then there are pipilum, i, n. and pipilus,i, m., both meaning “a peeping, piping, chirping” and hence, “whimpering, crying” and therefore, “an outcry, upbraiding”.  Both of these are pretty good, considering how Twitter is often used.

Perhaps pipila can be used for angry tweets and pipatus for happier tweets.  There’s subtlety for you.

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
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10 Comments

  1. stilicho says:

    Sunny and 86 in Memphis, TN!

  2. Philangelus says:

    Hey, I made that same joke on my Twitter feed yesterday, and I know you’re not following me, so GMTA. :-) I’ll go follow you now.

  3. david andrew says:

    I had a similar expression on my face to that Bluebird’s yesterday morning when the powdered sunshine began falling from the sky.

  4. APX says:

    Yeah, I believe that to be the scene at Glacier, as I live less than two hours away and I made that same face along with a few choice words the other morning. I was greeted by this lovely sight as I was leaving for school way too early in the morning.

    http://img23.imageshack.us/i/snowmorning.jpg/

    There was no snow when I went to bed the night before. I shoveled and brushed about eight inches of snow off and around my car, along with the walkway and sidewalk just so I could get out.

    This really is the winter that will not end. It melt dump cycle has been exceptionally excessive this Sprinter.

  5. markomalley says:

    That’s global warming for you…

  6. APX says:

    @markomalley
    That’s global warming for you…

    Pfft! No. It’s living in the Rockies and the bipolar weather. It’s not uncommon for it to be 18°C in February when there’s a chinook. The closer I get to the mountains, the more it snows.

    It’s similar in the western states cascade mountain range right now with lots of rain, rain, and more rain.

  7. markomalley says:

    @APX

    I really didn’t think that it would be necessary to employ the dreaded [/sarc] tag for my previous post.

    (‘tho I do remember, as a youngster, one year when we had snow in June….and that was about 50 miles from the location of the feeder)

  8. APX says:

    (‘tho I do remember, as a youngster, one year when we had snow in June….

    I’ve seen that too once. I was water-skiing during the end of June when it started snowing. It was weird…I was no where near a mountain, or any type of hill for that matter.

  9. irishgirl says:

    Wow-that bluebird is beautiful, even with the snow as background!
    Yeah, he looks really ‘ticked off’, Father Z! I think there was a classic picture of a ‘mad bluebird’ on the cover of National Geographic once!
    It’s been cold up here in the Northeast, too-it’s almost Easter, and I’m still wearing my winter fleece jacket! It’s supposed to be spring, not winter!
    If anyone uses the words ‘global warming’, they’re gonna get a swat alongside the head from me!

  10. Random Friar says:

    Headline: “Bluebird claims ‘Angry Birds’ game based on his likeness and personality. He’s suing for 20,000 mealworms and a heated birdbath.”

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