Lily Potter awoke with a start. She had just been dreaming of mending her friendship with Severus by naming him godfather to her second child. Why hadn’t this plan occurred to her sooner? She rolled over and shook her husband awake. The bully opened his eyes and put his nasty glasses on.
‘James’ said Lilly Lily. ‘We have to make Severus our baby’s godfather.’
‘Who the fuck is Severus?’ asked James, walking over to the window and hexing the mail man outside.
‘Snivelly Snape’ replied Lily. ‘It’s the only way to mend my friendship with him.’
James looked at his wife. ‘Well I didn’t ask you out 67 times a day for 6 years for nothing, I need you happy Lilyflowerpetalbutt and if this makes you happy I’m all for it. But I didn’t even know you were pregnant my sweet Lilypadthai?’
‘Well neither does J.K Rowling’ laughed Lily as James stared at her, confused, but used to not understanding anything.
Lily grinned and put on all green outfit to match her eyes. Together they fetched Harry out of his cot and went downstairs to start writing a letter to Sev.
‘You better write the letter’ said James, who had never learnt to spell due to his extremely limited mental capacity. As Lily started the letter James let Sirius out of his kennel and Remus out of the library that they locked him in nightly. ‘Lily’s writing a letter to Snivelicious, she’s going to ask him to be our new baby’s godfather’ smirked James, arrogant as always. ‚I still hate the prick but it’s the best thing for Lily.’
‚But I thought Lily hated him?’ asked Remus.
‚Nah she doesn’t’ said Sirius.
‚Wait who are we talking about?’ asked Peter who had just apparated, he didn’t wait for an answer before disapparating to go do some more betraying.
‚What about the whole Death Eater thing?’ asked Remus as he held a book up to his nose. ‚What about Voldemort wanting you guys dead and all?’
Suddenly Lily appeared, she was furious. Her hair turned even redder as flames rose around her, her rage lifting her off the ground. She roared incoherently like the red lion she was until James pulled her back to the ground. ‚What are you angry about this time?!’ sighed James.
Lily had no idea. She was just always angry. She shooed Remus and Sirius out of the house, since they were in hiding and all and went back to her letter. On the way back to the table James asked her out 6 times.
‚For Christ’s sake James we’re married!’ she cried. James stuck his tongue out, hexed the cat and asked her out again. Tears rolled down Lily’s face as she went back to writing the letter to her dear old friend. Good times were sure to be ahead.
“he didn’t wait for an answer before disapparating to go do some more betraying.”
My parents are renovating the kitchen and when I came to visit my mom complained about how the mess has spread to every room and “it looks like Mordor”, and she just refused to listen to my explanation that Sauron, who likes order, would never have let Mordor get so messy.
“You make us look bad’, complained Toad. “You looked bad before I ever met you,” Jon told him.
“Be careful you don’t cut yourself. The edges are sharp enough to shave with.” “Girls don’t shave,” Arya said. “Maybe they should. Have you ever seen the septa’s legs?”
“First lesson, stick them with the pointy end.”
“I’ll take that wager, Ser Alliser,” Jon said. “I’d love to see Ghost juggle.”
Like, Jon. You little shit. (I don’t know why I love this bastard so fckin much)
The most Jon Snow thing, though? The iconic of all the iconic?
“I’ll go, my lord. But you are making a mistake, my lord. You are sending the wrong man, my lord. Just the sight of me is going to anger Mance. My lord would have a better chance of reaching terms if he sent—”
Jon Snow is a passive-agressive asshole and no one can tell me otherwise.
WRITTEN BY Nikhil Sonnad for Quartz, January 11, 2018
With a few minor exceptions, there are really only two ways to say “tea” in the world. One is like the English term—té in Spanish and tee in Afrikaans are two examples. The other is some variation of cha, like chay in Hindi.
Both versions come from China. How they spread around the world offers a clear picture of how globalization worked before “globalization” was a term anybody used. The words that sound like “cha” spread across land, along the Silk Road. The “tea”-like phrasings spread over water, by Dutch traders bringing the novel leaves back to Europe.
The term cha (茶) is “Sinitic,” meaning it is common to many varieties of Chinese. It began in China and made its way through central Asia, eventually becoming “chay” (چای) in Persian. That is no doubt due to the trade routes of the Silk Road, along which, according to a recent discovery, tea was traded over 2,000 years ago. This form spread beyond Persia, becoming chay in Urdu, shay in Arabic, and chay in Russian, among others. It even it made its way to sub-Saharan Africa, where it became chai in Swahili. The Japanese and Korean terms for tea are also based on the Chinese cha, though those languages likely adopted the word even before its westward spread into Persian.
But that doesn’t account for “tea.” The Chinese character for tea, 茶, is pronounced differently by different varieties of Chinese, though it is written the same in them all. In today’s Mandarin, it is chá. But in the Min Nan variety of Chinese, spoken in the coastal province of Fujian, the character is pronounced te. The key word here is “coastal.”
The te form used in coastal-Chinese languages spread to Europe via the Dutch, who became the primary traders of tea between Europe and Asia in the 17th century, as explained in the World Atlas of Language Structures. The main Dutch ports in east Asia were in Fujian and Taiwan, both places where people used the te pronunciation. The Dutch East India Company’s expansive tea importation into Europe gave us the French thé, the German tee, and the English tea.
Yet the Dutch were not the first to Asia. That honor belongs to the Portuguese, who are responsible for the island of Taiwan’s colonial European name, Formosa. And the Portuguese traded not through Fujian but Macao, where chá is used. That’s why, on the map above, Portugal is a pink dot in a sea of blue.
A few languages have their own way of talking about tea. These languages are generally in places where tea grows naturally, which led locals to develop their own way to refer to it. In Burmese, for example, tea leaves are lakphak.
The map demonstrates two different eras of globalization in action: the millenia-old overland spread of goods and ideas westward from ancient China, and the 400-year-old influence of Asian culture on the seafaring Europeans of the age of exploration. Also, you just learned a new word in nearly every language on the planet. (X)
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