Kurt Hummel's so bright I gotta wear shades

My brief random thoughts about Tuesday's episode. If I didn't discuss gender fluidity and sexual orientation, I would be completely remiss.

( 3.12, The Spanish Teacher - Here be spoilers )

So two trips ago to the university library, where I occasionally go to do research for my Real Work, I rewarded myself for a job well done by having a peek in the Oxford English Dictionary to look up the origins of "glasz."

At the time, I decided I should make consulting the OED a regular reward for my work. But the last time I was at the library, I was in such a hurry that I couldn't. Today, however, I can, and I present to you the etymology of an R-rated word:

( F*in'-A, this word is awesome )

I was perusing the internet today and ran across the quote behind the cut, which had me laughing so hard that snot shot out of my nose. But you know how when someone tells you something is going to be so funny, it's less funny than it would be otherwise? So yeah, you're not going to think it's funny at all, now. Oh, well.

( Awesome and potentially blasphemous - though I sure don't think so! - quote about a certain sex act that lots of folks like to write about in Klaine smut. )

I have decided that every post containing my mental masturbation about meta must now be tagged with "metabation."

Because it's the right thing to do.

Okay. I have a multi-chapter fic that I want to post this week and it's pretty much done thanks to the amazing verdandil, but I need to decide the answer to this question before I start posting (and I'd like to start posting Monday):

Would Kurt Hummel make a grammatical error? (when he's not drunk, drugged, sick or in the throes of passion)

The type of grammatical error I'm thinking of is the type that almost everyone  the United States makes, like not differentiating between "who" and "whom" or not using the subjunctive when it's called for ("If I were a rich man").

Context of potential grammatical error: He is speaking with a friend.

Please pipe in with your opinion. A simple yes/no would be great; your headcanon on Kurt's degree of perfectionism would be awesome.

Since encountering the word "glasz" for the first time last week while perusing fan fiction, and after failing to find it in the Merriam-Webster or the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, I've been curious about the etymology.

I went to the university library today and it occurred to me that it would almost certainly have the complete Oxford English Dictionary (OED) on hand. If you're not familiar with the OED and you are interested in words, you really need to become acquainted. With more than 616,000 entries, it is the most comprehensive dictionary of the English language. Plus, each entry includes a reliable history of the origins of each word, and often notes on similar words in related languages.

So I asked my reference librarian to point me to the OED. As much as I love big, fat 20+ volume books, I opted for the online version because it is updated more frequently, and I suspected that glasz is a neologism.

Alas, glasz is so new that it's not in the online OED. I felt a bit defeated, but then I decided to look up cerulean, which is my other recent obsession. And there, in the etymological notes for cerulean was a reference to the Welsh word glas:

Latin cærule-us dark blue, dark green, applied to the sky, the sea (Mediterranean), but occas. to leaves, fields: compare Welsh glas. In the mod. languages always taken as deep blue.

I kind of want to fault the OED here for not being absolutely clear on why it's pulling out the Welsh glas here, but I think it's safe to assume that it's implying that cerulean and glas share an Indo-European root. (Also, I'm a little annoyed that OED says cerulean is always taken as deep blue, but that's just because I don't want it to be so.)

Anyway, I looked up glas in the Welsh-English dictionary of the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, and this is what I got:

1. sky n. blue adj. pale adj. grey adj. green adj. young adj. raw adj.

So, finally, I understand why people are using the word glasz to describe Kurt's eyes. What I don't understand is why they spell it that way. If I ever end up using it, I'll probably keep the Welsh spelling and italicize it, just like when I use non-naturalized French words in my writing. But I doubt I'll ever use it, unless Kurt or Blaine end up going to Wales, or Kurt turns out to have a Welsh relative I haven't met yet. Because I just don't see it coming up naturally for them, otherwise.

verdandil tipped me off to this beautiful bird.



The photo was takenby MDF and used through a Creative Commons attribution-share alike license. I found it on Wikipedia.

When I saw this picture, I was a little concerned by how the color is almost azure, with only a hint of green - but I calmed down when I read Wikipedia's current definition of cerulean: "Cerulean, also spelled caerulean, may be applied to a range of colors from deep blue, sky-blue, bright blue or azure color through greenish blue colors." Not that Wikipedia is a complete authority on these matters, but I will trust it here because I just like the idea of cerulean being so versatile. Like my Kurt.

(I am just going to ignore buzzkill Merriam-Webster, which defines cerulean as "resembling the blue of the sky.")