All about YOU

[birdsofshore]

I love talking with you all here each week / day / hour / insert own level of addiction, but I often think I don't even know basic stuff about your LJ , like what your username means, what your icons are, etc etc. Come and tell me everything.

Why did you pick your username, and what does it mean? What's your default icon, and does it have any significance? If it's a famous person, please don't assume I will know who it is - I never know who anyone is unless I have the hots for them. What about those other things we can personalise on LJ - the quotes or messages at the top of your journal, and that odd little thing I've never worked out how to change, for instance who_la_hoop's says "I can see your house from here", which always makes me laugh. Do you have special art or graphics on your header? What are they all about?

I will start you off. My username is from a poster that I have in my living room, which says "Birds of shore & sea", with, er, drawings of different birds. Of shore, and, indeed, of sea. "Birdsofshoreandsea" is more characters than LJ allows, and besides, the shorebirds are the ones I like the best.

My picture is probably self-evident, but it's a curlew, which is my absolute favourite bird. I live quite near to plenty of these glorious creatures and they make me very thrilled and happy whenever I see one. They're just so ludicrous and beaky. They look like they shouldn't exist, and they seem to have really fabulous personalities. I can watch them for hours, just mooching about and digging for worms. They also have subtly beautiful plumage and the most wonderful song. I'm not actually OBSESSED with birds in real life, but I can verge on HIGHLY ENTHUSIASTIC about birds on any given occasion, so apologies if you just glazed over there.

The quotes on my journal are from one of my favourite books, The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving. "You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed" and "Keep passing the open windows" are pieces of advice from the book on how to survive whatever life throws at you. If you haven't read it, it's a big, insane, sexy, sweet, funny, tragic romp of a book and please don't tell me if you don't like it, because I have adored it since I was about 15 and bought it to impress a boy I fancied who worked in a bookshop (my rec for Frequent Patronage will be along any day now, by the way). Fandom is definitely part of my plan to remain sane and to 'keep passing the open windows' (in other words, to avoid falling into depression and self-harm), so both quotes seemed apt when I was picking my layout.

I have only got a standard LJ header thing - it was the one that seemed least offensive when I looked through. I'd love fancy graphics or some beautiful art up there, but OMG, how hard to choose, plus, if I'm being honest, I don't have a clue how to do such things DD:

Please come and do all the sharing. I really, really want to know.

p.s. A very big thank you to whoever nominated me at HPfanficpoll thingy, if you are on my flist. I was very flattered indeed that you liked my fics, and touched that you took the time ♥

Comments

[sara-lakali.livejournal.com]

Not being a Biblical scholar, I had no idea that 'Ecclesiastes' was a person's name.

[icmezzo.livejournal.com]

Ahh, it isn't, actually. Let's see. This may be too much detail, but let me try. Qoheleth is a proper name. Ecclesiastes, though, is generally translated as teacher or preacher though that's slightly generous.

You can see the ekklesia (Greek: ἐκκλησία, roughly "(civil) assembly") in the word Ecclesiastes. Meanwhile the original Qoheleth, while a proper name, is based on the Hebrew root QHL (Hebrew: קהל (qahal)), which means to gather (as an assembly).

So that's the connection. It was originally the Hebrew name Qoheleth. But later the Greeks took the meaning of the name Qoheleth, which had to do with a gathering of an assembly, and used the Greek term for assembly instead, resulting in Ecclesiastes.

It's a little more complicated than that...but that's the basic idea of how and why the text has two different names depending on who you ask.

[sara-lakali.livejournal.com]

I love too much detail. When I Googled 'Who was Ecclesiastes?' most of the sites said the Book of Ecclesiastes was generally assumed to have been written by King Solomon. Are the two books (Qoheleth and Ecclesiastes) essentially the same? And if they are, is Qoheleth the same person as Solomon?

And, birdsofshore, if you'd rather we move this discussion to private emails, say the word.

[icmezzo.livejournal.com]

Oh boy. Translating terms is one thing but authorship of any of these sorts of ancient texts gets sticky and the answer will often depend on who you ask. This is also the sort of debate that can also start to offend some people because it begins to tie into religious beliefs. On a very basic level, some believe that the text was from King Solomon while others might think there is just no way to know who originally said or wrote these words down. That's not something I should probably go into in this forum, but if you want to connect, we can certainly move to email, understanding, of course, that my response will come with my own biases.

[sara-lakali.livejournal.com]

No, it's cool. I'm not particularly invested, one way or the other, just curious. Thanks for explaining. :D

[notearchiver.livejournal.com]

That's very interesting! I love learning random things like this.

[icmezzo.livejournal.com]

:D