vocab. IX, Gardiner's

Frankly, I'm a little bit surprised to see some of these words , like "gold," and "become, happen," they seem so fundamental, Shirley, they've already been used and so already have cards. I could check but I'm too lazy right now and can't be arsed.

And then, there's new ones. Yay for new words!

I'm getting ideas all over the place to paint things on my t-shirts, and regular shirts for that matter. So much better than tattoos, I think, because they can say different things for different moods, and it's possible to change them out. I did see a photograph of a guy with hieroglyphic tattoos that went a little bit beyond the customary obligatory anch (life), strange sign for a guy to wear as it's generally associated with feminine sentiments and because it so closely resembles the Greek sign for "female," by including other more obscure hieroglyphics but not the glyphs one could reasonably expect to accompany the anch like the djed (pillar, backbone) or the was (dominion), or possibly a sah (protection, see below) although I cannot remember now what they were because they were meager and they didn't make any sense at all when combined. And that's why those tattoos are idiotic. Better to say something within proper registers along the lines of, "I have searched my entire life all across the land to find a person the likes of you," or, "for as long as the stars exist in the sky shall my affection for this country endure." Touch'n innit? Or maybe just plain, "Mom + heart" which in hieroglyphics is represented by an ox-heart that resembles a vase with knobs for handles.

I drew these with a magic marker, and I don't much care for that because you've got one shot to get it right and my method is more scratchy than that. Although it did make copying and adjusting them in Photoshop much easier. I also learned that Photobooth has an option in its menu to flip the images automatically, and that saves me the trouble of firing up Automator. Actually, hieroglyphics can be read from either left or right so it shouldn't really matter, but I have words in English on the cards too, so it does matter. Plus I find that whole right-to-left business disconcerting, even though half of the actual ancient glyphs are written that way. You can tell which way to read them by the direction the animals are facing. You read into their faces.