My favorite archaic English that I've learned while reading William Morris this past week:

• unholpen i.e. not having been helped


• clomb obsolete past tense of climb


• frist, v., to defer or postpone. "Albeit fristed is not forgotten."


• swink swinks, swinking; past swank/swonk/swinkt/swinked; past participle swunk/swunken/swonken/swinkt/swinked. v. (archaic) to toil or work hard. From Middle English swinken, from Old English swincan (“to labour, work at, strive, struggle; be in trouble; languish"), from Proto-Germanic *swinkan (“to swing, bend"), from Proto-Indo-European *sweng-, *swenk- (“to bend, swing, swivel"). Cognate with Old Norse svinka (“to work"). Related to swing.

the costumes in the witcher

are kind of terrible, but they weren't really trying to be good - they were clearly aiming sort of in the neighborhood of Merlin or Xena and Hercules or A Knight's Tale or OUAT, and they didn't have the budget to do them seriously obviously. (I won't say I don't blame them, because there are a lot of egregious things I could name, starting with all of Yennefer's edgy prom dresses and not failing to mention how they not only took 'historical inspiration' from periods spanning a millennium, they didn't even bother to have a coherent notion of 'fashion' in a single location... .) But anyway, given the budgetary restrictions and the clear tone/register/subgenre/solemnity level, I felt mostly okay about the whole thing even though I hadn't sat down and written up my complaints in an itemized list.

And I'm still not going to do that, because I just do not have that kind of patience.

...But I've just seen a post on Tumblr of 'costume appreciation' with 9000 notes and tons of comments from people who apparently unironically thought they were good, or even especially good. Standout. Words like "brilliant" were used. ...Which shouldn't surprise me, I know, especially given that people tend to reblog mostly things they agree with, but still, my eyes bugged out a bit. There were even multiple people saying the showrunners were "dumb" [sic] to fire the costume designer after the first season, which is... a piping hot take.

However, they were the bearers of glad tidings! And I googled it, and they've replaced him with Lucinda Wright, which I'm inclined to say is bound to be a step in the right direction except I haven't actually seen anything on her CV except some Doctor Who episodes from 2005, so I can't be ENTIRELY sure. There are stills from historicals on IMDb, like Vanity Fair, which looks credible, and 2014's "New Worlds", which looks costumewise even sillier than the flashbacks in The Vampire Diaries or Sleepy Hollow, but maybe that wasn't her fault. At least she has done Henry VIII, so perhaps they're planning to aim everything a liiiiitttle bit more 16th centurywards? (Not a surprise. I can tell they're very attached to Jaskier's puffs and slashings, not without cause.)