I had a friend in college who had this recurring bit.
Any time something came up that was eventful, notable, or some other moderately-large magnitude, he would put on this wonder-struck nature documentary voice and say:
“It is truly the day of days!”
“This really is the soup of soups!”
“This is, by far, the game of games!”
etc.
The funnier part of it is he would only really use it for thing that were maybe competent or slightly-above-average, but were originally anticipated to be absolutely awful. Usually things that pleasantly surprised him, or were unexpected gems in the rough.
Just had these memories come up, and felt they were worth sharing. I had a lot of awful times in college, but it was nice remember this.
They are—truly, and without a doubt—the memories of all memories.
Linguistic fun fact: this is an expression that might go back to the Proto-Afro-Asiatic language, spoken somewhere around 10,000 BCE!
In the Indo-European languages, there’s generally some special marker you stick on an adjective to make it “superlative”: the most (whatever) of all. In English, we’ve got “-est”, which is cognate to Ancient Greek -istos, Classical Persian -ist, and various others. (We also have “most”, which is cognate to the second half of Latin -issimus.)
In the Afro-Asiatic languages (including the Semitic languages), on the other hand, there’s generally no such marker. Instead, you use a construction like this, from Egyptian:
jmy-r pr wr, nb=j, wr n(y) wrw… High overseer, my lord, great [man] of the great [men]…
Because, of course, the “greatest” person is the one who’s great compared to other great people. Similarly, Akkadian-speaking Mesopotamian emperors called themselves “king of kings and lord of lords”: the emperor is the king who rules over other kings, the “most king” one.
Via Biblical Hebrew this phrasing has spread into plenty of other languages, even ones which do have a special adjective marker for this purpose—which is why “king of kings and lord of lords” probably sounds familiar. (And I’m guessing is where your friend got it from, if he doesn’t speak a Semitic language himself.) Similarly, “vanity of vanities”, and the Latin expression saecula saeculorum, usually translated “for ever and ever” but literally “eternities of eternities”.
If there isn’t, I daresay we need a forum for linguistic an literary concerns.
For a fiction (interactive or otherwise) oriented community, discussions such as these are certainly on-topic.
That is, of course, unless someone would like to propose that interactive fiction may be created without any language at all; say, like graphic adventures and same such.
A “purely” graphic adventure might lack language in the sense that it doesn’t have any written language, but I don’t think you could design anything even remotely game-like without it being isomorphic to a language.
Generally speaking games in the abstract involve selecting between multiple options using some formal selection mechanism (like clicking on a hotspot) and there’s your vocabulary (multiple options) and grammar (interface interactions) and that gives you something that’s isomorphic to language even if you don’t want to call it a language outright.
An Army general I used to work for frequently said, “It is what it is.” Whenever he was talking about just about anything. But generally (no pun intended) he used the phrase when he didn’t have control over something.
Wouldn’t the tangent of tangents be a absolute mess of asymptotes that become ever denser as you approach odd multiples of pi/2?
The Factorial of Factorials would be quite great indeed though. And he logarithm of logarithm would be quite small…
This post brought to you by the greek letter pi and the number e.
Also, the original tangent was shorter than expected from the label.
This thread also reminds me of how some Harry Potter fanfics that go hard into the Purebloods are Aristocrats/Old world nobility trope some times use Surname of Surname to refer to the Lord of a Noble House or its heir apparent if said heir will become Lord upon reaching their 17th birthday… And I feel like Neville being referred to as Longbottom of Longbottom is the most memorable example of such… which raises the question if Old world nobles ever actually did something like this or if this is an invention of parts of the HP fandom.
Which is an English translation of Greek βασιλεὺς βασιλέων—Shelley based the wording on an inscription recorded by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus: “I am Osymandyas, King of Kings. If anyone wishes to see my greatness, or where I lie, let them surpass any of my works.”
Which is probably a rendering of Egyptian ħqꜣ ħqꜣ.w (usually rendered Heqa Heqau) “Ruler of Rulers”, a title prominently used by Ramesses II, who was also famous for making (or taking credit for!) really huge statues and boasting about his power. His royal name in Egyptian was Wasmu’are’a (wsr-mꜣꜥt-rꜥ, usually rendered User-Ma’at-Ra), which lines up okay-ish with Diodorus’s “Osymandyas”.
So the phrase in Shelley probably goes back to the same Afro-Asiatic expression mentioned in the second post!