Letter from Iceland #90
Little Book of Icelandic, the "older than our age" edition
Góðan og blessaðan daginn!
It is hard to believe that this newsletter is closing in on 100 posts! I started it at the end of September last year, in part to move away from the tyranny of Facebook with its whimsical algorithms and endless ploys to rob you of your time and attention. Substack is much more pleasant, not least because I can be sure that the people who want to see my content will actually be notified when I post something new—in contrast to other social media, where this is random, at best.
Initially I thought I could keep two Substacks going—my other newsletter, TIDTAAP actually came first—but my plans to write three posts or more a week across two newsletters were overly ambitious … I see that now.
TIDTAAP was meant to be a more personal, intimate space for me to share, but alas, in the hustle and stress of daily life I find I have gone back to my default mode of posting about Iceland—which demands far less of me, emotionally, and which is far easier to find stunning photos for—you would not believe how much time goes into finding the right image for any given post!
And yet, after our “more tea” conversation a couple weeks ago I thought I might try to get a bit more personal in this space … after all, in the survey I ran, an overwhelming number of respondents said they wanted more of my own experiences to be included in the newsletter. And so, I wrote a couple of posts in that vein, and received a handful of lovely comments—but alas, there were also a few paid subscribers who unsubscribed after those posts, which left me a bit confused. I have to conclude that the people who responded to the survey are not of the paid variety, and that these paid subscribers signed up for something that they no longer felt they were getting. Either way, it has given me some pause about how to proceed—whether the personal stuff was a bit TOO MUCH, and perhaps I should simply stick to the Iceland commentary.
Just mulling all that over now.
One thing I am committed to continuing, though, is the Little Book of Icelandic posts and audio that I put up here once a week for paid subscribers. We are now about halfway through the book, and the real meat and potatoes (as far as I am concerned, anyway) is coming up. 😜
This week, we look at a linguistic pet peeve of many an Icelander—namely how the language makes us older than we actually are.
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