@tangleofrainbows / tangleofrainbows.tumblr.com
it’s hurts so much to think that it’s very likely that some of the victims of this attack will be outed only in death, that they sought out a space where publicly closeted people could be themselves but they will never be able to come out on their own
they will be outted to their friends and families without their consent by the announcement of their death
dont 👏 introduce 👏 your 👏 friends 👏 or 👏 partners 👏 by 👏 disclosing 👏 their 👏 marginalized 👏 identities 👏 !!!!
dont say “my mentally ill partner” or “my queer friend” if it isnt relevant or they didnt give you permission to disclose that shit! its a really shitty and objectifying thing to do!! it can violate their confidence and out them!! and no one wants people to know sensitive personal information about them before they even meet them! or for their personhood to be simplified down to social justice buzzwords!! and it could potentially open them up to discrimination, prejudice, microaggressions or even violence! dont fucking do this!!
that increased visibility leads to increased vulnerability for many of our most at-risk trans people. never out a trans person without their permission for any reason ever.
so uh . . . my aunt might just have outed my cousin in the washington post? in the same article where she wonders why he never tells her anything personal? so that’s a thing now, i guess
ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh kickstarter is making me use my legal name on my profile for this project could you fucking not??? it looks like they only changed it within the past two years ugh whyyyyy like for real how do you not have provisions for trans people can you seriously be that fucking clueless???
ugh i just feel sick and gross and upset and dysphoric and seethingly seethingly angry
re: how teens and adults text, I would be super interested for you to explain your theory!
ok SO. a lot of this comes from various stuff i’ve seen on the linguistics of tumblr, but at the heart of it is that people in my generation (at least in the us; idk abt other countries’ timelines on this front) went thru (or are still going thru) our Formative Social Years in an environment where we’d regularly interact with even our closest friends on text-only platforms (whether texting or gchat or fb messages or w/e), and b/c so much linguistic/social information is actually conveyed by facial expression and tone of voice, we’ve collectively made up all of these textual ways of conveying that in a concise, efficient way
so like, sometimes on this blog i’ll talk about “straight people”, and sometimes i’ll talk about “str8 ppl”, and even tho i would pronounce those the same, the first is much more neutral — it would probably happen in the context like “i’m not sure how i feel about straight people writing stories that center around experiences of homophobia” — than the second, which which is much more frustrated/venting — it would be more likely to crop up in the context of “all i want is to live quietly in my little queer utopia but no str8 ppl have to come along and heteronomativity UGH #over it #whatever #NOT RLLY OVER IT”. or even with more subtle things like end punctuation: “i’m not going” basically just means i’m not currently planning to go to the thing; “i’m not going.” carries much more of a connotation of “i have seriously considered going and have Reasons for staying at home” (and note that capital — “i have Reasons for staying at home” feels different than “i have reasons for staying at home”). (and this isn’t even getting into things like shitposting or advanced memeology, but there are specific textual markers that go with things like that, some of which would be pronounced if you read them aloud, but many of which wouldn’t be)
but, crucially, for these kinds of things to carry meaning, they have to be used consistently: if i use “str8 ppl” and “straight people” interchangeably in all contexts (as i do for something like “the supreme court” vs “scotus”), then there’s no way to develop a distinction in meaning between the two — the only way to do that is to consistently use the different orthographies in different contexts. (to take another example: if something is “great”, then it’s solidly good. if something is “gr8”, it’s more in the land of “i can’t quite believe this is as earnest/tacky/tasteless as it is but i’m weirdly into it anyway?” (sometimes with a side helping of “do i just enjoy this ironically or do i genuinely enjoy it there is no way of knowing please send help”))
the upshot of this is that to be fluent in tumblr (or texting, or fb messenger, or w/e) means to actually be paying a lot of attention to subtle points of grammar and spelling, to know when to use “did u kno” or “ur” or even pull out an old-fashioned tip of the hat to “e733T haxxor 5killz”. most of these are very subtle distinctions, the kind of things you feel intuitively rather than write out explicitly, and so it’s very hard to convey them concisely and accurately to someone who’s not already immersed in the linguistic environment
and let’s be real, people in my parents’ generation aren’t. i mean, sure, many of them have facebook accounts, but these kinds of platforms weren’t around when they were in their “really getting to grips with social interaction” years, and their most important social interactions usually don’t take place exclusively online. for me, all of my closest friends are people i’ve only interacted with online for more than a year now (with a few brief face-to-face visits when various travel arrangements have allowed), so tumblr, facebook, and gchat are absolutely critical to my social life and interpersonal interactions; for my parents, their closest friends are people they see in person at work every day, so social media is a light overlay to their social lives, not the thrumming core
as such, my parents don’t grok these distinctions. to them “what are you doing?” means the same thing as “lol wut r u doing”; “gr8” is just like “great” (and “gr9” takes some parsing … ); dogespeak doesn’t have the same distinctive valence that it does to us. since they don’t know about these distinctions, they don’t feel the need to maintain more “proper” spelling/grammar when texting with a friend — different people have different set points for this, obvs, but in general i feel like “standard (setting aside all the class and racial implications in that term …) spelling and grammar” (with lighter-than-standard punctuation and capitalization) translates to “relatively neutral/pleasant conversational voice”, and then deliberate misspellings, abbreviations, letter substitutions, and grammar deviations are markers used to indicate shifts in mood — i have a vague sense that bitterness tends to collapse down and preserve grammar but weird spelling (“lyk w/e im happy 4 u but pls, i kno u lied 2 get that”) whereas enthusiasm tends to preserve spelling but weird grammar (“what i can’t even no how do air AMAZE”). since people in my parents’ generation don’t realize that doing so unintentionally changes the way their words come across, they feel free to text “poorly” (ie with lots of errors/substitutions, generally mixing various text-flagged vocal tones in ways that are often incoherent) in order to do so more quickly (b/c lbr typing everything out can be a pain (esp on a non-smartphone), and since parents don’t do it as much, they’re not necessarily as fast as our spry young fingers on a familiar interface)
so yeah, that’s what i suspect is going on
tl;dr: parents don’t use orthography to mark vocal tone in the way youngfolk do, and thus feel free to condense their texts and otherwise use textspeak. youngfolk are using orthography to mark for tone, and thus text more “correctly” to preserve their social intentions
Which is something that leads to some confusion between parents and children - I’ve gotten really upset over some of my mother’s texts because they have a period at the end, and in order to be neutral, they need to not have a period. And then I remember that the way she composes text messages (and, incidentally-not-incidentally, the way my boyfriend composes messages in text) come from a different tonal background, and they don’t use orthography in the same way to convey mood. It’s weirdly difficult to code-switch texting, I think.
I’ve been referring to this particular phenomenon as having a vivid sense of typographical register, but I think it also fits well into the broader sociolinguistic idea of style-shifting. If you don’t communicate via technology that much, you basically have just one style (or maybe a simple split between formal like a professional email and informal like a text), but the more computer-mediated friendships you develop, the more you develop ways of communicating textually with all the subtle shifts in nuance that you also have offline.
I feel like we should also note that there are different conventions on different parts of the internet? I’ve seen this described as having an [internet hub] “accent”, but it’s worthwhile to point out that the conventions discussed above are those of tumblr, and the conventions of youtubers, facebookers, redditors, etc probably vary from them. We’re all speaking the same text-based-media dialect, so we’re generally mutually understandable, but the variations can be important.
FOR EXAMPLE, my dad is an excellent texter. Excellent. He is by far the best at communicating by text message within our household, and knows precisely how to use the conventions, shorthands, and options of texting to convey the exact information and meaning he wants to. But his lack of use of things like emoticons betrays his lack of experience on chat-based platforms, and if you dropped him into tumblr he wouldn’t necessarily pick up on the different meanings being conveyed by our conventions straight away (never mind that there are also “neighborhoods” within tumblr with their own variations on the tumblr accent). Nonetheless, I have no doubt that within a month or so he’d probably be far more fluent than I am and would more consistently “speak” in that accent on this platform. But my mom? My mom would be baffled, and would take far longer to figure things out, because she isn’t already familiar with the dialect.
This is basically a tangent, and turned into a far longer one than I originally intended (here’s hoping my lemon bars don’t burn! *g*), but. My original purpose was to point out that while the point is a good one and fairly universal to the text-based-media dialect community, the examples themselves are specific to those who “speak” with a tumblr accent.
Guys can I use this in my English 101 class next week? I’ll remove usernames so students can’t figure out who I am by who I follow…..
Same! I would love to use this in my Writing for New Media class. I’ll take everyone’s name off of course. I’d also be curious to now how the OPs feel about the negative side to social media like bullying and outing and spreading private photos. Buuuuut you have no obligation to answer my questions or do my work for me.
i’m totes cool with people using this as an educational tool! citing me by my user name is fine, but if you ( lucyaudley and @catladyinwaiting) want to cite my actual name, drop me a line via fanmail or askbox and we can work something out! i’m honored y’all think this is worth using! ^.^ <3
i’m not sure i see the connection between the use of orthography to mark tone and bullying/outing/photo-spreading? all of those things defs existed before the internet, and i’m not really sure that i know enough about those things to say whether/how the internet has altered the dynamics of how they function. i am v v firmly against bullying and nonconsensual photo-spreading, but i think there may well be limited circumstances in which i can get behind the outing of a public figure. (i feel like most of the cases where i’m ok with it are when said public figure is working to pass anti-lgbt legislation, BUT at the same time i feel like that often only works as a strategy by piggybacking on homo/transphobia. i mean, obvs there’s an issue of rank hypocrisy going on, but so often it feels like the prevailing sentiment is “wow, their private life is super gross let’s run them out of office” instead of “wow, this person is deeply hypocritical and the positions they’re advocating for are grossly immoral” and that feels … very unsettling to me. it also seems to rely on a position of “if we don’t like your politics you have no right to privacy”, which is also something that makes me kind of squirm. otoh, tho, the legislation they’re advocating for is often p damn hurtful, and stopping that hurt from coming to pass is … not inconsequential? idk, it’s complicated and i don’t think i have a firm answer yet)
also, missionlameturtle, you’re quite right that my picture was not particularly nuanced! i didn’t really expect this post to get as many notes as it did, so i was writing p quickly and not being v careful to define the differing groups i was talking about — the nitty gritty ins and outs of online language usage could definitely stand to be parsed more finely, and your examples are a good illustration of that!
tangleofrainbows Thank you so much for letting me use this for my class. I’ll send an ask re: how you’d like to be referenced. My question about bullying etc wasn’t necessarily related to the linguistic aspect of this conversation but was more about the idea that as our closest relationships shift online, so do the more damaging aspects of social interaction. Something like outing used to be localised to a persons family, school, or work environment. As damaging as that is, there might be ways to combat and contain it, but now a person can be outed against their will in cyberspace to anyone who googles their name. And that kind of outing potentially affects all future social or employment situations and takes away the agency of the person who’s privacy is being violated. My feelings about politicians and public persons sex lives is complicated and probably longer than I should post here, but I will say that if there is abuse of power involved ie coercion, assault or harassment, I think it’s okay to whistleblow. I’ve been thinking about the positive and negative aspects of social media and the way internet space mirrors rl space as I plan this course, so these questions might be much more on my mind than they were on yours.
(idk if you haven’t sent the ask yet or if tumblr just ate it, but fyi it has not come thru yet, so if tumblr ate it maybe try re-sending?)
that makes a lot of sense wrt bullying etc and the increasing importance of online interaction. i haven’t really thought about it in those terms before, so, as you suspected, i’m afraid i don’t really have thoughts that are concrete enough for me to put them down in writing. sounds like a spiffy course!
re: how teens and adults text, I would be super interested for you to explain your theory!
ok SO. a lot of this comes from various stuff i’ve seen on the linguistics of tumblr, but at the heart of it is that people in my generation (at least in the us; idk abt other countries’ timelines on this front) went thru (or are still going thru) our Formative Social Years in an environment where we’d regularly interact with even our closest friends on text-only platforms (whether texting or gchat or fb messages or w/e), and b/c so much linguistic/social information is actually conveyed by facial expression and tone of voice, we’ve collectively made up all of these textual ways of conveying that in a concise, efficient way
so like, sometimes on this blog i’ll talk about “straight people”, and sometimes i’ll talk about “str8 ppl”, and even tho i would pronounce those the same, the first is much more neutral — it would probably happen in the context like “i’m not sure how i feel about straight people writing stories that center around experiences of homophobia” — than the second, which which is much more frustrated/venting — it would be more likely to crop up in the context of “all i want is to live quietly in my little queer utopia but no str8 ppl have to come along and heteronomativity UGH #over it #whatever #NOT RLLY OVER IT”. or even with more subtle things like end punctuation: “i’m not going” basically just means i’m not currently planning to go to the thing; “i’m not going.” carries much more of a connotation of “i have seriously considered going and have Reasons for staying at home” (and note that capital — “i have Reasons for staying at home” feels different than “i have reasons for staying at home”). (and this isn’t even getting into things like shitposting or advanced memeology, but there are specific textual markers that go with things like that, some of which would be pronounced if you read them aloud, but many of which wouldn’t be)
but, crucially, for these kinds of things to carry meaning, they have to be used consistently: if i use “str8 ppl” and “straight people” interchangeably in all contexts (as i do for something like “the supreme court” vs “scotus”), then there’s no way to develop a distinction in meaning between the two — the only way to do that is to consistently use the different orthographies in different contexts. (to take another example: if something is “great”, then it’s solidly good. if something is “gr8”, it’s more in the land of “i can’t quite believe this is as earnest/tacky/tasteless as it is but i’m weirdly into it anyway?” (sometimes with a side helping of “do i just enjoy this ironically or do i genuinely enjoy it there is no way of knowing please send help”))
the upshot of this is that to be fluent in tumblr (or texting, or fb messenger, or w/e) means to actually be paying a lot of attention to subtle points of grammar and spelling, to know when to use “did u kno” or “ur” or even pull out an old-fashioned tip of the hat to “e733T haxxor 5killz”. most of these are very subtle distinctions, the kind of things you feel intuitively rather than write out explicitly, and so it’s very hard to convey them concisely and accurately to someone who’s not already immersed in the linguistic environment
and let’s be real, people in my parents’ generation aren’t. i mean, sure, many of them have facebook accounts, but these kinds of platforms weren’t around when they were in their “really getting to grips with social interaction” years, and their most important social interactions usually don’t take place exclusively online. for me, all of my closest friends are people i’ve only interacted with online for more than a year now (with a few brief face-to-face visits when various travel arrangements have allowed), so tumblr, facebook, and gchat are absolutely critical to my social life and interpersonal interactions; for my parents, their closest friends are people they see in person at work every day, so social media is a light overlay to their social lives, not the thrumming core
as such, my parents don’t grok these distinctions. to them “what are you doing?” means the same thing as “lol wut r u doing”; “gr8” is just like “great” (and “gr9” takes some parsing … ); dogespeak doesn’t have the same distinctive valence that it does to us. since they don’t know about these distinctions, they don’t feel the need to maintain more “proper” spelling/grammar when texting with a friend — different people have different set points for this, obvs, but in general i feel like “standard (setting aside all the class and racial implications in that term …) spelling and grammar” (with lighter-than-standard punctuation and capitalization) translates to “relatively neutral/pleasant conversational voice”, and then deliberate misspellings, abbreviations, letter substitutions, and grammar deviations are markers used to indicate shifts in mood — i have a vague sense that bitterness tends to collapse down and preserve grammar but weird spelling (“lyk w/e im happy 4 u but pls, i kno u lied 2 get that”) whereas enthusiasm tends to preserve spelling but weird grammar (“what i can’t even no how do air AMAZE”). since people in my parents’ generation don’t realize that doing so unintentionally changes the way their words come across, they feel free to text “poorly” (ie with lots of errors/substitutions, generally mixing various text-flagged vocal tones in ways that are often incoherent) in order to do so more quickly (b/c lbr typing everything out can be a pain (esp on a non-smartphone), and since parents don’t do it as much, they’re not necessarily as fast as our spry young fingers on a familiar interface)
so yeah, that’s what i suspect is going on
tl;dr: parents don’t use orthography to mark vocal tone in the way youngfolk do, and thus feel free to condense their texts and otherwise use textspeak. youngfolk are using orthography to mark for tone, and thus text more “correctly” to preserve their social intentions
Which is something that leads to some confusion between parents and children - I’ve gotten really upset over some of my mother’s texts because they have a period at the end, and in order to be neutral, they need to not have a period. And then I remember that the way she composes text messages (and, incidentally-not-incidentally, the way my boyfriend composes messages in text) come from a different tonal background, and they don’t use orthography in the same way to convey mood. It’s weirdly difficult to code-switch texting, I think.
I’ve been referring to this particular phenomenon as having a vivid sense of typographical register, but I think it also fits well into the broader sociolinguistic idea of style-shifting. If you don’t communicate via technology that much, you basically have just one style (or maybe a simple split between formal like a professional email and informal like a text), but the more computer-mediated friendships you develop, the more you develop ways of communicating textually with all the subtle shifts in nuance that you also have offline.
I feel like we should also note that there are different conventions on different parts of the internet? I’ve seen this described as having an [internet hub] “accent”, but it’s worthwhile to point out that the conventions discussed above are those of tumblr, and the conventions of youtubers, facebookers, redditors, etc probably vary from them. We’re all speaking the same text-based-media dialect, so we’re generally mutually understandable, but the variations can be important.
FOR EXAMPLE, my dad is an excellent texter. Excellent. He is by far the best at communicating by text message within our household, and knows precisely how to use the conventions, shorthands, and options of texting to convey the exact information and meaning he wants to. But his lack of use of things like emoticons betrays his lack of experience on chat-based platforms, and if you dropped him into tumblr he wouldn’t necessarily pick up on the different meanings being conveyed by our conventions straight away (never mind that there are also “neighborhoods” within tumblr with their own variations on the tumblr accent). Nonetheless, I have no doubt that within a month or so he’d probably be far more fluent than I am and would more consistently “speak” in that accent on this platform. But my mom? My mom would be baffled, and would take far longer to figure things out, because she isn’t already familiar with the dialect.
This is basically a tangent, and turned into a far longer one than I originally intended (here’s hoping my lemon bars don’t burn! *g*), but. My original purpose was to point out that while the point is a good one and fairly universal to the text-based-media dialect community, the examples themselves are specific to those who “speak” with a tumblr accent.
Guys can I use this in my English 101 class next week? I’ll remove usernames so students can’t figure out who I am by who I follow…..
Same! I would love to use this in my Writing for New Media class. I’ll take everyone’s name off of course. I’d also be curious to now how the OPs feel about the negative side to social media like bullying and outing and spreading private photos. Buuuuut you have no obligation to answer my questions or do my work for me.
i’m totes cool with people using this as an educational tool! citing me by my user name is fine, but if you ( lucyaudley and @catladyinwaiting) want to cite my actual name, drop me a line via fanmail or askbox and we can work something out! i’m honored y’all think this is worth using! ^.^ <3
i’m not sure i see the connection between the use of orthography to mark tone and bullying/outing/photo-spreading? all of those things defs existed before the internet, and i’m not really sure that i know enough about those things to say whether/how the internet has altered the dynamics of how they function. i am v v firmly against bullying and nonconsensual photo-spreading, but i think there may well be limited circumstances in which i can get behind the outing of a public figure. (i feel like most of the cases where i’m ok with it are when said public figure is working to pass anti-lgbt legislation, BUT at the same time i feel like that often only works as a strategy by piggybacking on homo/transphobia. i mean, obvs there’s an issue of rank hypocrisy going on, but so often it feels like the prevailing sentiment is “wow, their private life is super gross let’s run them out of office” instead of “wow, this person is deeply hypocritical and the positions they’re advocating for are grossly immoral” and that feels . . . very unsettling to me. it also seems to rely on a position of “if we don’t like your politics you have no right to privacy”, which is also something that makes me kind of squirm. otoh, tho, the legislation they’re advocating for is often p damn hurtful, and stopping that hurt from coming to pass is . . . not inconsequential? idk, it’s complicated and i don’t think i have a firm answer yet)
also, missionlameturtle, you’re quite right that my picture was not particularly nuanced! i didn’t really expect this post to get as many notes as it did, so i was writing p quickly and not being v careful to define the differing groups i was talking about — the nitty gritty ins and outs of online language usage could definitely stand to be parsed more finely, and your examples are a good illustration of that!
k but kstew’s mom?? didn’t talk to reporters about this?? she’s literally said the mirror embellished what she said and she never brought up her daughter or her “girlfriend” once?? don’t fucking ruin this woman’s life over something made up by gross reporters
Black Trans History:
Ballroom legend Tracy Africa Norman.
She was photographed by renowned fashion photographer Irving Penn for Italian Vogue in 1971, did runway and showroom work in Paris as well as non-fashion commercial work in New York.
During her modeling heyday in the 70’s-80’s since she resembled Beverly Johnson, the hot African-American model of the time, she found herself not only working for the third largest modeling agency in New York, but picking up major commercial contracts with Clairol, Ultra Sheen and Avon Cosmetics in addition to being booked for and doing five ESSENCE magazine shoots.
She was making a name for herself in the fashion industry until some shady fool ruined a sixth ESSENCE magazine booking for the holiday issue and wrecked her modeling career by revealing her trans status to then ESSENCE magazine editor Susan L Taylor.
She went overseas to Paris and began doing runway modeling there until she moved back to New York and became one of the iconic figures in the ballroom community. She was elected to the Ballroom Hall of Fame in 2001.
