part of reading 18th century history is that you learn of gay slurs you could have never imagined
I haven't looked into it to confirm it yet, but I wonder if daffodils got that connotation because another name for them is narcissus.
decay sounds more gentle than rot. when something decays, it is gently taken apart in it's comfortable eternal slumber. when something rots, it's violently taken apart with agony. in this essay i will
Highlights from the conference room where they nominated contenders for Word of the Year 2023:
• They put Skibidi Toilet on the projector to explain what “skibidi” means.
• Baby Gronk was mentioned.
• We discussed the Rizzler.
• “Cunty” was nominated.
• “Enshittification” was suggested for EVERY category.
• “Blue Check” (like from Twitter) was briefly defined as “Someone who will not Shut The Fuck Up”
• The person writing notes briefly defined babygirl as “referencing [The Speaker]”. He is now being called babygirl in the linguist groupchats.
• MULTIPLE people raised their hand to say “I cannot stress this enough: ‘Babygirl’ refers to a GROWN MAN”
When technical issues occurred while voting on “kenaissance”, everyone had to reassure the speaker, Ben Zimmer, that he was “benough”
In a stunning upset, the last-minute nomination “(derogatory)” DEFEATS “cunty” as the most useful/most likely to succeed word of 2023.
Someone renominates “babygirl” for word of the year, saying that they have spent the past year trying to figure out if people are “little meow meows, blorbos, or babygirls”. This is in front of a room of hundreds of people.
ENSHITTIFICATION WINS WORD OF THE YEAR 2023
While verifying this was true (it is) I discovered that there is a wikipedia article on enshittification
the problem with reading and writing leading to a strong vocabulary is that you tend to know the vibe of words instead of their meanings.
if I used this word in a sentence, would it make sense? absolutely. if you asked me what it meant, could I tell you? absolutely not.
“When the language was imperfect or nonexistent, people still spoke, still looked for others like them. Connecting in new ways, loving in infinite ways, all as beautiful as the next. All because someone reached out and explained themselves, and someone else understood.”
— Laura Darling (via makingqueerhistory)
I thought that it was a bit on the nose that the hormone that causes ligaments to loosen during menstruation and pregnancy is called relaxin, but I just found out that the protein that causes jizz to coagulate is called semenogelin.
Guess what this insect parasite's toxin does to the host. Go on, guess
stupidly pleased with how many circular letters there are in ouroboros
thinking about desire paths
a buncha shit
we should come up with additions with increasingly more specific animals for increasingly more specific situations
Chickenshit - coward
-core as a suffix serves the exact same function as -esque and yet they throw tomatoes at me when i say something is kafkacore
kafkastuck
(the tomatoes stop midair and change direction) (they are now hurtling towards YOU)
yeah it’s like—-
-esque means homaging or resembling the style of, or reminiscent of even if unintentionally; you can apply the -esque suffix without making any overt assertions about creative intent or your own interpretive lens
-core is about pursuing motif as theme; it’s designating the [thing] attached to the suffix as a core (lol) unifying conceptual or stylistic element, rather than a mere attribute. it implies lifestyle choices, maybe an attached subculture–to be thing-core an item must either be produced as part of or usable within a pursuit of the theme
-stuck is weirder because it derives from a subculture to begin with, but generally it’s more like [other thing] ‘in the mode of’ [thing]. thingstuck implies the application of a template to another template to create the fusion child thereof; appropriately has its roots in fanfic aus
holy shit that is all exactly right! i’d like to further suggest:
-punk indicates an ideological counterculture rebellion against current cultural norms in the direction of [thing], such as steampunk and solarpunk. kafkapunk would be something like defiantly embracing the option of turning into a hideous giant bug in lieu of participating in late stage capitalism. which, frankly, is a big mood.
It's time we decolonize the Cascadian volcanoes
If we can say Denali instead of Mt. McKinley then we can say Lawetlat'la instead of Mt. St Helens. The mountain is named Tahoma, not Rainier. Naming a mountain after Jefferson doesn't erase its true name of Seekseekqua.
One name tells of the thousand years indigenous history and culture of the tribes who live there. The other name tells me nothing but colonialism.
Mt. Baker: Kulshan
Glacier Peak: Dahkobed
Mt. Rainier: Tahoma
Mt. St. Helens: Lawetlat'la
Mt. Adams: Klickitat
Mt. Hood: Wy'east
Mt. Jefferson: Seekseekqua
Three Sisters: Klah Klahne
BRB, adding "look up the indigenous names of Colorado mountains" to my to do list, because you're 100% right.
Great Idea! Does anyone have a rec for a pronunciation guide? I've got reading disorders and I would like to say these right.
I met a traveler once who told me that "the word for 'butterfly' sounds beautiful in every language." Mariposa. Papillon. Etc.
that’s very poetic but I’d like to offer a counterpoint:
Sounds way better in German than it does in English tbh
Like, for a harmless example, I’m pretty confident all of the assertions in this post about the origin of the word “spinster” are bullshit. I can find no evidence that wool (hand) spinner was ever a profession that paid well or allowed anyone to own their own business. Nor does it make any logical sense to me to refer to it as an “art” because it’s not like it’s hard or can be done multiple ways.
But you can find plenty of references to spinning wool by hand as being the shitty, tedious job that hurts your hands, hurts your back,and damages your lungs. It’s difficult, but it’s mostly tedious and awful and you can basically “master” it as a toddler. There’s a new book that suggests, after actually speaking to women whose feet were bound as children, that foot-binding was done in no small part in order to cripple girl children to make them better able to sit still for hours on end spinning and carding wool.
The image of “spinster” people were calling to mind in the 18th/19th centuries was of a “surplus” woman who had to rely on the charity of her nearest male relatives and therefore had to do the shittiest, most tedious job in the household because her only alternative is to starve on the street or get hanged as a witch.
I mean, I”m being weirdly nitpicky about an utterly harmless post that I’m not even some kind of confident expert in…but there’s something troubling to me about anachronistically finding examples of all these economically self-sufficient single ladies instead of the grim, horrifying reality of how fragile a woman’s life was and how terrible it was to be a woman without some man to give you social status. I mean, if there were all these examples of free-wheeling spinsters (not window with sons) who made good money and (somehow) owned their own property then what did we even need feminism for? I mean, hell, a single woman in the US in 1971 would not be able to open her own textile business because a single woman in 1971 would have no access to credit!
My justification for being a joyless pendant here is that I think it’s Not Helpful to create these myths that there were lots of happy alternatives for women or to downplay how brutal structural oppression was: A very small amount of women in pre/semi Industrial Age Europe had any kind of genuine financial security and most of those women in a lot of places/times in Europe and America had to genuinely fear having someone call them a witch and take whatever resources they did have.
You’re right and that post is nothing but revisionist historical fantasy that totally obscures the fact that single women were in an incredibly precarious economic and social position throughout most of history. The idea that spinsters were *actually* empowered, independent single women earning big money in the comfort and privacy of their own homes is completely ahistorical. And it seems like they’re doing it just to reclaim a dumbass term for unmarried women that’s only persisted because of sexism.
IDK about spinsters but feminist medieval historian Judith Bennett has done a lot of work on single women in late medieval England in various trades, like particularly beer brewing. Not that they were making a ton of money at it or anything, but there were a lot of single women supporting themselves by brewing beer. It’s not like single women without men were totally helpless throughout all of history until the late 20th century. There is nuance to be had here.
If you’re talking about the same Judith Bennett book i think you are, she makes it clear that for much of the medieval period commercial brewing, like home brewing, was considered a (semi) unskilled trade, and paid far less than skilled labor. She also makes it clear that the vast majority of the women brewers were married, not single, that they were often barely getting by economically, and that by the late 1300s brewing was increasingly male dominated.
I don’t think anyone here is trying to imply that single women living before the 20th century were “helpless” or didn’t work or support themselves, because it’s well documented that they did, some with more success than others. However, the post this is about argued that “a million” European women in the middle ages intentionally chose spinning instead of marriage because it provided them with a a comfortable income and independence, and there’s really no evidence for that.
Honestly, as a German I can not quite understand the obsession of the English speaking world with the question whether a word exists or not. If you have to express something for which there is no word, you have to make a new one, preferably by combining well-known words, and in the very same moment it starts to exist. Agree?
Deutsche Freunde, could you please create for me a word for the extreme depression I feel when I bend down to pick up a piece of litter and discover two more pieces of litter?
die Umweltvermüllungsverzweiflung = …
This is a german compound on the spot master class and I am LIVING
i saw a post today that said that it’s cultural appropriation for non-jewish americans to use yiddish words like spiel or schlep like….alright lol
Oh boy.
Yeah, I felt very ehhh about that post but was going to ignore it. A lot of Yiddish words have been absorbed by American English, especially in cities with large Ashkenazi Jewish populations like New York. I have no doubt that there are an awful lot of people out there who don’t even know that words like schlep and schmuck are Yiddish.
I do think that it can sound forced and I’ve encountered people who seem to be trying too hard to use as much Yiddish as they can either because they think it’s funny or because they’re trying to sound like they’re from New York (or something), but actually a minority in my experience.
I completely understand why non-Jews using Yiddish makes some people uncomfortable. I definitely wince when gentiles use Yiddish words incorrectly (I recently had to bite my tongue when a female gentile friend not only happily referred to herself as a “shiksa,” but also spelled it “shiska”), and I certainly wouldn’t encourage non-Jews to seek out new Yiddish words to incorporate into their language. However, I personally believe that language, in the words of William S. Burrows, is a virus, and we cannot always prevent it from spreading. And sometimes the virus mutates to a point of no return, and things that were appropriated or obscure cannot be put back into Pandora’s Box. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to curb people from appropriating more current terms before they get popular, and that doesn’t mean we can’t encourage language to evolve beyond certain offensive terminologies, but with words like “schtick,” and “glitch,” and hundreds of other words from different minority cultures that we use everyday, I think we have to accept that weeding them out of mainstream English is unrealistic. Simply put, the die has been cast. Obviously, I don’t speak for everyone when I say this, but that’s how I feel on the matter.
I’m inclined to agree, honestly. (Although I don’t think “glitch” is from Yiddish? “schtick” definitely is though.)
Glitch is absolutely from Yiddish! https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/glitch Ok, well, probably from.
:O I have learned a thing!
Interesting linguistics and language tidbit: fossil words are words that are mostly obsolete, except for their use in a specific phrase or idiom. Examples from English include:
ado: as in without further ado (and also the title of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing), meaning “trouble or fuss”.
bandy: as in bandy about, meaning “to give and receive reciprocally” or “to pass around casually” it could also mean “to fight with or against someone” (’the prince expressly hath forbidden bandying in the Verona streets’, Shakespeare).
bated: as in with bated breath not to be confused with its homophone baited. Bated means “reduced or lowered.” It comes from abate which is still used in law.
beck: as in at one’s beck and call, a beck is a nod of the head or motion of the hand used as a call or command. It has the same root as beckon (as in ‘he beckoned her from across the room’).
eke: as in eke out a living, meaning “to increase or augment”. There’s a remnant of this word in nickname which came from the compound ekename, which literally means “additional name”.
fettle: as in in fine fettle, meaning either a physical state or a mental state. This is similar to another fossil word, kilter, as in out of kilter, where kilter means “good condition”.
fro: as in to and fro, coming from the Scottish pronunciation of the word. Another more obsolete form of the idiom is ‘fro and till’ if you wanna show off to your friends or something.
kith: as in kith and kin. Kith referred to friends and acquaintances. Kin referred to family and relatives. An archaic version of this was kith and kine meaning “relatives and property”, or literally, “friends and cattle”. So, if you like your cows but not your family, maybe use the older version!
shebang: as in the whole shebang. This originally meant “temporary shelter”. It somehow came to mean “any matter of present concern”. May also be seen spelled chebang.
shod: as in roughshod. Shod means “wearing shoes” though I think it may now mean “having tires”. This has nothing to do with the word shoddy which is instead from shoad meaning “loose stone and rubble” (maybe?).
wend: as in wend your way, meaning “to pursue or proceed”. The modern past tense of wend is wended, but originally its past tense was went. That’s right. Went. Similar to send/sent, lend/lent, spend/spent, we had wend/went. For some reason it was decided to use went as the past tense of the word go instead (the original past tense of go was yede, so really I don’t blame them).
wreak: as in wreak havoc, meaning “to inflict or cause something, especially harm, or to take vengeance” (’on me let Death wreak all his rage’, Milton). Its often mistakenly written as “wreck havoc”. Might not be around much longer!
yore: as in times of yore. The word yore means “time long past” and comes from the same root as the word year.
Wait, so… does -copter come *from* helicopter?
Yep! This is called rebracketing. Another famous example would be “-burger”: the original food item is named after the German city, [Hamburg]+[er], but got semantically reinterpreted as [ham]+[burger]. Now it’s used as a suffix indicating a type of sandwich.
