ROFLMAO at the onomatopoeic term for a bicycle in Amsterdam!

"The Revolution is like a bicycle. If it doesn't move forward, it falls over."

From a Louis de Funès movie.)

Probably also has nothing to do with "Fiets, don't fail me now!"?

I am so glad to have the word bakfiets. I love it. I love it so much. I think of it sometimes, usually associated with bicycles and my failure to ride the one I have (anywhere I'd want to bike, I can also walk without having to buy a helmet or get into better condition or buy a helmet) but it's a pleasant word that has good associations for me, entirely due to Abi. I am probably never going to get one, but I love that it exists.

Re America, are you saying:

a) you dispute the received knowledge the continents are named after Amerigo Vespucci

b) you think Vespucci wasn't important enough to deserve two continents being named after him

c) you don't know why someone would choose to name the continents with Vespucci's first name instead of his last

Just curious, no particular bias of my own....

The Dutch term, fiets (pronounced as an English speaker would say “feats” feets)

OMG ROTFLMAO. The Dutch word for bike is feets.

"You came fast! How did you come? On fiets?"

"No, sir, rode my bike."

(And of course the funniest bit is that all the Dutch I've ever talked to spoke better English than I did.)

I have heard other theories, though it does appear that the Consensus of the Internet is that it is Vespuggi. I am not deeply emptionally affected either way, though I think I will leave the blog post as it is.

I guess fiets retains its singularity.

Re National Lampoon's "Amish in Space."

I remember a few things about it.

The family patriarch drifts about in a rocking chair, making pronouncements about accepting rebukes.

When a bunch of hideous BEMs invade and carry off one of the daughters, the elder forbids his sons from resisting.

Another daughter finds a big lever marked PULL TO RETURN SAFELY TO EARTH. She is prevented from activating it by the elder, who says something like "Touch not the unclean thing!"

Note, also, that the Dutch for 'moped' is bromfiets. That is a fiets that goes 'vroom'.

I reckon we all need to think about the accents of the past. Should we really expect Shakespeare to have been writing for Kenneth Branagh, or did he write for this accent?.

"Captain Vespuggi: The Winter Soldier" just doesn't have the same ring.

And the word for those little tiny car-shaped things that disabled and elderly people drive on the bike paths is snorfiets, "mustache fiets".

keranih @6:

I love multligual puns. It might be useful to know that the Dutch word for staircase is trap when I tell you that one of the favorite non sequiturs in our house is to point to the stairs and say, in one's best Admiral Akbar voice,

IT'S A TRAP!

Actually, 'bicycle' (like 'television' and 'homosexual') is Latin+Greek. (It was formed on the analogy of the fully Greek 'tricycle', which existed first.)

Sigh. You're right, and I think I'll amend the OP. (Thanks.)

(In my defense, I've done nothing but work, work-related socializing, commuting on my fiets, and sleeping for the last three days. The only reason I'm not on a boat with colleagues right now is that I had a prior family obligation.)

Speaking of bicycle culture: Chicago just got their first one of these practical railings. In the bike lane on Milwaukee Ave at Ogden, I am informed. Our local urbanism-and-bike-stuff blog is hinting at a big writeup soon and several more similar railings to come. Woohoo!

Now if only they'd give us curbs to keep idiots in cars out of the bike lanes ... still. Ten years from now the bike infrastructure of Chicago will likely be unrecognizable from any benighted bicycular time-traveling visitor from 2010, and a good thing too.

And speaking of my own household fiets, I HAZ A CARGO TRIKE! Not the kind I want most [with the wheelbarrow-like bin on the front between the handlebars and the front wheel(s)], because those start at $1500 and go only up from there, but one of these, only mine is red. Fire-engine red! It is so dank it makes me wriggle in happiness.

What it doesn't have is gears. [John did Scary Math and says its hardwired effective gear ratio is 3.1, if that helps anyone here]

What I don't have is cardiovascular conditioning.

As the bike weighs about 60lb and my kid (who I am frequently dragging on her bike-behind half-a-bike trailer mounted to my seatpost) is 40lb on her own ... this makes a difference.

As I am (YAAAAAY!) gradually catching up on my sleep deprivation, I intend to make myself take it out for a mile+ spin around the neighborhood at least once a day all summer and attempt to surmount the latter difficulty at least.

I have a plastic storage box mit snap-on lid that fits the back cargo platform PERFECTLY. Bungee'd on securely, it's even cleared by the bike-behind trailer's arm, so I can take minor-to-medium cargo AND the kid somewhere.

If I work up to 5-mile one-way trips (and two of them in one day), that somewhere will be THE BEACH AWWWW YISSSS.

abi @ #15

Just as long as you don't fall asleep on your fiets.

Plus, of course, you had to make sure the gnomes weren't goofing off or redesigning the spamtrap to be driven by water power. (We know spam comes in waves, but that's no reason for going back a level; steam power is entirely satisfactory, with the bonus that it can also be used for drying your pointy hats when it rains and pressing trousers, etc.)

I will say the weirdest thing about transitioning to driving the trike is that you canNOT steer it by leaning. Period. It turns because you turn the handlebars, only. Which I was perfectly aware of, in theory ... but on the actual road, with camber to deal with, my kinesthetic memory keeps trying to anyhow, with occasionally hilarious results. :->

What Chicago also just got: A museum devoted to illustration and "narrative art", to be paid for by George Lucas. He wanted it at the Presidio in San Francisco, but was turned down. Chicago's mayor courted him, offering a lakefront site near the Field Museum, Adler Planetarium, Shedd Aquarium, and Soldier Field.

The museum is completely self-funded; will be built, funded and endowed by Lucas; and has been described as a “history of storytelling” project “dedicated to the power of the visual image” as well as the world’s largest interactive museum.

Lucas's art collection includes works by Maxfield Parrish, N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, and J.C. Leyendecker. And a whole lot of Norman Rockwell. Plus Carl Barks. Plus a Kelley Freas portrait of Alfred E. Newman.

The museum will also, unsurprisingly, include filmmaking art, such as costumes and sets, and will cover computer graphics as well.

Here's the brochure from Lucas's pitch to the Presidio folks.

Here's the museum's Web site.

Personally, I would love to see this happen.

But controversy is brewing. See also.

My longtime interest in movable bridges took me to some Dutch-language sites, which included a diagram in which the lift span of a vertical lift was referred to as the Val. Curious, I checked out some dictionaries and it seems that that means "trap" or "thing which falls". This does not exactly set the mind at ease...

20
There was a big hoohah about what Lucas wanted vs what the Presidio was willing to allow. They really didn't like his proposed design; it was very large and wouldn't have fit the location: Lucas the emperor.

Bill Higgins @20 -- I'd sure like to go to that museum! Even though I've seen originals by most of those artists already....

I was shopping for a new commuting bike today. Really liked, to my surprise, an "Urban Xtreme" bike with drop bars, disk brakes, and a steel frame. I could have confidently predicted none of the above before trying it. I expected to look at flat bar, conventional rim brakes, and aluminum frame.

It's got a sibling "urban xpress" with a flat bar.

My first/last new bike purchase was twenty years ago. These newfangled integrated brake shifter levers are easier to use than I thought.

And the bike are so light! Before a rack and commuting clutter, of course. Still I think I might wind up with a much lighter vehicle.

#9, Fragano Ledgister:

Note, also, that the Dutch for 'moped' is bromfiets. That is a fiets that goes 'vroom'.

Not the ones I've heard... I'm more familiar with the type that go 'brrrrrrom-brom-brom-brom'.

I always found that name appropriate.

Fire-engine red

Reminds me of a conference during the dot-com boom when a speaker who worked for a company called Fire Engine Red pointed out that it was an anagram of Fried Engineer.

(No idea if this was the same company that comes up now during a Google search.)

HLN: Area woman is lured into watching Penny Dreadful, and becomes instantly hooked. She goes on to write three explicit fanfics in a single week, thus breaking a writer's block that had lasted a full year.

"It's almost too easy," she explained. "The script does half the work, especially since they've included Dorian Gray, and I've loved the literary sources for years. But it sure is fun."

Of course it’s made up of Latin and Greek terms. What could be more English than a bastard assembly of morphemes from several foreign languages whose original speakers would never have considered using them in conjunction with one another?

The real trouble starts when you mix French and Greek. Bureaucracy, anyone?

The real trouble starts when you mix French and Greek. Bureaucracy, anyone?

To be fair, we probably got that straight from French, which also uses some Greek roots, without mixing and matching too much. Bureaucratie is the French word, and the T is why we have bureacratic and not bureacracic, I'd imagine.

My favourite Greek-derived word is the English-language singular term for glasses or spectacles: a bioptikon (possibly a biopticon). Makes me feel like I have Transformers on my face.

Am I the only one wondering why a Dutch bicycle would sound/"speak" in English onomatopoeia? (*ducksrunshides*)

Oh, wait - Dear Hubby listened to me (as I gave a detailed explanation of why I wasn't closing the laptop) and then hunted up a volume in the bookcase: Etymologische woordenboek: Waar komen onze woorden vandaan?, by J. de Vries and F. de Tollenaere. They appear to give two explanations, one of which is close to your first. The development goes from vélocipède => vielecipee => flitsepee*.

Or maybe the "second" explanation is just an extension of the first? (They do actually cite a second source for this, so.... anyone's guess.) The current form was apparently determined by the addition of an interjection for movement/painting (? DH is also mystified) 'hup!' (With a lot of overlap with use in English) with a dialect verb vietsen, "to 'translocate' oneself with a quick motion." (Sorry for the weird mouthful of 'translocate' - Dutch has two words that are very different: bewegen and verplaatsen, both of which translate to "movement". "To move with a quick movement"? - ouch! that hurts my ears.)

Crazy(thunkRATELschraapPIEP!)Soph

* No giggling there in the back - "ee" is not the tight "long" e of "pee" but more like the English "payh"

The contrarian theory on the naming of America is that it was named for Richard Amerike (Richard ap Meryk in Welsh), who owned/sponsored a voyage of exploration in 1497.

a bioptikon
Do short-sighted spiders need to wear a panopticon?

There is also a suggestion in that wikipedia article that Amerigo Vespucci was named after America - that he was originally Alberigo Vespucci, and only called himself Amerigo later in life after the local name of a place he visited in Nicaragua, a name which survives in the Amerrisque Mountains.

Dave Bell @ #10:

One of my favourite details about the Original Pronunciation production of Romeo and Juliet was that they ran audience surveys to find out if the change in pronunciation made it harder for people to get into the play, and got the result that for some people it was actually easier because the unfamiliarity of pronunciation was balanced by the removal of the implicit "this is for people who speak Proper English, not you" message carried by the Formal Shakespeare Accent.

abi @ #12:

Ahahaha. The Dutch for moustache seems to be the Swedish for "snot" (snor). Or, possibly, "stealing" in the present tense.

abi@root

The only analagous etymological mystery of national importance I can think of is America.

Not sure if dogs are of national importance: but they are dear to my heart so what the hell: dog is weird. It seems to just pop up in Middle English, displacing OE hund(modern hound) to its more specialised meaning (cf deer losing its more general meaning). There are etymological suggestions for dog, but I'm not sure I'm convinced by any of them. Meanwhile German, for example, just continued with hund as the general word for a dog. It just pops up...

Rikibeth @ 27... Glad to hear "Penny Dreadful" helped with your writer's block. I now have access to Showtime and have been recording episodes, but won't watch it until I've found the first five. It does look good. And it has Timothy Dalton *and* Eva Green. 'Nuff said.

Niall McAuley #31: Another contrarian theory is that the Americas are named for a mountain range in Nicaragua, the Sierra América.

Oops, didn't see Niall McAuley's #33 before posting.

A century ago the world began
in blood and pain, the auguries were wild,
so many things have changed in a short span.

My father’s world the currents overran
there was no time for words or thoughts too mild,
a century ago the world began.

We have to choose which of the screens to scan,
it is too easy to become beguiled
so many things have changed in a short span

and we are all entranced, woman and man,
by all the facts that overcome the child
a century ago. The world began:

two shots, and then the faeces struck the fan
for all mankind; none would be reconciled;
so many things have changed in a short span,

the light itself has been placed under ban
and all that once was purest been defiled.
A century ago the world began
so many things have changed in a short span.

Fragano @40: <applause>

I was going to watch Penny Dreadful, but then the first ep disappeared (about two weeks after airing) off free Hulu and my friend's cable streaming subscription, and now I can't find it to watch anywhere.

These broadcasters need to learn that you don't poof the first ep before the third ep goes up, darnit ... not if you want people hooked in by word-of-mouth from friends!

I was aware that there was some controversy regarding the name America - that it disapears into confusion over the name of a Welshman, or perhaps the chosen name of an explorer who fell in love with a native mountian range, or perhaps something else - this delights me to no end. For me, this is how America is - of uncertain provenence, borrowed from myriad sources, all woven together.

Fragano @40: nicely done.

Re: Penny Dreadful - 1) is it better than the graphic novel League of Extrordinary Gentleman ? (I already know the answer re: the movie)

2) Do I need more than the cliffnotes for Dorian Grey? And are there any other sources I need to brush up on?

(Jimminee Christmas, if I had known being a fan was such work I might not have gotten into this line of nonemployment.)

Penny Dreadful: I feel it is aimed at those with minimal knowledge, with occasional bonuses for those who know more.

From thread 197:
> If the one little silver-covered comb-bound book was good enough for Gary Gygax . . . .

... he wouldn't have written any more versions? I really hit my stride with AD&D myself.

Regarding dog, after my first History of the Spanish Language class, I marched up to the professor and asked about perro. Nothing made sense. The answer? We're not sure, but the erre means it's probably from Basque or protoBasque.

I liked that class. A lot of it was memorizing the steps from Vulgar Latin to Spanish, which was fun to practice.

I can't remember where I heard that 'copacetic' came from Israeli Hebrew 'ha kol b'seder', "all is well," but apparently it's a folk etymology, as both of my dictionaries say "origin unknown" for 'copacetic'.

I do know that certainly my Israeli coworker (many years ago, and she was the only good thing about that job) said "ha kol b'seder" as the second line in every phone conversation she had with her husband. (She's also the woman who told the story of shouting "Enough! Enough!"* in Hebrew at her misbehaving child in a public place, and only figuring out later why she got the weird looks.) It's the equivalent of saying "fine" when someone says "how are you?" as a conversational reflex.

But as I've said before, folk etymology is the linguistic equivalent of creationism, so however attractive an etymology may be (and I really like this one, because it goes through Harlem shabbatsgoyim and Bojangles), if it can't be supported by the evidence, it must be discarded.

*"Dai! Dai!"

Off any current subthread topic, P Z Myers tweeted this wonderful video about the phrase 'like a girl', and the harm that it does.

The woman in the blue dress with the bright red lipstick needs to be my friend, because you can never have too many brilliantly-spoken and generally awesome friends. Maybe we can get her to come to WisCon.

Xopher Halftongue @ 47

Re: like a girl - le sigh. So many, many wormholes to dive down, and I really don't want to fight over this.

As a woman in a physically demanding field who grew up running track and cross country, I hold that there is a point in development where, particularly in urban areas, that young females markedly shift how they walk, move, and express themselves physically. We had more than a few try out for high school track who literally had not run a full half mile in the last four years. They absolutely did the whole hands-waving, heels flailing thing.

And don't let me get into what heels (aka be-eaten-by-zombie shoes) are good for.

I reject the idea that somehow the patriarchy forced them into this - this is so messed up, it has to have taken a committee - but there is something wrong here.

I was hoping to offer an antidote, in the form of a link to a scan, but I can not find it.

The image was of WildCATs's Grifter, sparing with another muscle bound young hunk. Said hunk attempts to mock Grifter, asking him, do you know you fight like a girl?

For Grifter, protege of the Keran amazon Zealot, this is hardly an insult, and his response (an uppercut to the chin) is an effective rejoiner.

keranih, I haven't actually read the graphic novel of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but I have read other Alan Moore works, and I'd say the show holds up, in terms of being layered and interesting. Plot-wise it's a bit raggedy, and it's very, VERY over-the-top (the inclusion of a Grand Guignol Theatre as an in-show location is no accident) bur I think it won't disappoint you.

You definitely won't need more than the Cliff Notes version of Dorian Gray. They've actually made a number of changes to his character which are distressing some purists but which I find intriguing, and I've loved the book since eighth grade.

It's a show that could have been tailor-made to suit my interests, and maybe is not for everyone, but DAMN, I'm having a good time with it.

keranih, did you WATCH that video (to the end)? It's about how the phrase 'like a girl' becomes an insult, even for girls. As far as I can recall, the word 'patriarchy' doesn't appear in the video, or in my comment about it. The use of the phrase as an insult is a problem that needs to be solved, and as a gender-based insult it's a feminist issue, but that doesn't mean there are Evoll Patriarchs standing over girls with wire whips dipped in vinegar and screaming at them "Stop running efficiently! It's not ladylike!"

I think the video makes an important point and we need to work on the use of that phrase, turn it positive if possible, and so on.

keranih, addendum re: other sources for Penny Dreadful: the major ones are Dracula and Frankenstein. They also quote a good deal of Romantic poetry in the show, and I squee when they do. And the more you know about Victorian London, the more detail you will find to appreciate - there have been some errors, some minor and some, to me, pretty glaring, but I am a costume nerd and when a designer decides to favor character illustration rather than historical accuracy I often balk. There is a small but vocal clique in the fandom who would really like to see Dorian Gray PUT ON A DAMN CRAVAT, no matter how pretty Reeve Carney's neck is.

Other references available to catch include La Boheme and Phantom of the Opera, though no familiarity is needed. And there is mention of Jack the Ripper but he's not a serious plot point or anything.

It's a treat, is what I'm saying.

Xopher @50

Yes, I did watch it all the way to the end.

No. Girls running like flapping chickens and being unaware of how to put their hips into a throw and squeezing their eyes shut when a ball comes toward them and wearing clothes that get them guy attention but are impractical for actually doing anything is a problem that needs to be solved.

If you think that changing the phrase is either going to make those girls start running like they are intending to get somewhere, or going to erase the cultural recognition that it is young women who run like headless chickens while young men do not, then we have significantly different opinions on what kind of top down change can be effected through social pressure.

Track girls don't have crap self confidence because they get told they run like a girl, girls have crap self confidence because their lousy running style is not going to allow them to fully extend their stride, drop their hands, and actually move fast enough to win the race against other females who are not running in that manner.

And the irony of this campaign coming from a hygeine company is...quite something.

Not seeing the irony. Their customers are almost all women, so being feminist is a plus for them. Do you think tampon companies are intrinsically unfeminist? I haven't heard that before.

I worked for a guy who told me that I threw like a girl. My response was something like 'What did you expect me to throw like?" - No one taught girls how to throw, when I was a kid. We weren't expected to need to throw.

So earlier this month the daughter and I were in Fayetteville and went with the friends we were staying with to watch the pride parade. One of the floats was carrying a guy in drag who was chunking little lavender mesh bags full of birdseed into the crowd. One of them caught my daughter's friend on the arm hard enough that it very slightly hurt. I don't remember who said:

Doesn't he know how to throw like a girl?

I'm not sure if it was right or wrong to say it, but it did crack us all up. We later decided over coffee we needed to send the cat to Mardi Gras so he could learn the right way to toss.

(That wasn't a double entendre at the time.)

Xopher @ 53

No, I think that it's pretty clear that Always is interested in looking like they're "pro-woman" or "pro-girl" without actually doing anything (besides selling a product they can't really market to the male half of the population) to support individual women.

And Always is best known for their sanitary napkins, not tampons.

being feminist is a plus for them

Not sure I follow that that line of reasoning.

Appearing feminist (for certain values of feminist) is probably a competitive advantage for such a company. Actually being feminist? Not obviously such an advantage, again depending.

Count me in as someone who, except for the Nautilus in Venice, thought the movie was less messy than Moore's story.
(Ducks out quickly.)

keranih, the problem with your analysis for me is that the ones who are doing it right are also running, throwing, fighting etc. like girls--because they are girls.

The problem is the idea that only if you're doing it wrong are you doing it "like a girl" (which also means that if you're running/throwing/fighting correctly, you are incorrectly performing "girl").

I'm an ex-girl (now matron) myself, and the mother of three fierce, athletic and unconventional daughters. Like Xopher, I found the video encouraging.

Lila: There we go. That's what I was trying to say, except I thought that message was pretty clearly what the video itself said.

An open thready kind of question:

I'd suggested two REM songs, "Losing My Religion" and "Nightswimming", for our church's Coming Out Day service, thinking of them as kind of a before-and-after picture.

I got back the answer, "I just read through these texts and I really don't see a strong connection to coming out day. What is it about these that you think make them coming out day songs?"

This left me at a loss.

I know that Michael Stipe has said various things about "Losing My Relgion" over the years, but the video being about as queer as it gets undercuts a lot of that. (And makes me wonder if it had an influence on Tony Kushner's Angels in America, but that's a story for another day.)

"Nightswimming" is perhaps less clear-cut, but I've always read it in that manner.

So what's the answer? Can I explicate the lyrics to make this clear? Is that even possible? Should I suggest asking some other folks' opinions? Am I wrong to suggest them? Wouldn't be the first time.

Is is a matter of listening to the songs? They are very much not in this cat's aesthetic. The videos help me understand, but those aren't part of a live performance at a church service.

Your thoughts, should you have any on this subject, are very desired.

#48, keranih: I reject the idea that somehow the patriarchy forced them into this

Oh, you don't need to explicitly tell girls they have to flail when they run, if they run at all which they shouldn't, for it to be sexist and damaging. A childhood of being told not to get your cute little dress dirty and similar slow drips of being not allowed to do something slowly erodes a lot of girls' willingness to get dirty. Or sweaty, by running. Or handle power tools. Or even *try* a lot of things.

kerainh @48:
I reject the idea that somehow the patriarchy forced them into this - this is so messed up, it has to have taken a committee - but there is something wrong here.

We might be having a terminological problem here. What definition of "patriarchy" do you use that isn't shaped rather like a committee, both in the sense of many pressures from many directions, and many people applying said pressures?

@59 Lila, @60 Xopher -

To me, the video identified the problem as "people say that running like a headless chicken is something girls do" and the solution as people shouldn't say that.

Which is neither the problem as I see it, nor imo an effective solution.

This statement ("girls are weaker and less coordinated") is effective mockery because of the truth in it. In most cases, this is directed at boys/men, and it is effective because guys don't like being mocked as weak.

If you look at the video, you see that both men and women and boys and girls recognize that there is a specific style of moving (or throwing, or punching) that is associated with how women do it.

That association does not come from contempt for women, imo - part of the contempt for women comes from that association. And the association is there because it has a basis in truth.

It was not clear to me that the video intended to change what I saw as the actual problem - women/girls performing at a certain degree of physical (non)capability. It was about changing words so that people (women) didn't feel badly about females being identified as the ones most commonly performing at that level.

There is only so far we're going to be able to go in reprograming the human thought pattern if we keep running up against the fact of weak throws and clumsy running being a characteristic of girls (at a certain age) and not of boys. (Likewise, us flatchested gals "look like boys". Goodspeech campaign's not going to change that, either.)

Actually training our girls to be able to physically perform might.

The problem is that "running like a girl" and the like are tied to specific behaviors that start kicking in around the time that a girl starts maturing into a young woman. We mince in high heels and sigh and flip our hair and go "oh ekk a mouse" because it works really well in convincing guys to pay attention and do as we ask.

Beating guys at baseball (or pinball) is a far riskier way to win the guy's attention.

As someone with marginal social skills and a flat chest, but who can hammer nails and chuck a rock, I would really like for this to change as well, to more favor me and my skills.

How much headway we'll make against thousands of years of evolution, though, I dunno. Especially as women are the most ruthless enforcers of what is acceptable female behavior on other women.

Dragging it back to Bujold, way back last thread - I think this was something she handled well, with an acknowledgement that many/most gals lacked in some physical skills, but that there ways to at least partly compensate for many of those, but not all.

@58 Serge

Miller's books were an untidy heap of...everything. And I really liked Federal Agent Sawyer. But the heavy handed anvils that were used to apply paint to that motion picture canvas were...not to my taste.

@63 Abi -

I see most of the boundary setting for women (and girls) being made first of our making, and secondly of that by our foremothers. It is possible that my personal experience plays a huge role in this, but imo it is the matriarchy that defines the roles of women, not the patriarchy.

@62 Janra -

Oh, yes, and this drives me INSANE with my neices. (It also made me crazy with my mother.) Okay, okay, the kid likes pink and likes the way the dresses swirl, fine. But it was *you*, dear SIL, who taught her to throw a screaming fit when she got dirt on her dress or shoes, or had her hair untidy.

It makes me suspect there is a mom's magazine version of Cosmo or Vogue that airbrushes all the little angels into impossible perfection.

keranih @ 64: I disagree with much of your analysis, but this:

Actually training our girls to be able to physically perform might.

has a lot to recommend it.

Keranih @ 64... My big disappointment with the movie is their dropping the Veauty/Beast relationship between Mina and Hyde, and the idea of Quatermain as a burnt-out adventurer. Still it had lines such as this.

"The empire is in peril."
"You're probably too young to know, but the empire is always in some kind of peril."

keranih 65: It is possible that my personal experience plays a huge role in this, but imo it is the matriarchy that defines the roles of women, not the patriarchy.

OK, I just deleted a long rant. I'm just going to say "Matriarchy, my ass" and leave it at that.

While you are correct that girls are the ones who tend to learn to run ineffectively and so on, you're still missing the fact that using the phrase 'like a girl' for those ineffective behaviors is insulting to all the girls who run, throw, fight effectively. They're all running, throwing, and fighting like girls.

And also, calling those ineffective behaviors "like a girl" makes it harder to train girls out of them, which is your intended result.

You're acting like words have no impact or importance. You're wrong. Words are critical tools for social change, and can be equally critical tools for enforcing the status quo.

Xopher, keranih

We're using words at cross purposes here, I think. In my vocabulary, and I think the one that Xopher is using, the patriarchy is a system, not a specific group of people.
The system is enforced by men _and_ women.
The patriarchy defines the roles of women in our society. That may include a role for a 'matriarch', but the society of women in the U.S. is not a matriarchy, it's part of the patriarchy.

It's no accident that at the same moment in history the mediated communication of the internet enabled the massive queering of gender, we've also come to massively overvalue the ability of language to cause social change.

For myself, it's not a matter of hoping that changing language will cause social change.

I don't say "throw like a girl" to mean "throw like an untrained person" or "throw like a weak, uncoordinated person" for the same reason that I don't use terms related to disability or race as insults.

Not because I think changing my language will magically cause ablism and racism to vanish, but because using someone's identity as an insult is hurtful and wrong.

Steve 69: Yes, that's what I meant.

Xopher @68

I'm dead serious about matriarchy. I don't ever recall being told I could not do something because of my gender by any male boss, mentor, or relative. My mother, aunts, female teachers, and female bosses, though...and they sure as hell didn't take it as enforcing standards for *men*.

I absolutely feel that words have tremendous power. I also feel that we are best served by teaching our childern sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.

A goodspeak campaign against "like a girl" isn't going to change the way girls run, hit or throw any more than a goodspeak campaign against "dance like a white boy" is going to give my brother the least sense of rhythm.

Nor did 'dance like a white boy' mean anything to Fred Astaire. Or Mikhail Baryshnikov. Or Patrick Swayze.

@71 Lila -

I think that is sound.

I wonder how much impact it has to change the words, rather than to do away with mocking altogether - I think perhaps not very much.

But in a world where we still resort to force, weapons, and fists as conflict mechanisms, I'll take the mocking over the violence, and better mocking over worse.

keranih @ 73... Nor did 'dance like a white boy' mean anything to Fred Astaire

I'm more partial to Gene Kelly myself. :-)

Suppose we continue in a world where most girls never really learn to throw a ball, run, or punch effectively, but where the phrase "you [verb] like a girl" somehow disappears from the language. My guess is that a near equivalent will show up, because it describes an observable phenomenon. We'll just take a more steps on the euphemism treadmill.

My guess is, we're moving in a different direction as a society. Lots of girls in grade/middle/high school are involved in sports now. It looks to me like girls being involved in sports is much more common now than in the past. And this is one way that girls will actually learn how to run, kick, throw, punch, etc.--by being involved in activities that teach them to do it.

Now, girls and boys have different bodies, and different incentives based on both biology and society. (And there are many areas where it's not too clear how to untangle the two--if lots more boys than girls want to play flag football in the 4th grade, is that biology or society, and how would you tell if your answer was wrong?) But ISTM that we're actually in the process, right now, of radically decreasing the number of adult women who never really learned to run or throw or punch or whatever effectively.

There's a term in anthropology: crypto-matriarchy. Ever see "My Big Fat Greek Wedding?" That sort of thing. There's a great scene where the daughter wants to go back to college, and talks to her mom and grandmother. Then, her mom manipulates her dad into thinking it's his idea. Who has the power, and who thinks they have the power?

Talk about "the Patriarchy" gets all muddled up because in the conventional Western world, most of us live, or at least grew up in a crypto-matriarchy. Males, as a group, have confidence that things go their way, and women, in groupings, do a lot of behind the scenes emotional work to keep all kinds of relationships stable, and thus keep the men between the orange cones.

In other societies, men have all the confidence, and work very hard to undermine the sense of self and real power held by _any_ woman. Some may find that description familiar. Anthropologists categorize those societies as true patriarchies. Like most category systems, it's flawed, and like lots of anthropology-for-undergraduates it has a very Western vs. Eastern or Imperialists vs Colonies feel to it. I do think the fedoras come from growing up in a crypto-matriarchy, thinking that they have a place in the patriarchy org chart, and discovering that reality just isn't shaped like that.

"The Patriarchy" that most of us are talking about here is not exactly either of those things. Abi said it well above: What definition of "patriarchy" do you use that isn't shaped rather like a committee, both in the sense of many pressures from many directions, and many people applying said pressures?

With regard to awkward running: well, there _may_ be more variability* in motor movement in females while a skill is being acquired, variability that vanishes with mastery. This would explain both the prejudice of the boys and the competence of the women. I will not speak to the meaning assigned to it, and leave that to better posters than I.

*picture a bell curve that is flatter compared to one that is more pointy.

keranih:

I dunno, the "sticks and stones" line has some real value in encouraging kids to learn to deal with the (inevitable, people being people) nasty things other people will sometimes say to them, but it's not really true. Just about everyone I know can think of things someone said to them a decade or two ago that *still* sting--sometimes because they were cuttingly accurate, other times because they were nastily wrong. ("Wow, how could she have said such an awful thing to me.")

More to the point, it's important for kids to know that sometimes, people are going to say nasty things to them--just as sometimes, people will do (or try to do) nasty things to them. But the "sticks and stones" line seems like it will lead the kids to convince themselves that they have to (or should be willing to) put up with verbal abuse. Whereas the right way to deal with people who like to use words to hurt you is usually to find a way to avoid those people, or if that's impossible, to find a way to push back on the verbal nastiness till it stops. And at the very least, they should recognize that having someone say nasty things to you isn't just harmless fun, it's actually something you have every right to get mad about.

Kimiko @77 - wot's a fedoras? Google only gave me this.

albatross @78 - I sometimes wonder if the 1st Amendment (specifically freedom of speech) would have been written as it was, and interpeted as it was, if it had been women, with women's preferred use of language, put down, and social pressure, (rather than the men's norm of force & violence) who had written it.

In someways, despite all our "pen is mightier than the sword" I think that we hold that words can be freely used only because we are pretending that *they don't really matter*.

Other days, I look at the second amendment, and remember that the Founding Fathers were in fact a bunch of crazy idealists who really did think that, below a certain bar, everything was fair game, and we could sort it out.

Madmen, all of them.

John A Arkansawyer @61 -

I am not your target audience, but I never saw/heard Losing my Religion as a particularly queer song.

It's possibily considered trite, but I always found Bruce Springsteen's Streets of Philidelphia -

- walk a thousand miles just to slip this skin -

- to be an evocative piece about coming to terms with identidy.

For the second half, perhaps "I can see clearly now" (which always gets me, because it does not pretend that the way is smooth, just that ones vision is clear enough to see and deal with the stones on the road.)

But songs are so dang specific. For me, How to Save a Life is a healer's life story, satisfactory and solid, keeping on, keeping on, winning and losing.

*shrugs*

If we can get enough people inoculated to stop thinking of "you [perform an act] like a girl" as an automatic slur on one's ability to perform the act properly, it will help us stop artificially DIScouraging girls from acquiring skills in those acts.

Also, keranih? Many, many women in patriarchical societies (like the modern US) have sufficient internalized misogynistic thinking that only rarely do the boys even HAVE to slap girls down directly anymore. Girls do it to each other, starting in middle school, and their mothers and allomothers often started it far earlier than that:

* Sit still. Keep your knees together.
* Don't climb/flip like that -- people can see your undies!
* Walk SOFTLY, please, not like a clomping elephant!
* Be a lady.

All of these continual, microaggressive pressures on growing girls teach them (unless they are very strong in themselves or have strong adults helping them resist) all the horrible physical habits of un-ability that you remark upon as the visible hallmarks of running/throwing/etc/athlete-ing "like a girl".

The reason the way girls run changes is because once girls reach a certain height or start to change shape, the pressures on them to conform to expected, 'ladylike' gender presentation ramp up exponentially. This is also when girls quit reporting being interested in math and science.

The fact that it's primarily other females causing damage to females doesn't mean the damage is the result of a matriarchy; if we had a matriarchy it would make societal rules that benefited women disproportionately to men, and oh boy do we not.

Leaving this for the runs like a girl/woman thread.

(I'd like to point out that the only way I'd win that race with her is if I had a bike, or possibly a 1 lap head start. )

It is, of course, the hallmark of a working (by which I mean, self-perpetuating and robust, not actually desirable) oppressive system that it co-opts the oppressed to police themselves and each other into conforming with their oppression.

See also every other long-term stable oppressive system in all of human history, with multigenerational slavery in the US South being perhaps the most ready example that jumps to my mind.

keranih:

The people who wrote the bill of rights (and the constitution, and the declaration of independence) were very well aware of how powerful words are. They'd just kicked off a revolution with their words, after all. And I have to guess that people as verbally clever as Thomas Jefferson were pretty clear on how you can cut a person to ribbons with your tongue or your pen, too.

[1] Both in the legal sense of not having the cops arrest you when you say the wrong stuff, and in the broader sense of tolerance for people whose views seem wrong to you--not pretending they're right, but also not beating them up or shouting them down.

#73, keranih: I don't ever recall being told I could not do something because of my gender by any male boss, mentor, or relative.

Lucky you.

Leaving aside the stuff that some people claim isn't sexism but a compliment ("wow, you know which way to wrap teflon tape?! I'm impressed!" -- said by a male employee of a client, on seeing me doing basic maintenance on some equipment owned by my employer) I've had more than a few.

To pick out three of the most blatant ones:

"Are you taking [university engineering program] to get your M.R.S. degree?" (laughs) --said by a male co-worker at one of my student internships.

"What are you doing?! You can't carry that!" -- said by a male co-worker, while I was carrying a 50-lb bag on my shoulder at a brisk walk.

(to male co-worker) "When you lift this, make sure to keep it close to your body, it weighs more than [worker safety] regs allow us to lift." (turns to me) "Don't you try to lift it, you'll hurt yourself." -- said by a male co-worker. The male co-worker he gave lifting instructions to is smaller than me.

#83, Elliott Mason:

"The last stage of oppression is when the oppressor lifts their hands and says 'my god, what are these people doing to themselves!'"

(The original quote was talking about genocide, but it is apt for less murderous forms of oppression as well.)

HLN: Local man gets call from apartment office. Apparently when maintenance people were moving stove unit it somehow started a fire and fire department got called. Fortunately when local man gets home he learns that damage is actually minimal. Hole and singed area on part of a wall next to new stove unit. Cover to light fixture in ceiling will need to be replaced. As will venetian blinds on window. Everything else seems fine. Local man plans to make first use of oven in new stove unit later tonight.

The patriarchy runs a very low level process - very close to the society OS. For instance, the gender-policing service was up the other day, when the neighbor girl informed the Local Child that their Male Parent Unit was weird for making clothing for Local Child. Local Child was sad, until MPU reminded them of all the other people who thought it was cool. No conscious intervention by the patriarchy programming team was necessary.

Elliott Mason @81 said a lot of what I was thinking.

In my mind, who does all the real work does not determine whether a system is a matriarchy or a patriarchy, but rather who makes the decisions and who benefits. I could agree that certain subcultures have a crypto-matriarchy, especially when you think in terms of private, personal power instead of public, official power, but I think the society as a whole is still working from a patriarchal structure.

"Throwing like a girl" is not just a denigration of men who do it, or even a way of saying that girls are lesser, it's also a way of defining femaleness. Girls going through puberty are trying to figure out who they are and who they want to be, and if they want to be a "girl" and are told that girls run a certain way, then by god that's what they're going to do.

There's also the issue of trying harder when you're told you should be able to do something, and giving up faster when you're told it's hopeless. My parents are very into the arts and humanities, and so I got a lot of encouragement for activities that fit that mold. Recently I discovered that I do actually like mathy stuff, it's just that I was told my talents lay elsewhere so I never really tried to do more than the minimum to get by in school.

I believe very strongly that language shapes our reality. What we tell each other about men and women builds a framework for how we think men and women should act, and thus how we think WE should be acting. Changing what we say will eventually change what we think we should do.

I wear a fedora (it's a panama) because I like it, and because it keeps the sun off my head and the glare out of my eyes. I do not, unlike a large number of young men, confuse it with a trilby. I also own a trilby (which is also a jippy-jappa hat), and much prefer the fedora simply because it has a wider brim (though the trilby is snappier). Please do not call me a fedora.

An old friend has accused me of being a planter even though I don't own a plantation (my younger brother having sold off the family estate and great house I certainly haven't even got pretensions at being a pen-keeper).

89
At least what I was told by my parents (and my father's parents) was more like 'you can be whatever you want to be: go for it!' It probably helped that my mother and my grandmother had both had very non-traditional jobs during WW2.

keranih @ 73

I'm dead serious about matriarchy. I don't ever recall being told I could not do something because of my gender by any male boss, mentor, or relative.

Perhaps you could have the courtesy of believing those of us who had exactly this experience. Over and over and over again. And who see "throw like a girl" as exactly the sort of sexist denigration that is used deliberately to "keep girls in their place" and remind them that they are branded with incompetence even when they're more competent than the boys.

So you have never in your life been discriminated against or oppressed by a man due to your gender. I'm happy for you. Seriously. But accept that yours is far from a universal experience. And that by arguing against the experienced reality of other women, you risk joining the very alternative framing that you describe: the women who enforce misogynistic attitudes.

keranih @ 73

I'm puzzled. You are clearly intelligent, and well read, but you make statements such as women enforcing social norms means it's not a patriarchy. Or that a drumbeat of voices telling girls that they are less than boys won't have any effect if you just tell them sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.

I see ample evidence that a system of oppression is expressed throughout a culture, not just by the elite, and that stopping the negative messages is as important as telling those who are put down to "buck up". Are these novel ideas to you?

"Throwing like a girl": When I was in junior high track, one of the instructors pointed out that boys were more likely to screw up their arms doing shot-put than girls were, as they naturally went to a throwing motion that is used for balls. Very bad idea when said "ball" is a ten-pound shot. I'm not sure if that points to physiological differences between the genders or to training gaps.

Also note that while I haven't learned proper throwing technique, my husband has summed up the differences between "throwing like a girl" (aka "untrained") and proper throwing: Someone who is untaught will tend to face the target straight on, while someone who is using proper technique will have the arm with the ball back, the other shoulder pointing at the target, and be almost perpendicular. When I spent a summer teaching archery, in fact, that was the first lesson, because the stance is very similar.

One thing sticks in my mind suddenly; The experience of being told the brisk walk I took to school looked like "marching". Because instead of thinking "Oh, no, I'm unfeminine" and correcting, I thought, "oh, good, that means I'm doing it right." March, to me, didn't just mean "The way armies move", because I understood that part of why armies marched, outside the excesses of parades, was training for getting places fast, efficient, and in a group. And I wanted to do two out of three of those.

And it says something that the word stuck in my mind for 25 years after.

(Unlike EVERY army in recent fantasy films, whose march is a most remarkably noisy, slow, and inefficient form designed to tire out the soldiers - and doesn't break over bridges)

Open thread: Apparently, big red buttons are irresistible.

94
Ah, now I understand throwing a little better. (A semester of archery taught me the proper stance.) I wish they'd done that in grade school.

Anybody else watching "Halt and Catch Fire"? Me, I'm expecting to nominate it for next year's Hugos.

The Atlantic website has this appreciation of Penny Dreadful.

Elliot Mason at 17: that adult trike is very attractive. I am curious -- what made you choose that one, as opposed to ones made by Schwinn, Torker, Summit...?

@Lizzy L: It's the one offered for sale near my house on Craigslist. :-> I would prefer one with a bucket-shaped holder on the front (because it would interfere less with having the kid hanging off the back of the bike/using panniers as well/a kid seat on the panniers), but all of those are muuuuuch more expensive. And never show up used around here.

Also, we discovered after the fact that the Sun Atlas model supports a 250lb load on the cargo deck (plus up to 270lbs of rider), whereas most of the other models you mention have a total limit for all the weight on the bike of something like 270lbs. Their back 'cargo' bins are mostly intended for tiny light stuff, like shoving a backpack under the seat. The Torker and Schwinn in particular have very light-weight, easily bent back baskets (to discourage you from putting anything heavy in them).

keranih @ 80: Yeah, the lyric and the song aren't particularly queer. A lot of coming out stories aren't.

And a lot of non-Southerners mistake that title as being meant literally. Michael Stipe said this: "In the South, in Georgia, where we live, if you say that you're 'Losing your religion' basically means that you're at the end of your rope, or that you've had it, you're fed up." Given that, there are still a lot of different interpretations of what that song means. I won't say just one is right, but the video has so much homoerotic content, and he wasn't yet out, so.

And the lyric of "Nightswimming" is very open to multiple interpretations, but again, I think the video lends itself to mine in particular. Or maybe I'm just reading them way they seem right to me.

I think reading the lyric/text is the wrong way to enter.

I've heard this before. People who "have religion" are people who always behave properly (a pretty bizarre idiom in itself). IIUC, a correct usage would be "That woman jostled me so hard that I lost my religion and cussed at her."

keranih@74: "But in a world where we still resort to force, weapons, and fists as conflict mechanisms, I'll take the mocking over the violence, and better mocking over worse."

They are not separate. The mocking first, then if that doesn't work, the more intense measures, including ostracism and violence.

Mocking vs. violence

I've never known a case where the mocking didn't escalate as far as the social setting permitted.

It's not a "vs.".

John A Arkansawyer @102 -

Oh, no, I get that, from way back (the meaning of the phrase). And blame it on my perspective, but that video doesn't hit any homoerotic (or really many erotic-of-any-kind) buttons for me.

It's a guy - an artist - under great creative pressure, slowly going mad. He imagines Icarus, but this time it is the father who falls. He imagines people who come in and out of his empty room and stand in the corners and don't say anything. He sees martyered saints and temptresses. He's angry, upset, and feels abandoned by friends. He imagines himself as Icarus's father, betrayed by his creation and tortured by ordinary humans who don't understand him. And he imagines a, a, a poetry factory where machinists build a set of wings, but they as sterile and useless as anything the Soviet Union created. And then he is back in his empty, cold, leaking barn, struggling with his demons.

What I'm saying is, that doesn't work for me as a 'self-discovery song'. Either by itself or as a video. It might work very well for other people that way. If so, I wish you luck with it.

Mocking is violence.

Re @31, @38, and other posts about America/Amerigo/etc.:

I don't get why anyone would consider this a mystery; the Amerigo --> America mapping is quite well documented in historical records. I think people like to invent contrarian theories just to have something to argue about. This is like the theories that Cardini didn't invent the Caesar Salad, isn't it? Or the thing about Shakespeare?

The TL;DR version: Vespucci was a failed explorer (he lost 75% of his crew discovering Guyana and lost it to the British), but a good mapmaker. His maps became extremely popular with a group of well-funded German intellectuals who produced and published the first folio maps of the New World. They credited him by putting a Latinization of his first name onto the continents (apparently Vespucci is hard to pronounce in German). All of this was extensively documented by everyone involved (I read it in a history of less successful 16th century explorers).

I presume by mocking we're not talking about the kind that Jon Stewart or other satirists practice.

Satirists, by definition, are punching up.

Michael at #87 I may be Just a Girl, but I know enough to disconnect Stove Unit before attempting to move Stove Unit (or any other Unit, really). I take it the non-girls who were performing "maintenance" on your apartment didn't know as much.

Thanks, EM at 101. Appreciate it.

Speaking very briefly on the patriarchy vs matriarchy point ( @69, 80, 88, 89, etc) - it is possible that I am not using the term as many here are. But when one stretches "partriarcy" to mean "the modern US culture and the Pashto culture and Confucicianism and Italy and everything else human" it really loses its ability to be used as a word. I continue to use it to mean "a male controlled society" - which the USA is very far from being.

Janara @ 85, Heather @ 92, etc: The close reader may note that I never said that I did not encounter some (or many) men who tried to put limits on my horizon. I have had co-workers and subordinates and casual aquaint and the boyfriend or two who have tried. I do not doubt any woman who tells me they have run into this.

"Male people try to limit you" however, is not the defining feature of a patriarchy. If the US culture really was a patriachy, and we really intended to make changes, and changes could be made via 'this-is-why-you-suck-and-should-feel-bad lectures' - why on earth is this message being produced by a feminine hygeine company? Seriously, who do they think is listening?

And again I draw your attention to the cultural use of "to [verb] like a girl" - it is a piece of mockery aimed at boys, because of the crap way that girls (stereotypically) [verb] badly. No one says "you dance like a girl!" "you cook like a girl!" "You study like a girl!" - these are not effective mockery because they are meaningless - girls (and women) excell here. I'm with albatross @76 - this is a thing because (some) girls [verb] badly. Changing the phrase is not going to change the poor performance that underlies the idea.

If we're concerned about mockery, however, we need to address the mockery of our boys as well. Which would need examining the reaction of our boys to mockery, and perhaps how it differs from the reaction of girls.

If we're just concerned about our girls being hurt by this, I have two thoughts.

Firstly, throwing "like a girl" is bad. No one should do it. Girls need to be taught how to effectively move. If no girls threw like a limp noodle, "throw like a girl" would be a stupid phrase that no one used.

Secondly - both our girls and our boys will be mocked. They live among humans, this happens. It sucks, but so do many parts of life.

Learning to discount the remarks of people whose opinions we do not value while still letting them speak is a vital part of becoming an adult person. (As albatross @84 notes, it's part of the American heritage.)

Which brings me to Steve C. @109's point - I suppose Jon Stewart and Stephen Colburn - not to mention Chris Rock, Jeff Foxworthy and half a thousand other comedians currently out of work in LA - should turn themselves in for charges of violent assault.

(And, oh - the idea that anyone mocking a female is always "punching down"? Check your assumptions, please. There's a coatrack by the door.)

Mockery is one of the tools the monkey tribe has in its tool box. It is not my favorite, and I tend to think of it as inferior most of the time to reason and logic and love. But it is better than physical or emotional violence.

If it were not the case that mockery could be managed below the level of violence, then these clowns would not have been nearly as successful.

Our girls should know how to run fast and throw hard and block a punch effectively. They should know how to read a crowd that is about to explode into a riot and how to tell the difference between a friendly flirt and someone who intends to hurt them. They should know the difference between looking professional and looking sexy. They should know how to counter a logical argument, a lie, and a taunt.

As Elliot Manson @81 points out - when we don't teach our girls this, we are failing them.

They should know how to fall and get up and fall again and get up again. They should know that their primary purpose in this world is not their own advancement. They should know that just standing up for themselves isn't enough, that they have to look out for those weaker and less able than themselves.

And if they aren't learning those things, it's not going to be fixed by erasing "like a girl" from the English language. It'll come by changing the way we raise them, and how we teach them to become women.

Which brings me all the way back to janetl @93 - thank you for saying that I seem intelligent and wellread, I like to think I am. It has seemed to me to be the general custom that various sorts of intelligent and wellread people could have different views on different things that they have read, and so come to different conclusions.

keranih @113, I think you're using the hard definition of patriarchy, and so you're missing the angle of men being the (default) privileged class, or thinking that they are.

I've done and said a few embarrassing things that, in retrospect, could have a lot to do with default privilege. And I hear of stuff which is just plain stupid that still happens. And it likely needs places like this to remind me that it still happens.

I've been browsing the lyrical images of the invisible one, who posts most often on the Dysfunctional Families thread. You can get the site by clicking her name, should you mislay this link and want to revisit.

I was stopped short at 8 June 2014 figuring out what the objects could possibly be. Fishing tackle? - misled by what looked like dry fly bits.

Enlarged it. Ha!!! Toxophilites* in the area!

*one of my favorite misleading terms, coined by Roger Ascham in 1545 according to Wiki.

Open threadiness: Congratulations to Tor Books on another win at the Locus Awards for Best Publisher!

How to throw like a girl

keranih 113: I continue to use it to mean "a male controlled society" - which the USA is very far from being.

*jawdrop*

I see the USA as being very largely male-controlled and male-dominated, with the privileged class being male (specifically WHITE male), and most social structures designed to benefit men at the expense of women (or sometimes to benefit a few men at the expense of all other men and all women).

It is less male-dominated than it used to be. It is less male-dominated than Saudi Arabia. It is still largely male-dominated.

I cannot understand how anyone who has lived in the USA for a lifetime, or even for a few years, can possibly honestly believe that the USA is not a "male-controlled society." Your honesty I'm willing to assume; but that leaves me completely boggled.

Xopher @118: I am reminded of exchanges on Facebook where my dad attacks me for talking about the ecological issues we need to handle in the US by arguing that China is an ecological hell-hole so why am I complaining ...

I learned which things I wasn't supposed to do or be good at without anyone explicitly telling me. Cars and guns were For Boys and I shouldn't be interested in them, even when I was; Dad was really puzzled when I said I was interested in going shooting because I had never asked, only waited to be invited. Boys were the fastest. Boys were the strongest. Boys played soccer and girls weren't interested in it. Girls were supposed to be grossed out by boys and vice versa. All boys were bad. And no child in the world ate vegetables voluntarily.

When that changed, I became freakish. No one told me when the rules changed because no one had told me the rules, period. I learned them the same way I learned slang or playground rhymes.

"Like a girl" teaches girls how they're supposed to be. It not only excuses lack of skill-- if you're a girl and you throw like that, what do you expect?-- it makes it clear who throws right.

One year in junior high I had a very nice older gym teacher, one of only two gym teachers in K-12 who didn't sneer at me when I was in pain (Osgood-Schlatter's, undiagnosed therefore untreated for years because I was obvs. making it up) or get angry at me because I wasn't athletic (all hail the Great God Basketball and His son Track & Field). This teacher told us that we had to throw "like girls" because, due to our naturally lower centers of balance, we could put more of the force of our bodies into underhand throwing per pound of muscle on bone, while we tended to have less muscle to throw with. So we did a lot of drills putting our whole bodies into our underhand throws. Meanwhile, he assigned the male students exercises in keeping their balance that sometimes involved what looked a lot like a horse stance, because, he said, men tend to carry their weight higher and therefore are tippy.

On the thread concerning how a male-dominated society looks, or doesn't look:

Cockblocked by Redistribution: a pick-up artist in Denmark

This might seem a tangental contribution, but the way I see it, determining if a particular society is or isn't controlled by a specific group hinges on whether that group, generally can get what they want. Not only that, but also how generally can members of that group expect their sense of entitlement to be ratified by the society at large.

The take-away from this article is that the dedicated pick-up artist has a far easier time getting what he wants when the targets are made vulnerable by (fear of) poverty, expensive-to-treat medical conditions, et al.

Which, poor bunny (referring to the PUA trying to "review" the women of a country), he didn't get to do in Denmark.

Crazy(and well aware how many of her hopes and needs have been looked down upon as "feeling entitled", or luxuries allowed only after more "important" people have had their go - on the basis of her "special-interest", that of being a woman...)Soph

B. Durbin @96: “How much more can brave Cadet Stimpy take? … How can he possibly resist the maddening urge to eradicate history at the mere push of a single button? The beautiful, shiny button! The jolly, candy-like button! Will he hold out, folks? Can he hold out?"

HLN: Local woman engages in zombie-hunting, to generally positive results. A group of seven friends spent Saturday as the first annual Zombie-Eradication Day; played the board game Zombicide for several hours, then went to a laser-tag venue that offered a zombie theme. One travels through a large, mazelike "haunted house" type basement (dim lights; strobes; loud noises, fog machines, things jumping out at one -- all the sorts of things local woman usually *hates* -- armed with a "machine gun" (they said what type, but local woman is hopeless at weapon designations) with which to SHOOT the ZOMBIES. Worst score in the group was about 24 zombie kills with two bites (they "bite" if they get within a few feet without being shot); best score in the group, surprsingly, was local woman with 40 kills and one bite. (Nobody was entirely unbitten in the group, but we were assured that it took five bites for the zombie infection to set it.)

Odd how the eek-I'm-helpless-I-hate-it dynamic of a haunted house, which local woman dislikes intensely, changes when one can SHOOT BACK.

Local woman will do this again. In about a year. After the adrenaline has time to clear from her system.

The patriarchy is what allowed Santa and Rudolph's dad to put Rudolph down for being different while his mother and his girlfriend stand by helplessly. The alternative to the patriarchy turns out not to be a matriarchy, but the post-patriarchy, best examplified by Yukon Cornelius, who takes on the responsibility to make a home for those who don't fit, including Hermie the elf who wants to be a dentist.

We detest the Beatles.
Hate the Rolling Stones.
We like Obama
Because he uses drones.

We distrust George Lucas
Dislike all his clones.
We like Obama
Because he taps the phones.

(Just trying to exorcise a brainworm. This seemed the safest place.)

All day, we have been hearing the big-name musicians at Glastonbury on how they want to see Dolly Parton.

And then she hits the stage. Wow!

And there is a twitterstorm over whether she is miming.

Now, this isn't a crazy accusation. It's more common than you might think, it was once routine on Top of the Pops. But, with digital transmission of sound and picture, there can sometimes be different time delays in the process.

There were certainly timing glitches, and some of them might be in my my TV as the digital data stream is decoded. But that didn't look like miming to me. Machines and men both make mistakes, but they're different mistakes.

Some of the screeched tweets looked, at their core, to be more about Dolly Parton being a successful woman.

If I wanted to make fabric/embroidered book covers, is there a source of book blocks with plain, not-for-primetime covers that would be embellishable? I'm thinking of something like notebook refills, only not spiral-bound.

I don't think I'm explaining this well, but I know there are people here who do bookbinding so I figure it might be a place to start.

Dave Bell @ 128: Also, if they can prove she's faking her voice, then they can say she really got in on big boobs and big hair. It's irrelevant that she's had those same pipes for what, a 40-year career? Certainly since before they could do the sort of vocal correction they can do now in a recording studio - and people listening to a song aren't looking at the body.

Never mind the question of whether not miming live once actually constitutes a valid refutation of that whole rest of her career. (The reason it was an issue for a pop teen idol band is that they *don't* have that whole career behind them, and often never will.)

Not a country fan, but I still have a lot of respect for Ms. Parton and especially for her voice.

(Vitas, pop idol in Russia, at one point adopted a habit of pulling the mike away from his mouth in mid song to prove to naysayers that he's really delivering that same performance on that stage at that moment. Which I hated because I don't exactly want the awesome vocals to blink out periodically. The reasons I would want to see a life performance of something I already have recorded generally assume there won't be a *decline* in musicality.)

keranih:

"mockery is...better than physical or emotional violence." My answer? Mockery IS emotional violence. I'm still getting over the emotional damage done to me as a child by mockery, bullying and other emotional violence.

I think "words can never hurt you" is an awful thing to say to a child who has just been verbally mocked or bullied and hurt by it. It is telling the child that if they have been hurt it is their own fault that they are hurt, not the fault of the bully. It is victim blaming and it is very damaging.

If American, British etc. civilisation is not a patriachy, not male-dominated, then why do women get paid less than men, listened to less than men? Why are women not making up 50% of politicians, company CEOs and board members, etc. etc.? "Throw like a girl" and "run like a girl" are used as mockery because of the overwhelming, male-dominated, cultural/societal assumption that girls, and their abilities, are lesser than those of their male counterparts in all physical settings. Yes, we (general we) should be teaching our daughters to run properly, throw properly, fix cars etc. etc., and that girls/women can do such things - and do them well - not that lacking a Y chromosome means that we should be, and want to be, weak and helpless. Part of that process includes removing the verbal/textual reinforcement of that helplessness which is included in the "...like a girl" meme. Discouraging the use of the term is not, in and of itself, sufficient: but its part of the process

Lila said it way upthread, but I think it needs to be said again:

I want people to stop saying "You do [x] like a girl" to mean You do [x] like someone who's never been trained to do [x] for the same reason I want people to stop saying "That's so gay" to mean "That's stupid."

Using identity-words as insults is bigoted.

While I don't want to dismiss the extent to which "you throw like a girl" teaches girls that they are not expected to do well at throwing, I would like to shine an equally bright light on how "you throw like a girl" teaches everyone that being like a girl is BAD.

I always want to see the end of "girly" as an insult, and feminized slurs used as particularly degrading insults for men. I want who and what I am to stop being used as an insult.

I also want the end of "like a man" being used as a general compliment/aspiration ("Take it like a man!" "Man up!") for the same reason we all, I hope, can agree that those remaining pockets where "mighty white of you" is still in use as an unironic compliment need to cut it the hell out.

*applauds Nicole*

Well said, ma'am, well said.

Also, 'Christian' to mean "morally upright." Don't hear that much anymore, but it used to be pretty common. I never did have the experience of having a POC tell me that I or something I did was "Christian," but I had my reply ready: "White of you to say so."

I'm not sure I would have had the guts, and these days I have other reasons to keep that behind my teeth (like saying racist things is racist even if they're meant ironically), so I doubt this particular exchange will ever occur in my actual life. Perhaps I'll put it in a story.

Xopher @ 133: I was once very, very tempted to use the phrase sarcastically in a feedback thread on one of those "get yer BBC stuff here now so you don't live in fear of Torchwood spoilers before you can legitimately spend money on it" sites (i.e. a torrent site). The conversation would have gone something like this:

Them: I think it's pretty good despite all that Captain Jack Harkness gay crap.

Me: Gee, that's mighty white of you.

I refrained for reasons much like yours: racist things are racist, even if meant ironically; being all clever isn't worth risking hurting someone with the shrapnel.

(As Scalzi tells us, the failure state for "clever" is asshole.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT AND OPEN THREADY.

HLN: Area women spends Friday night at a roller disco, Saturday afternoon/evening competing in a roller derby bout, Saturday night dancing like there's no tomorrow at the bout afterparty, Sunday morning reassembling roller derby track at roller derby practice location, and Sunday afternoon taking her annual Women's Flat Track Derby Association minimum skills assessment. Area woman returns home Sunday evening, remembers that 1. Pasta with Sausage is delicious, and 2. there is a ridiculous amount of sausage in the freezer.

"Mmm," area woman is heard to murmur. "Recovery pasta."

If you're not familiar with the latest Facebook outrage, here's a pretty good summary. I am furious about this, and went to the Feedback page for PNAS¹ to write the following:

=====

I am writing to express my deep displeasure with your decision to publish "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks" (Kramer, Guillory, and Hancock).

These researchers did not obtain informed consent consistent with the Declaration of Helsinki², as your publication allegedly requires. The only reference to "informed consent" in the paper is to the Facebook User Agreement's authorization of data collection and usage for research; this is dubious at best, and does not even begin to address the issue of consent for the emotional manipulation (in fact, calling it emotional abuse would not be excessive) that some of the subjects underwent.

As someone who uses Facebook in English, I may very well be one of the subjects of this abusive and unethical study. I would never have consented to have my feed filtered in the way the study describes, much less to have it filtered with the intent of deliberately manipulating my emotional state. The filtering may be covered by the UA (I'm not an expert, and like virtually everyone do not read and reread the UA), but I feel confident that "from time to time we may decide to manipulate your emotions to make you happy or sad as we see fit" is NOT included there.

I have written to the two university professors involved in this study, asking for their IRB³ authorizations and ccing their respective IRBs. I'm not going to bother writing to Kramer, since he works for Facebook and I assume he has nothing I would recognize as ethics.

I urge you to retract this paper for consent noncompliance. The editor should be ashamed; the two university professors should be censured by their respective institutions. But the only thing you can do is retract the paper and look very carefully at any further submissions from these researchers.

Thank you,
[my legal name]
_________
¹Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, a prestigious scientific journal

²An international accord setting out standards of informed consent wrt experiments on human subjects

³Institutional Review Board, in charge of ethical compliance for human research

(Footnotes not in what I sent them, obviously. I didn't know these terms and structures until I was helped by a member of this community who is also a researcher using human subjects, and whose standards for informed consent are very strict indeed.)

Only one of them is actually a university professor. The other is a postdoc, but I didn't realize that until I'd sent the feedback.

Power & girls, generally:

The Fortune 500 CEO list has 4% women, 1% minority per this link .

The Senate is 20% female and 7% minority, the House is 19% female and about 20% minority if I'm doing the math right on this report. I didn't count to see how many minorities are also female; I saw a list and by eye it was more than 20%, less than 50%.

I did this math once before, was appalled by the numbers and forgot the specifics; please let me know if I made any obvious mistakes.

Anyway, my point is that, generally, white men control the money in the US; white men make the laws.

It could be just lag; very few CEO's or Congresspeople are under 50, and 30 years ago the world was different . It doesn't feel like lag to me, but I have no mathematical justification for that statement.

De-lurking to say a big thank you to the community ...

Thanks to the extensive discussion of the Hugo awards in the various threads after the nominees came out, I decided to get a supporting membership and actually vote. I've now read enough* to vote in the fiction categories and I'm in the middle of the Campbell nominees now. I'm having trouble choosing for Fancast and Fan Writer, but I'll figure that out soon.

Anyway, my point was that I've been really enjoying this experience** and it's thanks to this community. So thanks!

* Following the John Scalzi/Jo Walton method of reading enough of every work so that I feel comfortable voting.

** Except the "sad puppy" slate, which is pretty mediocre.

#113, keranih: The close reader may note that I never said that I did not encounter some (or many) men who tried to put limits on my horizon.

I re-read, closely. You earlier had said:

I don't ever recall being told I could not do something because of my gender by any male boss, mentor, or relative.

So do I understand from this that you distinguish being told explicitly "you can't do that" from other types of "put[ting] limits on [your] horizon"?

The close reader may have noticed that I used the word "erodes" in my earlier post. You don't have to explicitly tell a person "you can't do that" when they're surrounded by the constant wearing drip of "like a girl", "be careful!", "don't get dirty", "put that down", "why don't you do [x] instead?", "wouldn't you rather" from all directions, rather like the video I linked to showed. I find that explicitly being told that I can't do something is much easier to dismiss (especially now that stuff *that* blatantly sexist is relatively rare) because hey look, I'm doing that, they don't know what they're talking about and can safely be ignored. The drip drip drip, though; no one of those statements is by itself enough to push back on, and they're often presented in a caring way, especially "be careful" or the pseudo-compliments.

A friend of mine signed up for welding in high school. When she showed up for the first class, the shop teacher never explicitly said "no girls allowed" or "you can't do that", he immediately asked if she had made a mistake and had intended to sign up for the jewelry making class. There was no need to *say* she didn't belong, that was assumed and unstated and he went straight to looking for what mistake she had made to end up in a place she obviously didn't belong.

Several boys asked me if I was lost and many more stared at me, confused, when I showed up for my high school electronics class, in the shop wing. That was an entire wing of the school that girls just didn't go to. They never said directly that I couldn't be there, because it was assumed and unstated that I had to have made a mistake to end up in a place I obviously didn't belong.

How many girls don't even think of signing up for welding, electronics, or other shop classes, because that's a boy thing and not for them, and any thought that they might like to try it got eroded away long before? No, never explicitly told "girls can't weld", and yet my friend and I were the only girls in our respective classes.

Girls need to be taught how to effectively move. If no girls threw like a limp noodle, "throw like a girl" would be a stupid phrase that no one used.

Ever heard of a positive feedback loop?

Lots of girls throw poorly because they were never taught how to throw properly, while lots of boys are taught and thus can throw properly. "Throw like a girl" is a descriptor of how many girls throw, even though the actual connection is lack of training.

"Throw like a girl" describes how girls typically throw, so if a boy throws poorly he's trained to throw properly, but if a girl throws poorly, well, that's how girls throw.

So, lots of girls throw poorly because they were never taught how to throw properly...

While being taught to throw, (gym class maybe? the one that both boys and girls attend from early elementary and is supposed to teach basic physical skills, and has been around for how long?) there is still that expectation and insult that girls throw poorly, and girls who are growing up and learning to define themselves take in "girls do x" from all directions -- and maybe put less effort in, or give up sooner, when being taught to throw properly, saying or thinking "oh, I just can't do that, I'm just not good at that". Discourage the language everywhere as well, and learning can proceed with less hindrance. Stereotype threat is a real thing.

None of this is to say that girls are some sort of special delicate creature that needs to be coddled; boys at the same age are also learning to define themselves, and see "like a girl" used as the worst insult and meaning weak and ineffective. That can lead boys to scorn everything that girls like or do as being weak and useless, including boys who like those things, not do things they might be interested in because they're "girly" things, and reject girls who like "boy" things as not actually being interested in those things.

(And then there's all the other genders, orientations, and presentations, which are generally not recognized. Excepting "gay" as "girly" and therefore to be avoided and mocked.)

Claiming that only explicitly stated "you can't do that" is the problem is erasing the majority of the problem.

Why a feminine hygiene company? Why not?

The "don't get your dress dirty" video I linked was by Verizon. Why a communications company? Who cares?

The message is good. I don't care if they're doing it for PR, they're doing it, without relying on damaging stereotypes, and they have the money to get it done well and get it seen.

Xopher @135: there's a huge difference between agreeing to have one's information used for various purposes, and agreeing to be a research subject. I expect the people who signed off on that paper will be in very real trouble -- at least, I hope they will!

keranih seems to be using matriarchy: much social power actually wielded* by women.

Nearly everyone else seems to be using patriarchy: primary benefactors of social power are men.

At least this is what I am seeing, and it might be a source of some of the conflict, especially since I am prepared to grant both those statements as probably true.

*particularly on a day-to-day low-stakes level, since women do most of the emotional work of society, and also most of the child-raising

Tom, I'm doing my part to ensure that they do.

The issue of "you throw like a girl" being an insult has little or nothing to do with any biological differences. The issue is that "like a girl" is used as a synonym for WRONG. And it carries the further connotation that being female/feminine is also WRONG. That's why changing the language will inevitably have an effect on the culture.

John A., #70: we've also come to massively overvalue the ability of language to cause social change

I can't agree with this, Just as the most obvious example that springs to mind -- how fast did the social climate start changing when someone reframed "gay marriage" as "marriage EQUALITY"? That was absolutely brilliant, because it changed the focus of the discussion from "gays" to "equal rights," and a lot of people started thinking about it differently once it was put that way.

Words MATTER, more than most people realize.

keranih, #73: "Sticks and stones..." is a bully's best friend. Because words DO have power, they DO hurt, and that's a Get Out Of Jail Free card for saying the most vicious, hurtful things. "Oh, you were hurt by this thing that I said with the specific intention of hurting you? Well, it's YOUR OWN FAULT and I haven't done anything wrong!"

Fuck that shit, sideways with a cactus. It's the other end of the rape issue; as long as we focus on telling the victims instead of the predators what they did wrong, nothing will ever change.

(FYI, I consider bullying and rape to be on the same spectrum of behavior, with a common root of "hurting someone because you can". It's just expressed differently, and sometimes rape IS bullying, especially male-on-male rape.)

Sandy, #137: Also, remember the 15% phenomenon -- in a mixed-gender classroom environment, if the women contribute more than 15% of the class discussion, they will be perceived by both genders as "dominating" the discussion. Similarly, I'm quite sure that there are a number of Senators who look around the chamber as it is presently constituted and think, "My god, just look at all these women!" When you're used to a given proportion of any type of person in a social situation, and suddenly find yourself in a place where the proportions are different... well, it takes some getting used to even if you don't have a problem with the proportions changing.

janra, #139: ObXKCD.

How many of us have ever been appalled by the way "kids these days" frequently can't do mental math (making change, etc.)? My partner and I have both occasionally had surprised store clerks ask how we DO that? He used to answer with, "It's easy where I come from," and when the clerk asked him where that was, he would say, "The past." OTOH, I tend to respond with, "It's not hard. You could do it too, if anyone had ever bothered to teach you how." The analogy, I trust, is sufficiently obvious as not to need browbeating.

On the Facebook story, what I am seeing in the news media is an apparent ignorance of the expected ethical standards. It's just a storm of protests, not questions about whether Facebook met the ethical standards expected of such research.

There's a pattern there, a sort of acquiesence to power. Outfits like Facebook can set their own rules, and we just have to accept it. Nobody is bothered whether there is any legal framework or other external context.

That's a rather obvious flaw in other areas. It's settled law that a contract can't be enforced in breach of statute law but companies are always pushing the limits.

Lee @ 143: I can't agree with this, Just as the most obvious example that springs to mind -- how fast did the social climate start changing when someone reframed "gay marriage" as "marriage EQUALITY"? That was absolutely brilliant, because it changed the focus of the discussion from "gays" to "equal rights," and a lot of people started thinking about it differently once it was put that way

That's one way of viewing it, which ignores the long years of struggle that came before and continue on.

I've been reading Jo Becker's risible, pernicious Forcing the Spring and trying to review it. It's so disheartening.

At several panels at WisCon it was wondered what the next Big Fight we should be mobilizing for on the sexual-and-gender-minority rights front, is. I had to miss the Radical Queer Agenda panel (dangit; I was on something scheduled against it) and I bet they came up with some good stuff.

Something that's been BEING fought, under the table, and is quietly being won with hardly any public/media notice is health insurance coverage for transition-related procedures.

First Obamacare redefined "being transsexual" as not a pre-existing condition that can prevent you from being covered at ALL. Then the San Francisco municipal health plan decided to explicitly cover all transition-related surgeries, even above-the-neck ones ... and found in two years of covering it (for a population with probably a notably higher proportion of people needing that coverage than will be generally true) that it was no more expensive, actuarially, than covering gall bladder surgery. They didn't even have to raise their premiums.

Just this month, Medicaid has removed its blanket ban on transition-related expenses. Several states have changed their insurance regulations to comply with Medicaid's position (transition care is now no longer a blanket no -- which means in practice almost certainly hormones are covered if prescribed in accordance with HBIGDA, and who knows on surgeries).

Two years ago, only 20 nationwide-sized employers covered transition care in their company plans. Now over 60 do.

What a brave new world it shall be when any trans person with half-decent insurance coverage can be certain their much-needed care will be COVERED, and no longer require independent fund-raising of $25-125K!

And yet, this isn't the big new "We need to move the Overton window and hold marches for it" issue, because it's chugged nicely along and is half-done (if not in the home stretch yet).

I haven't encountered a matriarchy; I have run into a bunch of Aunt Toms.
In better news...
HLN: Area pontist welcomes a new bridge.
It's a double bascule span in the South Park district of Pugetropolis, south of Seattle. I have a great big old soft spot for bridges that lift, but also the people of that 'hood had been waiting a lot longer than they should have had to. The old bridge was on its last abutments, so much so that my friend would not drive on it at all, and the powers that be demolished it before even starting work on the replacement--something they never would have done in Bellevue. It is hoped by me and everyone else that the neighborhood will recover.
Yesterday it was just people swarming all over the thing, but road traffic is scheduled to start in 14 minutes...

The Supreme Court has found in favor of Hobby Lobby, and "closely held" corporations can get an exemption on religious grounds from the Affordable Care Act requirement that contraception be covered. The decision explicitly states that this only applies to contraception, and a company cannot exclude other coverage that some religions oppose, such as blood transfusions. I believe that the decision doesn't actually say "because, women".

"Closely held" isn't just mom-and-pop stores. Some large corporations qualify.

Any claim that the USA isn't a patriarchy is either using that word incorrectly, or is just trying to stir up arguments.

In other news, they also decided against public employee unions. Sigh.

(Got an Internal Server Error trying to post earlier. Doing this to see if it will shake it loose.)

Xopher:

Did the researchers get this through an IRB? The researchers I know involved with human subjects (accessibiltiy and usability researchers) absolutely, positively won't go anywhere near an experiment involving humans till it's got IRB approval. I'd be very surprised to see the academic researchers involved willing to be involved without IRB approval.

One possibility: if the researchers don't normally deal with human subjects (especially if they're computer science or math types without much insititutional culture of human subjects research) then they may not have realized that human subjects research rules apply to stuff like this, rather than to stuff like drug trials or setting up a make-believe prison to see how the guard/inmate roles affect peoples' behavior[1].

[1] Don't do this--it doesn't end well. Nor is it exactly clear how meaningful the results were, since the guy who designed the experiment with a particular outcome in mind was directly involved in how they turned out.

Sad news -- one of the nicest people in the world has died. Per Robin Bailey, Frank M. Robinson, author, editor, gay activist and Nice Guy, has died -- no details yet.

janetl:

ISTM that the issue here is that the definition of "patriarchy" is not too clear to a lot of participants in the conversation. I'll admit, I'm one of them--I can't quite figure out what's meant by "patriarchy" in this context. Nor is it quite clear to me that everyone using the term here has the same meaning attached to it.

Patriarchy

crazysoph:

I'm not too convinced that Roosh's deep social analysis[1] of Denmark (and his failure to pick up many women in bars there) is likely to teach us much. I expect he's actually a pretty good source of information about how to pick up women in bars (at least non-Danish ones), since that's apparently what he spends all his time doing. But I doubt he's got any deeper insights into the larger society than the guy sitting next to you at the bus stop.

I think it's an easy mistake to make to give someone's arguments or words more weight because they're saying something you agree with. But really, this looks like GIGO.

[1] For some reason, a lot of pick up artists in the blogosphere self identify as conservatives. This leads to a lot of entertaining rationalization, since pretty much all conservative value systems teach that this kind of lifestyle is destructive to both self and society. It's not like spending your life chasing wine, women, and song (or getting laid as often as possible to keep score and somehow "win") is some kind of new innovation of the 21st century. Any middle-aged guy in ancient Rome would have recognized the type, and rolled his eyes.

It probably isn't good for my soul to wish certain members of the Supreme Court would peacefully shuffle off this mortal coil while Obama is still in a position to name their replacements.

Stefan Jones @155, do you really think that the House will let Obama name anyone, even should that happen?

148
On the union ruling: not as bad as it could have been.
On the contraceptive ruling: I'm not sure they realize the can of worms they just opened. Or maybe they do, and don't care.

Xopher, I just posted a comment on one story about the Facebook stuff that they should have gotten informed consent from everyone involved, and gotten approval for their project, and I don't think they did either one.

So... The Supreme Court sided with Hobby Lobby, which means they can withhold any health care need that goes against the owner's religious beliefs. You know, like contraception and abortion...

Somehow, I don't think this would be happening if some of the Supremes had been nominated by a Democrat, in spite of the oft-heard assetion there's no difference between the two paries.

I KEEP seeing people reacting to suggestions that change of language use could, or already has, effected a further change in a political or social concept as if the people saying so are saying it's the only way to cause social change, or the only thing that has had an effect. (In many cases, in the face of people explicitly saying "We can do BOTH")

Most recently: John A. Arkansawyer @ 145, I didn't see Lee ignore a lot of other aspects of the fight for marriage equality. I saw her saying she saw an additional particular bump when the words Gay marriage were replaced with marriage equality. And you know, so did I. Now, it may be that the human mind is invention a correlation because as well as pattern-matching creatures, we are notoriously pattern-inventing ones, (And as a further issue, we all know that even if there was a direct demonstrable correlation in time with a bump in the marriage rights battle, correlation does not prove causation, either.)

But to suggest that because we thought we saw a correlation and we do attribute power to those words, we believe it's either the only thing we noticed making a change or the only thing we advocate doing seems to miss the point.

(I also attribute most changed minds, including my own, to tireless efforts to campaign for the idea, a lot to efforts to normalize it, a lot to the visible results in places where it is legal, and some to seeing cultural icons and/or political representatives who've changed their minds publicly, especially those describing their changed mind as a desire for their own child's happiness)

I like keranih's idea of teaching all kids to throw properly, including the non-sporty boys who get the brunt of the insult thrown at them and the girls of all kinds who get the back end of being the insult. But I ALSO like the idea sie is protesting against, of trying to change the language so the assumption that girls are bad because they are girls, not because they are untrained, gets far less reinforcement.

And I don't see *Anyone* advocating FOR the language change saying it's all you need to commit the change. They're saying it's a relevant piece, in the face of people who are saying that it doesn't matter, all that could possibly matter is the physical.

The two should run in tandem. They're a team. Teach all kids to throw, WHILE never using the gendered slur against those who don't get it right.

(And that the ads don't also say, "And BTW, why not teach your girls to throw with force and aim"? Probably don't because it's a short feel-good soundbyte. Soundbytes are notorious for promoting their one solution even if it's one among hundreds of things that need doing, something true of none of the people typing here.)

Lenora Rose @ 161: Language follows cultural work, not the other way around. It's easier on us not to believe that, so we do.

John A Arkansawyer: Cites, please?

And again, your first sentence presumes one must precede the other. I said they can work in tandem.

Pretty much all civil rights battles I've observed have spent time trying to make certain words or sentences far less socially acceptable, usually during the time they're working to secure other and more substantial rights. This is true for POC, for people with physical and mental disabilities, for QUILTTBAG communities, for feminism.

The switch in terms from Gay marriage to marriage equality came pretty late in this particular game, but the fight for equality is far from done. So unless you're asserting that the cultural work is finished and we've just got to tweak the language now (An assertion which is absurd in the face of the number of places without marriage equality) I fail to see evidence of your assertion.

Lee @143:

Just as the most obvious example that springs to mind -- how fast did the social climate start changing when someone reframed "gay marriage" as "marriage EQUALITY"? That was absolutely brilliant, because it changed the focus of the discussion from "gays" to "equal rights," and a lot of people started thinking about it differently once it was put that way.

I'm not sure you have the arrow of causation correct there. Marriage equality advocates have been using "marriage equality" for a long time; for a while it was "same-sex marriage", but advocates haven't said "gay marriage" at least since I started paying attention in about 2000. Part of what I think you're seeing is that as people become more sympathetic, they start using more sympathetic terminology. And, as intended, that terminology makes others more sympathetic as well - but it's not as though marriage equality advocates decided one day in 2010 to change how we talked about things.

Jacque @ 163: You first.

Lenora Rose @ 164: And they should. But language isn't the driver. What popular change in language has ever preceded the struggle it celebrated? How often is change in language deployed to disguise how little things have really changed?

Gently, people.

John A Arkansawyer @166: You first.

I have made no bald assertions that need supporting.

abi @ 167: Sorry. I could feel myself becoming grouchy.

All: Being in the South has given me a certain perspective on this. We've done an admirable job of patching our language up. All but the most unreconstructed have learned certain things to say and not to say.

Boiling underneath it all has been the same vile pit that Guy Grand built at the end of The Magic Christian. Different graffiti, different bait, but entirely the same stinky contents.

Most people didn't change. Most well-meaning people didn't change. The power didn't shift as we'd hoped it would. Now we're stuck with the results of an unproductive time doing things aimed more at disguising than ripping out root causes.

And here's a special bonus quiz question to bum you out: How many of the Koch brothers support gay marriage?

Wasn't there an ad campaign a while back that used "X like a girl" as a tagline--showing clips of women running, throwing, biking, etc in a clearly correct and effective manner? I have a pretty clear visual that goes with this memory. The take-away from it was of course that doing it "like a girl" was not a bad thing, that the women in question were "doing it like a girl" because they were girls, and doing it. (In fact, it may have even been a Nike ad campaign.)

John, you've been at the sharp end of a lot of conversations lately. I totally understand that you're on edge.

Which is one reason I'd like everyone to go a bit more gently in this conversation.

abi @ 171: I'm not as on edge as I have been, but your concern is still well-placed. Between trying to review that damn book--god, it's demoralizing--and digesting the latest Court decisions, I'm not a happy puppy. Even though I'm in an obscenely good mood mostly.

And some of the worst of the South is resurfacing. That's the sharp end that worries me. I don't think it'll be as bad as it could be, but the long Republican march through the government is designed to smash it up real good. I expect to be collateral damage.

And what people are offering up as resistance mostly isn't. They are well-meaning and it doesn't matter. Or maybe I'm just this guy:

"That's good thinking, Chuck--but syrup won't stop 'em. Next!"

Regarding the Facebook study, it's deeply problematic on several fronts (note that I'm coming at this as someone who works with human subjects for a living, and I have extremely strict views on what informed consent means).

Before we even get to their approach to informed consent (quick version: no, the Declaration of Helsinki doesn't let you claim advance consent for studies the way they want; standard consent procedure requires a hell of a lot more detail than "buried in the depths of their user agreement), their result is a joke to boot - their main results have a Cohen's d of 0.02 and 0.001 respectively, which means the only way they're significant is because of the size of their subject pool.

Frankly, I don't expect companies to have the same research ethics that I do (although, arguably, I probably should - the Declaration of Helsinki, which is the core document on the rights of subjects in biomedical research, doesn't make any distinction between academic researchers and corporate researchers, and it shouldn't - it's mostly aimed at biomedical, rather than psychological research anyway), but what galls me is that everyone on the paper should have known better. From what I've found, everyone involved has graduate training in psychological research, which mandates yearly training on subject protections, so either they've paid no attention to their training, or they think that it simply doesn't apply to them.

PNAS (the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), which, as I believe Xopher mentioned, is a seriously prestigious journal, also has its own requirements regarding human subjects - the following is Section VII of PNAS' own editorial guidelines:

"Research involving Human and Animal Participants and Clinical Trials must have been approved by the author's institutional review board. Authors must follow the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors' policy and deposit trial information and design into an accepted clinical trial registry before the onset of patient enrollment. Authors must include in the Methods section a brief statement identifying the institutional and/or licensing committee approving the experiments. For experiments involving human participants, authors must also include a statement confirming that informed consent was obtained from all participants. All experiments must have been conducted according to the principles expressed in the Declaration of Helsinki."

Now, there is an entire class of research that IRBs classify as "minimal risk" - which is to say that the IRB doesn't believe there's a meaningful risk of bodily harm to subjects if they participate. From what I've seen, particularly from Laurie Penny's New Statesman piece on this Facebook Can Manipulate Your Mood, the IRBs involved classified it as "minimal risk", which I can understand as a professional judgement. However, speaking as a researcher whose work is similarly classified, this classification does not permit researchers to ignore their responsibility to get proper informed consent for the experiment in question prior to subjects participating therein.

For point of comparison, all of my research can be pithily described as "sit in a little dark room and play the most boring video game ever (maybe while having your eyes tracked". The greatest risk to subjects in my research is boredom, and maybe eyestrain-induced headache. However, I'm still required to have my subjects read an actual consent form before they participate. I can't just say "well, you agreed to this in order to do this other thing," and the fact that Facebook's approach to consent seems to be exactly this infuriates me as a researcher.

Getting informed consent from subjects isn't optional, much as some portions of the field seem to think that it is. Or, more bluntly: get informed consent, because the zombies won't.

If someone was really twisted, I'd see about forcing an IRB audit, and making the researchers produce all 689,003 consents... and the ages of all participants, because a minor can't give informed consent without their guardian's agreement and countersignature.

AKICIML: Does anyone here happen to know the date for next year's Locus Awards (as in, were they in the program book or something), or could ask someone involved in the planning and get an actual answer (as in, they've ignored several e-mail queries)? Or at least provide a time frame in which it might be expected that someone could find out? My local con has a chance at snagging a really stellar GOH next year, but only if we don't conflict with the Locus Awards -- and we can't find out when those are going to be.

Laurie Penny's New Statesman piece on this Facebook Can Manipulate Your Mood

"When do we start to worry?"

When they made privacy "opt-in." And made it really hard to delete your account.

I haven't touched Facebook with a bargepole since.

Lee @174:

Lemme see what I can find out.

Lee @174:

According to the Editor-in-Chief*, there's nothing booked, but it will probably be the last weekend in June or thereabouts.

-----
* AKA my best friend from high school, because sometimes the world is a very small place.

Abi: I'll try and be gentler. If I fail, please do not hesitate to shut down this line of talk.

Carrie S @ 170: I remember that too. It's one of the ongoing debates what to do with language: try to get rid of it, or reclaim it? I don't think there's one answer. I tend to try and reduce usage in my own language choices, because I find the pitfalls of reclaiming to be much more likely to be hurtful (using a reclaimed phrase in front of someone who is still scarred by prior not-reclaimed usages) and absence rarely does explicit damage, either to any listener or to my own ability to express myself fully.

John A. Arkansawyer: You give some well thought out answers and some exceedingly important context once you answer with something that's more substantial and less brief. I don't usually encourage people to go on at length (though it's usually my crime), but it served you much better in this instance.

But language isn't the driver.

Agreed. But change in language still tends to happen before the social change is complete, and often does help continue the nudges in the right direction.

What popular change in language has ever preceded the struggle it celebrated?

None, as far as I know, although the course of change is rarely a clear-cut and easy road to follow, and it may very well precede the internal attitude change of many individuals. But a counter-question: What struggle has been *over* at the point at which people began to advocate a change of language (In spite of the extant examples, my mind keeps going to "retard" and how it seems like the idea of not calling people something that dehumanizing seemed to me to precede a significant amount of the integration and support programs now in place).

How often is change in language deployed to disguise how little things have really changed?

That does happen, too, which is why I understand why Keranih objected to *only* changing the language. As you say, there's definitely a veneer in the south. But the south has always, even on non-prejudicial matters, had a reputation as far as this non-southerner has understood it, of people with sweet polite language and much nastier undercurrents.

But I do believe that language influences outcome -- if in nothing else, it's often made clear with the antithesis of what some of us are advocating: this is where dog-whistles come in, and conservative reframing of concepts related to anti-racism, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, or anti-poverty, so that what the words they twist actually mean gets buried under unwanted associations.

Thank you, folks. That was the gear-change I was looking for: seeking to understand one another and our views rather than focusing on the forms of our postings. Conversation to enlighten, not to win.

(I love Making Light.)

abi, #177: Thanks. Unfortunately, it's the "or thereabouts" that's deadly, because our con's traditional date is the 4th weekend in June. We are already under some pressure to shift our date due to another con which heavily overlaps our draw area having moved to the end of June; if we had a second reason not to want that weekend, it would be a strong addition to the argument. Does your friend have any idea when the event will be booked?

Frank M. Robinson is dead.

He was a mentor and friend to me for many years.

Leonora:

ISTM that what's missing from your description is the costs involved with these sort of activist-pushed language changes. I think there are substantial costs, and the benefits look to me to be quite modest.

For example, one pretty obvious cost is that people having a discussion about some important topic have limited time and mental energy. Time spent "educating" people on the right words to use is time *not* spent on discussing anything that actually has to do with the issue you care about.

A more subtle cost is the way changing the acceptable terms in conversation puts older people at a big disadvantage. It's not at all uncommon to hear an older person toss out an outdated term while expressing a perfectly decent idea or position, and not too uncommon to see them get dinged for it. That isn't making the world a better place in any way at all. More broadly, this becomes a kind of ingroup/outgroup signaling, so that by using the wrong terms, you're "not one of us." That's some pretty powerful social machinery to invoke, and it can lead to some good outcomes, but also to some pretty unpleasant ones.

One pretty visible cost is ridicule. Lots and lots of people who aren't even particularly hostile to your cause can and will make jokes at your movement's expense. Because language-policing and self-conscious use of the latest euphemeisms is, in fact, ridiculous.

Lee @180:

I don't know when it'll be booked, but it's a very strong "last weekend in June" and a very weak "thereabouts". I'd take it as another argument to move.

Not using people's identity as an insult = "language-policing and self-conscious use of the latest euphemeisms" and "ridiculous"?

I have nothing to say that can even begin to connect with this.

Bowing out. See y'all on another thread sometime maybe.

albatross @182:
Because language-policing and self-conscious use of the latest euphemeisms is, in fact, ridiculous.

Is it? You make that sound like an objective, measurable fact, but I'm not convinced that it is.

Both terms you're using are strongly emotionally weighted. But what you call language policing can also be asking people not to call Xopher a f— and Fragano a w—. And if I'm self-conscious, can it not be because I'm being careful of the feelings of others, particularly those who are often overlooked?

And I'd maintain that those things are not inherently ridiculous. They're often ridiculed, but that's not the same thing.

Also:

Time spent "educating" people on the right words to use is time *not* spent on discussing anything that actually has to do with the issue you care about.

You assume that there is a disconnect between "anything that has to do with the issue you care about" and "the right words", but that's really not my experience of it at all. Very often, when people ask me to use a specific form of words, the request is followed by an explanation of why that form of words matters to them.

And the vast majority of the time, that explanation reduces to the same thing: putting the person first, recognizing them as a person rather than a stereotype/member of a group/incarnation of a term that's become an insult. And even in the cases where the vocabulary is not an immediate expression of that impulse, the request to use it is: see me. treat me as a person. call me by the name I choose.

And that has rather a lot to do with the issues they care about.

Of course there are exceptions; of course there are times that terms are used as bludgeons rather than bridges. But these blanket, normative statements casting your opinions as objective facts are, quite honestly, inappropriate for this conversation.

Dial it back. You're driving people away from the discussion, and you are not entitled to do that.

The costs aren't that high.
The benefits *are*.

Serge (and everyone), let's all make sure we're using relative rather than absolute statements. I think it would reduce the temperature of the discussion.

Sure. By the way, when I was growing up, I never had to suffer being called a nerd, even though I was a nerd, because the word had no equivalent in my native tongue.

Oh, and I didn't intend my earlier post to come across as an absolute. I blame my inclination toward extreme concision. That behing said, I do tend to find the cost of using a word that won't insult someone to be quite low. There may be exceptions, of course.

And by contrast, it took me a long time to figure out that I was a nerd (which in my context was a good thing), because I couldn't claim any of the (then specified) skillsets, such as math, engineering, or science. Not quite in the same league as "girls don't...", but of the same type.

I don't recall "nerd" or "geek" entering common use until the late 70's. I do remember harsher terms.

albatross 150: The Cornell IRB have issued this bullshit statement, which addresses only the data-access issue, and basically says that because Guillory and Hancock didn't have access to the data, they figured they weren't doing human research directly, and therefore the IRB didn't need to approve.

I got a note from their IRB including this press release. I wrote back to them telling them (in polite, academic-friendly language) that it was bullshit, and why.

While writing this I got an email from UCSF saying they're "gathering additional information," and to contact a particular person in Public Affairs for further questions. That's better, IMO, than the bullshit Cornell fed me.

And Benjamin Wolfe is the person I mentioned earlier who coached me on some of these issues.

albatross @ 182: I hve a longer answer on costs and supposed ridiculousness pending, but for now, i will choose to spend my very limited time on something that no doubt feels like a very minor matter of labelling to you, and makes the point almost as well:

My name is Lenora. Not Leonora or Lenore. It does actually bother me a fair bit when people get it wrong. Please try better next time.

Benjamin 173: I'm actually pretty glad their result is a joke; I'd had some concern that some people in the "negative" group might have been depressive and pushed over the edge by this, but it sounds like those fears are groundless.

If someone was really twisted, I'd see about forcing an IRB audit, and making the researchers produce all 689,003 consents... and the ages of all participants, because a minor can't give informed consent without their guardian's agreement and countersignature.

Or make Facebook pay them each $1000. That would serve them right.

@193 The Cornell statement is total cover your ass bureaucratic crap. My father taught social psychology there, and I can't imagine him or any of his contemporaries in those departments approving of that study. Some of them would be raising public hell over it.

Abi #185: If that word is the one I think it is, people calling me that are at risk of having me track them down and kill them. There is such a think as a deadly insult and that one's right up there with suggesting that my mother walks the streets.

I actually wrote something related to this last week, exploring reasons potentially underlying resistance to language-policing from a hopefully-sympathetic point of view. It does have some background reading (at minimum, the previous week's post), and some of my phrasing could be better, but here's where I end up:

If one source of resistance to "political correctness" is this feeling that all the rules are just arbitrarily imposed by people who presume to dictate your language... well, I don't know what would be a good way to address that, but I know what's not a good way: telling people that they're awful for using the wrong language, without ever addressing why they're using the wrong language.

As an example of a healthy interaction around use of language, during a conversation around Christmas my aunt used the word "tranny." I took her aside and said, "I know you mean well, but between last time you learned what words to use and now, that's become considered a slur." She asked "what should I use instead" and I told her, "trans person or trans man/woman, matched to how they look or are trying to look," and she thanked me and it was that simple.

albatross@182

Usually the "outdated term" was ALREADY insulting when the older person originally started using it. It's just that back then the targets of the term didn't dare object.

Dave Bell #128: Indeed, Ms. Parton has a long and distinguished record. I'd call the slowed-down "Jolene" one of her trophies, and solid proof of her chops.

If you tried to do that with the work of most singers, slowing it down by a third, it would highlight every flaw and slurred syllable. Her version still sounds like a dman good singer.

Michael I @199, not always, I don't think. At least, I learned "Oriental" at the exact same time I learned "Occidental" and had never understood it to be any sort of a slur; just a description of which hemisphere one lived in. Now I gather "Oriental" has become a slur; I was rather taken aback when I found this out but have tried very hard to adjust my language.

That said, yes, sometimes (often?) they *were* intended as slurs that one couldn't protest.

I don't think of these things as language policing. I consider them basic courtesy.

"Please don't call me 'X'."

"I'm sorry for saying that. What would you like me to call you?"

"Call me 'Y'."

"Okay, thanks for letting me know. I'll remember that."

Hm. Reading the Cornell statement, it actually makes some sense. The IRB is concerned with data collection at their institution, so arguably, with Gullory and Hancock having no involvement in data collection, and none of the data collection happening under Cornell auspices, the IRB wouldn't have been involved.

From my understanding (having never done human subjects work across institutions), the basic rule of IRBs is where will the data be collected. If there's a project going on across multiple institutions, I'd guess you'd want to have collaborators from different institutions listed on the applicable IRB protocol at the institution where the data is being collected, so they could legally have access to the data, but their home IRB wouldn't be involved.

So, assuming that the two researchers who were at Cornell weren't involved in any data collection, the Cornell IRB wouldn't have been involved. I can well believe that Gullory and Hancock's respective research at Cornell was minimal risk, and that's what seems to be getting reported by their IRB.

From an informed consent standpoint, the real issue is the conflict between Facebook's cavalier (and incorrect) approach to informed consent, and PNAS' editorial requirements for informed consent of human subjects in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. From what's come out in the last couple days, I don't think PNAS should have accepted the manuscript on grounds that the authors' consent procedure was not in compliance.

I actually see this as a nice stick with which to beat corporate research (because, frankly, I expect a certain cavalier attitude towards human subjects, especially from tech companies): if you want to publish in academic journals [and engage directly with the rest of the field], you get to play by our rules. Don't want to consent your subjects properly? The journals shouldn't be willing to publish the work.

estelendur #198: Where I originally come from 'tranny' meant 'transistor radio'.

Where I came from, a tranny is what you use to change your car's gears.

It has come to my attention that every issue of National Lampoon seems to be up, and downloadable, at the Internet Archive, in no particular order. I'm told that even the '64 High School Yearbook Parody is there. I was told this a day after I scanned the whole thing.

Pro: They have the good issues.
Con: Every page has a watermark on it.

But hey: free!

Hyperlocalews... At a local comic-con, local man saw the Incredible Hulk's Lou Ferrigno and MST3K's Joel Hodgson. No, there was no battle royale.

Teka Lynn, #202: I suggest applying Cory Doctorow's advice on "political correctness" to similar phrases like "language policing" and "Goodspeech campaigns" -- whenever you see one, replace it with "treating people with respect".

Because really -- what harm does it do you as the speaker NOT to use language that you know hurts other people? Okay, so you have to "self-censor" for a while to remove those phrases from your reflexive go-tos. Guess what? Everybody does that under various circumstances. But somehow it's only when the language under discussion hurts people lower on the privilege ladder that folks get all up in arms about being asked to change it.

Albatross @ 182: To continue (And I'm sure if I hadn't already spent so much time on this, I could edit it down to greater brevity):

A more subtle cost is the way changing the acceptable terms in conversation puts older people at a big disadvantage. It's not at all uncommon to hear an older person toss out an outdated term while expressing a perfectly decent idea or position, and not too uncommon to see them get dinged for it. That isn't making the world a better place in any way at all.

That is unfortunate, and no it isn't making the world a better place. I think it depends on the people involved in the transaction in question, but this is a place I advocate strongly for compassion if the error is entirely one of "not what I learned as a kid/old habit", and the person, once politely corrected, *tries* to remember to use the right term.

One can even take it a step further and let it slide. My Mother-in-law uses a few terms considered by some to be politically incorrect (Almost invariably the ones that are more debatable, like Oriental, rather than the ones that are explicit), and I usually say nothing. Because I know this woman: she has travelled worldwide, lived in Kenya, knows a lot more about the real relations between people around the world than I do, and has more generosity in her heart even for people and things she disagrees with than I ever shall.

OTOH, we have called her directly on unthinkingly passing on an anti-Muslim Birther e-mail. (Not that she agreed with it, I hasten to say. Her e-mail habits are... sometimes interesting and inexplicable.) her reaction was mostly dismay, and a certain improvement in what gets sent.

And, more significantly, the situation in which I called someone, politely, on use of a racial stereotype, and had it turn into a multi-hours' discussion, where I *and* a third party nearly walked out - because the person who'd made the statement showed zero remorse and even less understanding, and doubled down hard on how okay it was to do/say that thing. Not because I asked quietly, "Could you please not do that?"

Yet if you asked that person, he would say it was political correctness gone amuck that caused the altercation. Of course, he also blames that for just about everything it's remotely possible to blame on PC-dom.

More broadly, this becomes a kind of ingroup/outgroup signaling, so that by using the wrong terms, you're "not one of us." That's some pretty powerful social machinery to invoke, and it can lead to some good outcomes, but also to some pretty unpleasant ones.

I agree. I suspect darn near everything in identity language has some aspect of that signalling. But, as I've said about the concept of privilege, that it has problems doesn't necessarily make it invalid, it just means care must be exercised in its invocation.

And again, people aware that the term or language shift in question is new or not universal usually try to politely educate people they suspect from other markers really are "one of us". It's when this attempt goes BADLY that the person usually becomes more firmly pushed out of the group.

One pretty visible cost is ridicule. Lots and lots of people who aren't even particularly hostile to your cause can and will make jokes at your movement's expense.

Nudged on by people who are hostile. Nudged on by assuming extreme positions are central.

This is also exactly the way feminists are mocked for everything else we do or say.

How dare we risk doing a thing that might lead back to mockery upon us by our foes and bystanders who hear the spin and don't recognize it as such?

What *can't* be spun, usually into satire, by taking it to its absurd extreme?

Because language-policing and self-conscious use of the latest euphemeisms is, in fact, ridiculous.

Because "language policing" is how "Please call me what I prefer to be called, not that thing I find denigrating" has been painted by people who would rather choose what to call other people, even if it hurts, than to have to learn to ask, and sometimes remember, various divergent terms.

I won't say there aren't ridiculous extremists who do police language, and they might deserve mockery, but there's a whole gamut of people who are *really* just politely asking people not to call them something they find insulting, and they don't deserve the same.

Worse, just about everybody I've seen painting ALL identity language advocacy as 'language policing' is also reactionary to a lot of real action on the part of social justice movements. (the few exceptions that complain about language but seem to have their heart in the right place otherwise, seem to be mostly a small subset of the elder generation members you mention above)

Most of the people I know who do use make effort to use the most current terms sound pretty natural about it, not self-conscious -- though if the term is unfamiliar to the listener, it can jar just as badly as if it didn't slip out naturally.

Most have some sympathy for people who are genuinely trying, or just make mistakes (I HAVE accidentally called a recently out trans man by the wrong gender pronoun, and while it's been pointed out to me when I slipped, it has never been a big deal as long as I tried to correct.) The only people they take issue with are the ones that react, not with "I'll try to remember for next time", but with one of the wolves' responses here.

Anyone who ever asks for a pronoun correction or a particular term/stereotype not to be used will still get painted as policing by those who disagree. Does this really invalidate the worth of the effort?

Language can change fast and people adapt. Except, apparently, when it comes to respecting another person's identity or having some sympathy for their desire not to be insulted.

Fragano @197:

Yes, and I know. The problem is that there aren't words with that damaging power for most straight white cis men, which makes it easier for them to fail to understand/not care that there are such words for other groups.

I was rather hoping that realizing that some of the most beloved members of this community are vulnerable to that kind of damage would make that point a little easier to grasp despite that visceral gap.

What I'm getting from the Facebook fracas is that the effect is so small, and the experiment will need to be so large, that even before the consent issues are considered, it may be impractical to confirm the result.

And hen I start wondering, if the effects are so slight, how the trolls came to be. Can a Social Media site do anything to modify their behaviour, or are they the product of their real lives?

But it may discredit the view that the abusive posters were created by their access to social media, and call into question just how, as time passes, we can deal with such problems. Those internet jokers prosecuted under terrorism laws over bomb threats: we need a better real-world response. We shouldn't be dismissing the virulent hatred directed at well-known women, with threats of rape and murder. How did they get that way, and what do we do now?

These flaws may need a lifetime to fix, a new-age Reconstruction that is sustained for a lifetime. We can't afford to stop any reform at the next election.

And there is some evidence, better than Facebook's, that governments are broken by the dominance of such things as single-sex private schools (Places such as Eton in England) which infests politics with people who have experienced adolescence in a flawed social environment.

(You don't need to go to a Public School to do great things. Look at what Nye Bevan did.)

abi @ 210: I wasn't thinking about eliminating slurs as one of the ineffective parts of language-as-politics. It's one of the places where it is effective, even though its effectiveness is greatest while playing defense. That's still worthwhile.

What I was thinking of was more, for instance, the tweetstorm as political action. While that has its uses, the idea that it substitutes for physical gathering and face-to-face organizing is, I think, wrong.

abi #210: About twenty years ago, on Usenet, a white American complained about the word 'buckra' insisting that it was pejorative much to my surprise. Over my objections that in Jamaican Creole it simply meant 'white person', he said that in his understanding it was a pejorative term for white person and his understanding, as a white man, was superior to mine. I gave up and walked away from that newsgroup (which, I suspect, was his objective).

Speaking of a variety of things...

I was idly considering where to take a long-ish break next year and thought that Seattle (being somewhere where I know quite a few people, some of which I don't even know through work, and have spent quite a few pleasant weeks in the past) was a brilliant idea and it also struck me that it isn't super-far from Spokane.

But, it troubles me that I cannot find a "code of conduct" nor an "anti-harassment policy" on the 2015 WorldCon's web pages. Is it just me being bad at finding this info?

John A Arkansawyer, I would never have included political Twitter in what you mentioned. That's another issue and worthy of discussion, but I don't connect it to the respectful-language topic without a serious amount of thought.

So: what's your favorite kind of puppy? Do you like the little tight-skinned ones that will stay nearly that size, or the big floppy ones that will eventually grow less wrinkly? Or floofy fur?

Claiming "language policing" or "political correctness run amok" amounts to classic concern trolling: trying to convince you to abandon a dominant position.

That is, having been accused of a given offense (using an insulting word), they're claiming that calling them on that offense, is itself an equal or greater offense against them.

Of course, being allowed to insult a subordinate (group) with impunity is privileged behavior by definition. What they're claiming is an offense against their privilege.

Diatryma @ 215: It doesn't seem like such a leap to me, I guess, nor was I meaning to just talk about one thing.

AKICIML: Suppose I'm trying to do experiments in cooking Indonesian food. Are there reasonable substitutes for:
- banana leaves (for wrapping & steaming rice)
- galangal
- kluwak nuts (which i most suspect I won't be able to find at all)
- Indonesian bay leaf
?
(looking at making either sop konro or coto makassar, and burasa, by the "find five recipes and average them" method)

estelendur, #218: If you don't have a hard deadline on finding these ingredients (as in, you're planning to do this tomorrow or something), you can order galangal from Penzey's Spices. Or my partner says that ginger and galangal are closely related, so you might try using that instead.

estelendur@218:I've found frozen banana leaves in our local (a Hy Vee) supermarket. A good Asian food store will also have them. If they don't have them, then you could try using green corn husks. The flavor will be somewhat different but not radically so. If the object needing wrapping is large, then you could contain the corn husks in an outer wrapping of cheese cloth.

Ginger can be used instead of galangal although the flavors are somewhat different.

I see that people substitute regular bay leaf for Indonesian bay leaf but then remark that they taste different. A sour component is mentioned. They are for sale at:
http://www.asiangrocerystore.com.au/mariza-indonesia-dried-bay-leaves-daun-salam.html

Note that they are also different than Indian bay leaves.

I haven't tried a recipe that needs kluwak nuts. I see them for sale at:
http://www.efooddepot.com/products/wayang/4662/wayang_kluwak_kupas_%28peeled_kluwak_nuts%29__hypen__3_dot_5oz.html

I notice that while the kluwak nuts for sale in the US are processed and safe, raw kluwak nuts are poisonous and contain hydrogen cyanide. So, make sure to get processed ones. The ones at the above link look processed.

As Lee mentioned, Penzey's Spices has powdered galangal available, but depending on the season (and on your local area), you might be able to find it at an Asian grocery store--I've seen it here in my city, and we are not a terribly cosmopolitan locale. It looks like a very thin-skinned ginger, perhaps slightly more bulbous, and is kept in the fresh vegetable section, in my experience. Note that, bit like powdered ginger versus fresh, the flavor profiles of fresh & dried galangal are distinctly different, at least to my palate.

For wrapping & steaming of rice packets like I've seen, in place of banana leaves you could try waxed paper, or even cornhusks, like you'd use for tamales.

As for the other two, I'm stumped.

HLN: Local woman is waiting for results of yesterday's biopsy. Anemia, multiple masses in abdomen (one somewhat necrotic); possibility of one or more types of cancer. Local woman is exceedingly unenthusiastic. (Translation: local woman is scared shitless.)

Velma: Good thoughts for you.

Velma, <hugs> if welcome.

Velma, wishing you hugs and all the good energy you want. (Oh shit!)

222
Oh, !@#$%^&*(.

Velma (222): Thinking good thoughts.

Oh crap. Thoughts & prayers, Velma.

Velma, may things turn out better than feared.

*roots for Technology and Life*

Velma, GoodThoughts being sent your way.

How many folks are going to be at Detcon1? Should we try to plan for a Gathering of Light?

E-mail from my local library:

The rhesus chart / Charles Stross.
Ready. Must pick up by 07-10-14

Woo Hoo!

Velma: GoodThoughts, candle lit.

Velma @222:

You're in my thoughts and prayers. Please keep us posted how things go.

Oh, Velma. If anyone can pull the strength and community love (including me) to get through this, it's you.

Velma: That's scary-sounding for sure, and I hope it turns out to be far less alarming than it sounds.

Please keep us posted, so we can help you fret, at the very least.

Velma: Scary indeed! May there be sure and certain knowledge of how best to proceed as soon as possible.

Velma @222: Thinking good thoughts.

Velma... My fingers are crossed.

@Velma: Best wishes and fingers crossed.

Velma: The very best of wishes to you!

Velma, holding you in the Light.

Ingvar M @214 -- I believe Sasquan has such a policy (and I know we intend to have such a policy!). You're right that it's not obvious on the front page, and I'll see what can be done about getting that changed.

Velma, good wishes and prayers you way from me, also.

Thanks for the suggestions, all! I found everything I was looking for except the kluwak nuts and Indonesian bay leaf, at the previously-unknown-to-me large Asian grocery in my area.

Velma: sending good thoughts and wishing you luck :(

Velma, good wishes and crossed fingers and toes from over here too.

Velma: Good thoughts. Do we have permission to do more?

Best wishes, Velma, for things working out well.

Velma #222: I'm wishing you strength and hope.

HLN: Local man encounters former boss on street. Former boss is carrying two gallons of spring water, says she won't drink water in building where she works and local man formally worked.

She explains that, in additional to local man, two other people on that floor have gotten tongue cancer. She didn't know whether the type of cancer matched the kind local man had.

Velma @ 222: Good thoughts and wishes wending your pay. Prayers if appreciated.

Xopher @ 250: That is exceedingly suspicious clustering. Something needs to be checked. And if it is more than coincidence ... I have no words, but the ones I would have would be exceedingly vile.

Some of the ways the Dutch are unusually good at bicycles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqkDiExIEiE

Velma @222: Petitioning the heavens on your behalf; HealingWishes and industrial-strength Strength are on their way FedEx.

Velma, best of luck to you.

Velma, very best wishes.

Xopher: prayers, spells, petitions are all welcome. I am still waiting for biopsy results and trying to find interest in food.

Not quite how I'd planned to spend my summer.

Ingvar M @214, me @243: I've checked -- the policy isn't in final form yet, but Sasquan is working on one. I don't have a firm date on when it'll be up, but it is in the queue, and not forgotten.

Velma, you are in my prayers. Here's hoping for better news from here on out.

Velma: Good wishes and virtual hugs, if wanted.

#257: Oh good. I've found Sasquan to be very responsive, and I'm glad they haven't missed that detail.

General note on bad behavior and "doubling down"—there was a bar owner in Spokane who had the bad taste to create a drink called "Date Grape Kool-Aid" and then act as though he were being attacked when people objected. Complete jerk behavior. He then made minor changes to the name when Kool-Aid threatened a lawsuit, but put up ads with a person in a bulldog suit—closely resembling the local college mascot (my alma mater). He also stuck up college stickers around the bar, making it seem as though the college endorsed his bar. Well, they didn't. Lawsuit followed (in progress, AFAIK. Local college also happens to have a law school.)

And then it turned out he was behind on his rent, and the landlord was unamused. His quick fundraising efforts failed (for some odd reason) and his bar has been evicted. He is playing the martyr, of course.

My friends in Spokane (who brought this to my attention) are experiencing a bit of glee. If he'd apologized, they probably would have forgiven him. But continuing in bad behavior and then claiming to be entirely in the right? Well... it's hard to get sympathy that way.

Tom Whitmore @ #257:

Excellent.

:hugs the Velma, if given the hi sign to do so:

Love and prayers and goofy harmonies as always, now and ongoing.

Re the discussion on conventions and policies and so forth: I was pleased to see that Balticon has one, because I'm pretty sure that's where I'll be next year for Memorial Day weekend. Perhaps some fun can be arranged, if other Fluorospherians will be in attendance.

Velma, hoping for the best for you.

And some thoughts on "language policing"/asking people to use correct identity names, I recently had a post of mine blow up a little on tumblr over just that. Some links and pull quotes:

My original post, in which I was criticizing a media interview for seeming unwilling to mention the word "bisexual" in the context of Penny Dreadful's portrayal of Dorian Gray, and where (on a gay media site, no less) they resorted to that old "he's beyond labels" dodge. My exact words:

This, on the other hand, feels like a giant “no homo” after the preceding question. And I blame it more on the interviewer than the actor.

WHY IS EVERYONE SO AFRAID OF CALLING SOMETHING BISEXUALITY? Or, better yet, pansexuality, which seems more accurate for Dorian - I doubt he’d restrict himself to the binary.

One person took exception to my phrasing thusly:

his was going so well until you said bisexuals restrict themselves to the binary :/ non-binary bisexual here, your definition is wrong, biphobic and transphobic

Now, despite the Jay-Smooth-approved "what you said" vs. "what you are" method of criticism, that stung.

However, I tried to keep my cool. The first paragraph of my response:

…if a person’s sexual orientation (as opposed to their gender identity) includes more types of people than fit into the male/female binary, how is that not pansexual rather than bisexual?

And I ended by saying "…I think we may be using different words to describe the same thing."

You can see my full response and links to most of the ensuing discussion here. (Tumblr's threading: not so bad, actually.)

Here is where, in frustration, I resort to the "look, I'm OLD, have some patience" self-defense, to a different commenter:

Look, I am 44, a dinosaur by tumblr standards. When I was first figuring out my identity in the 1980s, “bisexual” WAS used reductively, and nobody would have said “heterosexuals and homosexuals get to be attracted to nonbinary people” because hardly anyone realized that “nonbinary” was even a thing.

I do follow it with an apology (middle paragraphs cut for length):

I used the terminology as best I knew how. I screwed up. I appreciate the education.

and in the tags, I mutter "but I feel like I could use a little more slack". (If you're not reading the tags on tumblr posts, you're missing half of the conversation, just like not reading the comments here.)

Here's a subsequent response from a later person, which was much less judgmental in tone, and my response to them. Including my tags "also thank you for not rushing to throw and around" (eek, I'm sure I meant "insults", not "and", or else I left out the words biphobic and transphobic), "hasty and quick to anger", and "a jedi craves not these things".

Their response (to which there's a link in the notes) had the tags "don't beat yourself up auntie" and "i know you meant no harm".

I like to think that I kept my cool reasonably well through most of the discussion. And I know that on tumblr it's not instantly obvious that I'm of an older generation than many of the participants, because I can code-switch into tumblr's flailing-fangirl style with some fluency, and do, because it's very expressive.

But dear heaven, I'd like it if more people corrected language the way that calling-doctor-bones did rather than the original response I got. Especially when the point of my original post was so clearly arguing for a position they shared that even they acknowledged it.

Sometimes hostile corrections have a purpose, which is to get across the message "both your language and your position are wrong wrong wrongity wrong, and this makes me angry," but sometimes, even though it's true that "tone policing" is a form of silencing, it would be a lot more effective to correct someone gently. abi, what's the full phrasing of your admonition to "read charitably" and consequently how to react? Like that.

...yeah, I'm still maybe a little stung over the initial response, even though I found the way the discussion wound up ultimately satisfactory. And the lessons learned here about responding temperately - is that the rest of the admonition? - helped a lot.

So I have great sympathy both for those who say "incorrect and insulting identity language needs to be called out and corrected, as a matter of courtesy and respect," AND those who say "language policing is hostile and drives off allies."

Would that all of life had the Fluorosphere's moderation team.

Oh my bob there are such terminology issues around sexual and gender variance lately. To the point that my own chosen best-fit identity words read as insulting (a step short of slur, but barely) to some other people who I consider to be on the same spectrum as me and fighting many of the same fights.

The bisexual/pansexual fight is totally a "Thing" that's happening right now in terminology slapfight news, and you sailed straight into the center of it all unwitting. I'm sorry. :-/

Rikibeth @262 I have great sympathy both for those who say "incorrect and insulting identity language needs to be called out and corrected, as a matter of courtesy and respect," AND those who say "language policing is hostile and drives off allies."

Thank you. I had a similar experience to yours elsenet, also in a discussion having to do with gender identity and sexual orientation, except I didn't follow it through to your satisfactory conclusion. I was driven off (and, I should note, by relatively mild correction. It was not a dogpile. But I am, as always, conflict-averse.) I was left feeling, well, excuse me for attempting to express support; I won't make that mistake again.

Maybe this is whiny. Maybe this is entitled. But I think there must be a middle range between "I'm entitled to plop down anywhere in the internet and say any ignorant thing I want" and "Study up on this and become an expert before you dare make a passing comment."

Elliott Mason: I had NO FRICKIN' IDEA that bisexual/pansexual was a current slapfight, and part of me was just going "well excuse ME for having a grounding in scientifc prefixes, LATIN, UR DOIN IT RONG."

I have a handy reality check system in the form of my kid, who is a non-binary-gendered college student and thus hears all the changes and kerfuffles first. Kid was like "yeah, it's a thing, and okay people are stepping back from pansexual, but you are so right about the Latin and that part BUGS ME TOO."

Kid also backed up my perception on another tumblr incident that resulted in an unfollowing, saying "okay, that person has a position, which I don't necessarily agree with but it's a position some people have, but they were hella rude about how they addressed it with you, your request for clarification was reasonably polite." It's good to be on the same side as my kid. (And I get uncomfortable when people praise me for being so supportive, because THIS IS MY KID and that should be, like, expected MINIMUM.)

OtterB, in my case, I engage when I have the energy rather than backing down and going "well excuse me for trying to offer support" because it's not abstract/ally stuff for me, it's my identity (bi/pan depending on How You Use The Words) and my kid's that are both at stake, and it feels worse to back off than to defend it. I blame absolutely no one for backing away in the face of a hostile reaction to a well-meant statement. Hostility is draining.

And I know, I know, "intent isn't magical", but sometimes, if you can make a good guess at a person's intent, you can figure out ahead of time whether to say mildly "excuse me, you're stepping on my foot" or "HEY, GET OFF OF MY FOOT, NOW, JERK!"

Sometimes people are taken by surprise and their foot is already bruised by repeated stepping, so sometimes they yell out of proportion. I try to get off any feet I'm stepping on, regardless of how it's pointed out. But someone who yells at me when it was a simple accident? No matter how sorry I am, I probably don't want to stand near them anymore.

Rikibeth @ 262: I'm sorry that discussion began so roughshod, and glad it got cooler and more level so quickly. I also have to echo your kudos to the moderators here, with special note of Abi* - and the many many educational discussions they have put forth both on moderation and how it really works, and charitably reading other peoples' words. Many Moderators are much quieter and less public about their decisions, but while their moderation decisions have influenced the tone of this site, those discussions and openness have influenced my manner of responses elsewhere.

*Because while abi is most likely to discuss this now, and is definitely the proponent of charitable reading, I can think of words from some of the others that have also made me think about how response feeds either good conversation or trolling.

Thirding praise to the ML moderation style for helping me be more civilized elsewhere. Based on my very short attempt at moderating a community, it's hard.

ab @ 177... According to the Editor-in-Chief (of Locus) AKA my best friend from high school

The Cabal of Women who want to destroy SF obviously recruits its members at an early age.

Lenora Rose, thanks. I expect tumblr to get a little contentious, really - enthusiasms run high and so do emotions. One of the things I've been enjoying about the Penny Dreadful fandom, as I've been watching it develop (nothing like being in near the start!) is how civilized people generally are - there's plenty of spirited debate, but remarkably little name-calling or disrespect of others' opinions. And the discussions get pretty high-level, which seems to be a result of the show having so many roots in classic literature, which attracts people who already like that stuff and like to analyze it. And when a fan who's pretty clearly not as well-versed in the reading says something that demonstrates a lack of grounding, the tone of the explaining definitely tends more to the You Love What I Love And Here Are More Things To Love That Will Make You Love Our Thing Even More, and not You Idiot How Do You Not Know That Already. It's really refreshing. If there are bitter arguments, I haven't seen them in the tag.

Which is why it was kind of a shock to get the call-out I got in those terms. It was an outlier for how that little corner of fandom has been behaving.

Something else I've tried to observe is that it's more acceptable to get very ranty at people who are clearly not participating in the debate (showrunners, frex) than it is to get ranty at people you're engaging with directly. Mostly? This new baby fandom is good about that. Rest of the world? SO variable.

Rikibeth... I haven't watched "Penny Dreadful" yet, but we recently became Showtime subscribers, and they reran the whole series this weekend. My DVR is full and ready for my peepers. I've heard lots of good things about it. I must say that its cast including Timothy Dalton is a point in their favor. Same for Eva Green. (Unless we're talking about the dreadful "Camelot", which even her birthday suit couldn't make me want to keep watching.)

Serge, you and I share an opinion of that dire Camelot, even if it was Jamie Campbell Bowers' birthday suit I was watching for, not Eva Green's. (Although hers is quite wonderful as well).

Penny Dreadful's a lot less aggravating than that.

Velma, that's terrible. You've come to the right place. I don't think anyone will gainsay that we all wish you well. Please keep us informed when possible.

Something to think about for convention planning...

Well, two things...

The power bank (there are other names), a rechargeable battery that can recharge your smartphone or tablet, is getting to be a commonplace item in shops. It's not everywhere, but it can make a big difference to have one. Some cameras can recharge from USB too.

Something called an OTG lead will let you connect a tablet or smartphone to an ordinary USB stick. You'll need some file management software, but that lets you back up the pictures you take. With the right sort of adaptor, you could read the memory card from a camera, maybe directly connect the camera. Smartphones can take good pictures, but I've not seen any which have easy memory card changes. Try things out before you go.

(I'm seeing some startlingly low prices for memory sticks and cards of one sort and another. Five quid to store 2500 images? No wonder people stopped using Kodachrome.)

My biggest problem is going to be deciding which camera to take.

Well, to me use of the term bisexual implies the existence of a gender binary, because otherwise what "bi" are you being "sexual" toward?

But I'm a) a pedant, b) neither bisexual nor non-binary-gendered, and c) well aware that words don't always keep the meaning they were originally formed with, witness the usual suspects (malaria, glial, migraine).

But being swatted down for not using the most up-to-date term would definitely frost me the hell off.

Xopher, I agree with you on both points, the "Latin, UR DOIN IT RONG," and the being frosted off when swatted for a small (and CLEARLY non-malicious) error in nomenclature.

I once quit visiting a blog because a commenter ignored the point I was trying to make in my comment in favor of dinging me in a very hostile manner for saying "transwoman" instead of "trans woman". JFC.

Xopher @ 274

I'm following the conversation on language with interest. Can I request an expansion of what the difference is that you see between "being swatted down for not using the most up-to-date term" and the general "language-policing and self-conscious use of the latest euphimisms."

It's clear that a difference is intended, but I'm not clear on what it is.

B. Durbin, #259: That's good news. I heard about that issue when it was all over Facebook, and am glad to get an update. Sounds like the standard cluster of "an asshole is rarely an asshole in only one area" behavior.

HLN: Local woman is now posting from shiny new (to her) Windows 7 computer.

Sam, two conversations:

Conversation 1:
A: I was talking to this [term 1] the other day and [completes thought].
B: That's interesting. A, [term 1] is considered offensive these days. [Group] prefer [term 2] these days. If you use [term 1], people will think you're [term for people who are prejudiced against [Group]].
A: Wow, thanks. I'll try to remember.

Conversation 2:
A: Are we still using the word [term 1]? It seems wrong to me.
B: You shouldn't have to ask! You're a filthy [term for people who are prejudiced against [Group]] if you don't already know we use [term 2] now!

And of course the more usual ending for Conversation 1 is

A: I was talking to this [term 1] the other day and [completes thought].
B: That's interesting. A, [term 1] is considered offensive these days. [Group] prefer [term 2] these days. If you use [term 1], people will think you're [term for people who are prejudiced against [Group]].
A: Oh, get over yourself. You [term 1]s are always trying to tell us [non-term 2]s what to do. Anybody who doesn't [rant with terms like 'political correctness', 'social justice warrior', etc.] is called a [term for people who are prejudiced against [Group]].

SamChevre, if I can step in, the difference for me comes down to intent and tone and subtext.

When someone describes what's going on as "language policing and self-conscious use of the latest euphemisms," I take away the sense that the person so speaking doesn't believe that the latest terms are valuable, or that it matters whether they use the up-to-date correct, non-insulting language, and that they're privileging their desire to use the terms they prefer over the desire of those whom the terms describe to be called what they want to be called.

When someone says "swatted down for not using the most up-to-date terminology," the sense I take away is that the speaker would like to use the current appropriate language, but acknowledges that they may not always know it because it's often a rapidly shifting area, and that they would appreciate a mild "actually, the term I prefer is X" -type correction instead of "your use of the word Q is rude and Xphobic" when, apart from the term, the substance of the utterance was anything BUT Xphobic.

Does that make sense?

Xopher, well put!

Rikibeth, actually I liked yours better. Plus, it's shorter!

Xopher, I felt like I sacrificed clarity for length and that your examples were nicely illustrative. Lord knows I've had conversations like that. All of them. I've learned not to be Person A in conversation 3 by now, but I did have to learn.

That, and I've also had to learn not to be person B in Conversation 2!

Xopher, don't remind me! I was that young and earnest and quick to bristle, once. I cringe a little at the memory.

Velma:

You're in my prayers. Yikes!

Rikibeth, Sam, Xopher:

I suspect there is not a clean line between these two. It's notoriously easy to misread the intent of a speaker, or the subtext of a discussion, for example.

In the particular set of conversations regarding terminology, one thing I'm grappling with personally right now is the bit where I have friends with...mutually exclusive terminology preferences, basically. One friend prefers Term A as their self-chosen best representation of how they identify, and another friend had Term A used against them in a terrible context and thus has very painful memories brought up whenever that word is used.

To date, my best way to navigate this is to not use the term at all in public places where one or both of them is likely to be present, and keep in mind the potential for both reactions when I see the term used elsewhere. But there is not a single good solution here! Not that I can see.

When it comes to "bisexual" vs. "pansexual", I then find myself in half of that bind myself. And thus I back away quickly from the discussions there, because... I do not want to give up a term that represents me in a way I'm comfortable with. Nor do I want other people who have been hurt by that term to be further hurt. And damned if I have a better solution when I'm in the middle of it than I do when I'm standing outside it.

The language thread is interesting. Is there a term similar to the Overton Window to describe words and their varying acceptability?

And I hasten to add that "politically correct" is not what I'm looking for. :)

Lenora: Sorry for getting your name wrong.

Abi 185: I guess I kind-of assumed in writing my comment that we all agreed that you ought not to go around tossing out ethnic slurs and deadly insults. Indeed, I don't think there are many people at all who use those terms innocently--instead, if you call someone a f-- or a n-----, you're almost guaranteed to be trying to insult someone, start a fight, etc. And I thought we were discussing something quite different from that.

The discussion I *thought* we were having was based on the construction "X like a girl" for various X, and more broadly on the question of whether trying to impose language changes is a good or productive thing for social movements. And so I gave some examples of places where I see that attempt as having some significant costs, and having seemingly pretty small advantages.

This isn't a matter of my not understanding that there are slurs that hurt people or make enemies or start fights. None of that is new to anyone in this discussion, even the old white men. Most of the kind of language change we're talking about seems to be pretty far from that point, to me.

Steve C:

The phrase I've seen is the "euphemism treadmill."

Thank-you, Rikibeth and Xopher.

Dave Bell @273

re Smartphone card swapping.
As my DSLR has poor wi-fi options, when I'm at airshows I have a miniSD card with adapter. If I have photos on the DSLR that I want to share during the day, I copy them to the miniSD card (using the DSLR's two SD slots), then put the miniSD into my smartphone. My old smartphone required the battery to be removed to swap the miniSD, my new one has an externally-accessible slot.

albatross, #286: IME, terms like "language policing", "political correctness", "Goodspeak campaigns", etc. are far more likely to be used by people higher on the privilege ladder* who are objecting to being asked to consider the wishes of those who are lower.

and @291: "Euphemism treadmill" made me giggle, and seems to be remarkably accurate.

* As regards the issue under discussion at that time. Intersectionality is real, and the same person can be higher on the privilege ladder in one area and lower in another.

albatross @ 290: Apology accepted.

I think a major question involved is, where is the line between socially acceptable cases of asserting one's identity (Being called an obvious socially recognized insult is cause to take offense in most peoples' eyes) and those which are 'taking it too far'? Why is asking people not to use 'X like a girl' -- when it insults not only the person, usually a boy, so addressed, but an entire gender that is, for many, a very close part of their identity -- excessive? Why is asking for one's own pronoun obviously too much? Why is debating bisexual and pansexual* a discussion that is, in your prior word, ridiculous?

The answer, "Because some people are a jerk about how they address the language shift" is insufficient.

Fade Manley @ 287: I can see that being very hard ground to navigate.

My experience so far is that even with people with separate preferences** few of those preferences are of a sort to cause deep offense in those who don't use them. I am very sad to see that you have to deal with an exception. (is it a case of someone reclaiming a nigh-universally insulting term? If so, my answer would likely match yours: I know there are a handful of words I will never use even if the person in front of me is saying, "I want to use it for myself." )
________

* I have some interest in that debate. I have been IDing myself as bisexual since I first came out to anyone, and while I agree that the origin of the word, and the prefix bi, imply a binary (See, there's the prefix again!) -- but calling myself pansexual still sounds and feels weird, like the wrong size clothes.

** My biggest experience with people who have distinctly different preferences: I've encountered non-binary people, mostly online, who prefer things like singular they, sie/hir, Spivak pronouns, or even 'it', and to the best of my knowledge, only the last has been considered by anyone else to be insulting (And because of that, as with my comment on all reclaimed insults, it's the one I am not likely to reach for in front of someone whose preference I do not know.)

"Pansexual" seems off to me because it sounds like being attracted to everyone-- this is probably rarely the case.

"Pansexual" seems off to me because it sounds like being attracted to everyone-- this is probably rarely the case.

I tend to read "bisexual" and "pansexual" as overlapping but not necessarily identical descriptions. I identify as bisexual for a number of reasons, some of which come down to "it's the term most people will understand if I use it," and it's possible I'll change my mind in the future. And, yeah, I bristle when I run into the people who use the prefix origins to claim it means something very discriminatory; English is full of words whose active meaning has little to do with the literal aspects of their roots! But at the same time, I can totally see someone choosing to go with "pansexual" as better representing themselves because of their dislike for those root origins.

Just not, you know, using it as a stick to beat people with.

Lenora Rose, as you guessed, it's a slur-reclaiming thing. Specifically, the word "queer". I know a lot of people who self-identify with that term; I know a few people who were deeply hurt by it; and I do not personally know, but have heard about from the latter group, people who use the word themselves, and attack that second group and tell them they're wrong for not embracing the word themselves.

My general approach is thus to never use the word myself in a public place, and to assume that people who use it in what doesn't seem like a hostile manner do indeed mean it in the reclaiming and non-hostile sense. But it's something I need to keep in mind when I'm using language in public spaces, and, yeah, that uses some cycles.

...but a lot of things use some cycles. I had to work "gyp" out of my vocabulary after discovering it was a slur, and that took a while to internalize. I'm still working on "lame" and some other ableist stuff. There are people who say it applies to them and doesn't hurt them; there are people who say it applies to them and hurts them; I figure the first group isn't going to be hurt by my not using the word, by and large.

I've also picked up incorrect word definitions on occasion from my early reading; it took me years to find out that "taciturn" didn't actually mean "stoic". It's brain-cycles to remember to use those words properly too, and no one's likely to get hurt if I use them wrong. So I figure if I can invest a bit of energy in getting other vocabulary right when no one's feelings are on the line, I can invest at least as much in the vocab handling when people's feelings are.

Along the lines of The Man Who Melted Jack Dann, I present: Lisa Jackson Deserves to Die.

As my fellow librarian just remarked, "poor cover design."

It's like "The Sheep Look Up John Brunner!"

299/300
ROFLMAO!

It brings back memories of the 1984 Hugo-counting program, which was stuffed with output to track where it failed if it died in the process - the thing would only run if most of the device drivers were unloaded, it required so much memory. So the monitor would have a line reading 'Eliminating [nominee]'.
Yep: Eliminating In the Face of My Enemy

Rikibeth @265: Sometimes people are taken by surprise and their foot is already bruised by repeated stepping, so sometimes they yell out of proportion. I try to get off any feet I'm stepping on, regardless of how it's pointed out. But someone who yells at me when it was a simple accident? No matter how sorry I am, I probably don't want to stand near them anymore.
All of my feelings forever. (to use the tumblrspeaks)

Xopher @274: But being swatted down for not using the most up-to-date term would definitely frost me the hell off.
One of my favorite webcomic artists had a character use the term "transgender" and was promptly swatted for not having her use "trans" instead. By someone who assumed they were cis, which they… kind of aren't.

Lenora @295: calling myself pansexual still sounds and feels weird, like the wrong size clothes
That's how I feel about really all gender identity descriptors. Because it's "bleh too big" instead of "ouch too small get it off!" I usually just let all pass by without comment, but… someone was saying something about no good options? Yeah.

My kid just read, unhelped, the first two sentences of The Hobbit. And I GOT IT ON VIDEO. I am so geeksqueed.

Extra so because she is motivated to want to know the story in The Hobbit because a month ago she wanted me to play my guitar at her. So I pulled up some things I have chords for and practiced, and one of them was Smaug the Magic Dragon. It was fun, she sang along, ok fine. Then last Saturday she started spontaneously singing the chorus endlessly, clearly earwormed. So I told her that the song was based on a book and now she wants to know the story. :->

Xopher @ 197.801: That's an interesting explanation, but ISTM that it requires some of the Master Race getting a dose of common sense; or, what else were the Lakewalkers before the tech crash? I'm also not sure I believe in nanotech carrying the impulse to rule; ISTM that that requires conscious self-delusion. But I'm guessing here; the scope of the idea is certainly awesome.

abi@197.813: I definitely don't remember those chapters; don't know whether I quit before then or just blanked on them. (It sounds like Melville may have taken Les Miserables too much as a model.) I'd call such infodumps the opposite of procedural markers if they're so irrelevant, but I suspect from your comments that there are less-irrelevant sections.

Xopher @ 197.851: or a slogan that has been debased. Sturgeon touches on this in "Slow Sculpture", and Knight built it into "The Country of the Kind", one of his most penetrating stories. Considering the number of other useful thoughts the right wing has debased, I'm not much worked up over this one -- although I would probably be suspicious of its use, as you are.

Kimiko @ 197.981: the problem with your analysis is that it doesn't explain movies having the same rules of acceptability. Temple of Doom aside, I've personally seen a US all-ages movie that was no-kids rated in Europe; consider this vs the joke about US women (according the movies) always draping themselves with a sheet when they sit up in bed. Or, consider that everything we debate was banned under the Hays code; somehow the wowsers didn't notice violence sneaking back in, or didn't really care as much (for reasons discussed in this thread?).

Xopher @ 197.1029: the first time I sang K.626, I snarked at a fellow bass with the unfortunate name Victor Perpetua. ("Who's this fellow Etlux? Relative of yours?") The things 18-year-olds think are funny....

kimiko @ 77: that's the theory espoused in What Every Woman Knows -- but I doubt that an observant anthropologist could argue it's the only, or even majority, state of affairs in countries where it appears. I won't claim it's a patriarchal lie for hiding where the power really is

Islander @ 121: your coach had a fascinating theory, but I wonder how true it is given that (from what I've read and very loosely observed) a woman typically has longer legs than a man of the same height, suggesting that women would have a relatively higher CG. Does anyone have hard facts on this one?

Cassy B @ 156: the House doesn't control SCOTUS appointments -- and if the Republican senators played stupid over an appointment they might find the 50%-cloture rule extended. (This isn't just my opinion; there's been discussion that Ginsburg should resign in time to be replaced by another sane person.)

Velma @ 222: may it turn out to be only a scare.

general: I see several comments about other SCOTUS messes, but none about the buffer-zone error, which was a 9-0 decision; could none of the sane wing of the court understand the difference between "freedom of speech" and "freedom to get in somebody's face"? Locally people are suggesting that SCOTUS should lose its buffer zone (I hadn't realized they had one); I'm hoping for skilled cool-headed people who know enough basketball that they can set picks on the anti-choice induhviduals, or at least answer with whatever level of heat the anti-choicers attempt to apply.

On bisexual/pansexual: I agree about the overlap. I identified as bisexual for a long time; when I became aware of the term pansexual, I thought about it some more, and realized that a goodly number of people I've been attracted to/involved with have not fit neatly into the gender binary, and pansexual seemed to reflect that best, so I went with it. However, I'll still use "bisexual" if that's the one on the tickybox list besides gay and straight, and I certainly won't get shirty about being called either bisexual or pansexual - they both feel fine.

I'm perhaps sulking a little bit about having been offered a shiny new label that I liked and that now it seems the Identity Language Cabal wants to take away again, or accuse me of "bisexual erasure" if I use it. I really did like it and the way it acknowledged my partners. My Rule 63 Jack Harkness cosplay isn't just because I like the coat.

Sometimes I feel like I have to dig up photos of me with the bi activism group from the gay pride marches in the '90s, with all of our rainbow-colored signs with a numbered Myth About Bisexuality on one side ("we don't exist," "it's just a phase," etc.) and "I am not a myth!" on the other side, and scan it in, so I can wave it around to prove my street cred to the kids who are fighting whatever the latest fight is. Especially when we seem to still be fighting the SAME fight. Are you a college student, like my own kid? See the baby in the stroller in that picture? THAT'S HOW LONG I'VE BEEN AT IT.

...I'm just venting now. Carry on.

I myself was very bummed when it was pointed out to me that QUILTBAG--what acronym could be finer than that one?!?--used terms which referenced a binary gender and did not in the same degree use terms which didn't.

I mean, QUILTBAG, people! So handy a term. And yet, so inadequate. Much like myself some days. Not so much others..

Fade Manley, I thought the word might be "queer". I'm all for reclaiming, and will happily self-identify as such (useful umbrella term! none of this hairsplitting!) but I'm cautious about using it unless I know my audience, because I remember all too well when it was a slur first and foremost - who else remembers Josie Cotton's song "Johnny Are You Queer?" I can't be the only one who saw the movie Valley Girl, right? - and don't want to hurt people who've been hurt by it in he past.

But I have to say when I'm batting ideas around with the academically-inclined types who talk about "queering the narrative" and whatnot, I find the term apt and a delight to use.

Elliott Mason, YOUR KID IS AWESOME, and getting that on video? Priceless.

I share your moment of parental kvelling.

albatross @290:

I think a lot of my assumptions about whether we agreed on what we were discussing went out the window with your calm, absolutist, essentially privileged declaration that things that people cared that much about were "ridiculous".

Indeed, my assumption that I understood you and where you come from in these kinds of discussions went out the window too. I thought you were the guy who tried on lots of shoes, then walked the mile across no-man's-land to tell the other side what they felt like. But that guy wouldn't have said that.

In my experience, when a thing looks "ridiculous" on its surface, but people are still passionate about it, then I'm looking at it from the wrong perspective. Lots of things can seem ridiculous: the color of the shirt a man wears as he kicks a ball into a net; refusing to eat when hungry and drink when thirsty because the sun has not yet set; the disposition of little tasteless wafers of bread; the word filioque; the difference between "God" and "G-d"; the placement by humans of one organ inside another. Ridiculous, the lot of them—except to the people who care about the things they represent.

Unless (and the thought comes late) you meant it as a kind of performance-art lesson in how words can shut down conversation rather than opening it up?

#299: Years ago, I had a book called "Hello Summer, Goodbye Michael Coney"

And years later, I learned that Jo Walton once had that exact same edition!

#302 ::: estelendur

I don't know whether this would be of any use to you, but Hanne Blank has referred to her orientation as sovereign.

Aigh. Velma. Prayers/good thoughts.

I generally use queer sparingly in f-t-f conversation, unless in company which also uses it. I'm less sparing online, since I'm not generally hanging out in places where people would use it insultingly.

And. Pansexual just feels weird and not quite the right suit of clothing for me, but I try to use it as an identifier (along with bisexual) in places where not using it would divert the conversation to terminology instead of the conversation.

AKICIML: My Google-fu is letting me down, for once. I'm trying to find a manual for the air conditioner I was just given secondhand, and all the links that Google suggests don't seem to actually have the manual.

It's a Maytag, model M3X05F2-BC.

The reviews at Home Depot are right about it being a noisy beast, but I'm not going to raise a fuss about free. It screens out a lot of street noise, anyway, even if its frequency combined with the different frequency of the RCA-brand unit in my bedroom sometimes gives me brief auditory hallucinations. They're more interesting than disturbing, and I'm used to my auditory processing being weird.

But all that is merely digression. What I really need to find out is whether it has a filter that needs to be replaced, or a washable filter, and where said filter IS (so I don't yank on some other part and break it), and, if it's disposable, where I can buy or order replacements and what part number those are.

Nancy, Hanne Blank's (fantastic!) description is for orientation, IOW, partner choice, and estelendur mentioned gender identity, which isn't the same thing, though they interact, of course.

estelendur, again offered in the spirit of "no idea if this will help," but my kid has been known to say "My gender identity is sparkles." Or sometimes "polka dots", but "sparkles" is closer.

I was discussing questions of gender identity with another friend of mine, who is nonbinary but not entirely sure how to describe how they see themselves, other than "you think you see a girl but NO THAT IS WRONG." And wasn't happy about "genderqueer" (though, as the term is commonly used, it's not a bad external descriptor) because this friend really loathes the concept of gender at all, it having caused them so much distress over the years, and doesn't want the word smack dab in the middle of their identity label, forcing them to acknowledge it. There was also a concurrent discussion about clothing choice and presentation, in which we were analyzing the gendered connotations of my friend's preferred clubwear and how those connotations weakened in the context of goth fashion, where people mix it up with abandon and little to no pushback. In the labels half, I brought up my kid's self-definition of "sparkles", and my friend *pinged* and said "I've got it! My true gender is GOTH!"

O course, if they went around saying that, it would involve a ton of explanation every time, so they go with "nonbinary" as the least awful option. But they were happy to be able to call themselves something that felt like it fit.

For orientation labels, for me, "pansexual" is my Jack Harkness coat. "Bisexual" fits equally well, but it feels less awesome - the exact same coat, but before I'd swapped out its plain buttons for replica RAF ones and sewed on the epaulettes with their rank stripes. It's the extra details that make it excellent.

Omnisexual?
Parasexual?
Metasexual? (Or is that one taken? Oh, no, that's metrosexual.)

Or, in my case: Martian. (And don't even get me started on placental reproduction. I mean, seriously, WTF!? ;-> )

My sex is female, and I present in a way that maps closely to "woman", but as far as I can tell, my actual gender is "geek".

I was wondering about "multisexual".

Unfortunately, Greek/Latin seem to be bad at Taoism-- I'm noodling at the idea of a gender which is too real to be named.

"Agnostisexual" seems too wimpy.

I'm wondering at the lack of 'poly' in these prefixes. No dog in this fight, but my friends have quite a few, and I don't like any dogs getting hurt even if I don't know the owners, so. 'Polysexual' seems a little more discriminating than 'pansexual', which I tend to interpret as 'yes, with anyone' because lack of data points for actual use.

I'd also like to go back and use 'philic' rather than 'sexual' because that doesn't involve defining one's own sex or gender to declare which sexes or genders one would like to make out with. But that's not English as we speak it because English is messy and weird and involves a lot of people with a lot of opinions and not all conversations are connected to all others.

Words. Oh words. You are difficult.

And if I remember Hanne Blank's book correctly, 'bisexual' used to mean 'attracted to the sex one is not'. (and what would happen if, in response to 'bisexual is binary-normative!' you said, "I am bisexual. I am attracted to women and nonbinary people. No menz allowed, so not pan." I am now making an intellectual exercise, and a silly one, out of people's actual important lives, so I'll stop. But I would like to try that.)

ambisexual?

Store tag, not cover, but in response to #299/#300 et al., Why yes, yes they do.

I've been mulling over what I wanted to say about the sticks and stones thing (which has morphed away, unfortunately for me, but fortunately to another interesting topic); all I can comfortably come up with is "BS. Names can kill. And when they don't manage to quite do it, they can ruin years of a life now not worth living." And repeating that canard helps the names to kill and maim. So, please don't do so around me?

People wishing evidence are welcome to view my history, especially on Those Threads; and I freely admit to my luck that it was just sticks and stones (and fists and toes) and that it could have been oh so very worse. And the fact that I'm almost coming up to my break-even point - where the years of "worth living" equal the other ones.

Oh, and prayers for those needing them, and yay for those finally having words to claim.

Shaking loose an ISE. Maybe.

Nope. Second try at the comment:

I tell some people (cis people who show a lack of trans-awareness) "I am cisgendered, meaning the gender I was assigned at birth is the one that matches my gender identity, and cisvestite, in that I am most comfortable in the clothes that are socially approved for the gender I was assigned at birth and present as on a daily basis."

Why? To show them how much they're just assuming, and to open the discussion of how hard those assumptions make it for people for whom those things are not the case.

I've been told I'm on the butch side of center, these days. This was not the case in early days (o Mary don't ask). When I was in junior high one of the bullies who slammed me around on a regular basis was asked why by a vice-principal; he shouted "'Cause he's a woman!" He expected this to be accepted as justification and was outraged at having been called on the carpet for doing his masculine duty to police my inadequately-masculine gender presentation and impose penalties as he saw fit.

(He did not, I realize, mean that he felt beating up women was an appropriate thing to do; it was only for "women" who ought to have been "men"—which at age 11 I thought was a bit unfair to expect.)

It's odd. This discussion has led me to question my lifelong self-identification as a gay man (well, gay boy at first). I know 'butch' and 'fem' are not gender identities (some entirely cis women are quite butch and some entirely cis men are quite fem), but I don't know that some of the more fem guys* I've been attracted to (even slept with) are really guys, do I? Some might be trans women who never came out to me. And I certainly don't know if some of the men I've been attracted to on the street might be trans men.

My preferences tend to the "soft butch" presentation (that is, warmly masculine guys, not macho extremes like Sylvester Stallone), but I've been attracted to (and dated) some guys who no one, least of all themselves, would call butch. And in at least two cases, I've been VERY attracted to some "guys" who later transitioned.

So am I gay if I'm attracted to trans women? Even if as soon as the effects of HRT become apparent, the sexual attraction fades?

Fortunately I don't need to have an ironclad orientation to survive. I'm not in the position of Orashia Edwards, who's been denied asylum in the UK because the Tories don't believe bisexuals can be in opposite-sex relationships and yet be queer enough to be murdered in Jamaica, Time Magazine's "most homophobic place on Earth."

*deep breath*

Anyway.

So I don't have to know for sure, but it's been decades since I've questioned it at all. It's interesting.

*Or even some of the butch ones; at least one of the trans women discussed in the next paragraph presented as pretty butch, at least when acting.

CHip 304: That's an interesting explanation, but ISTM that it requires some of the Master Race getting a dose of common sense; or, what else were the Lakewalkers before the tech crash?

I'm assuming some of the proto-Lakewalkers dissented from the idea that they should rule the world, and that there was a lengthy war once the Malice Emperor ate his followers and showed his intention to eat the world.

I'm also not sure I believe in nanotech carrying the impulse to rule; ISTM that that requires conscious self-delusion.

I assumed that the Malice Emperor's personality was encoded in the nanotech he was building and modifying, if only to make himself truly immortal instead of emortal as the proto-Lakewalkers already were. So the malices all have bits of the ME, at least enough that they try to rule as soon as they're built up enough to think of it.

The things 18-year-olds think are funny...

Indeed. And the principle that if you can make a joke about someone's name they're already sick of it doesn't penetrate that young either. (Although interestingly I made a name pun recently that the person said she'd never heard before. Lucky for me. I apologized anyway.)

Is this where I mention the nearby appartment complex that advertises deluxe bi-level facilities? Maybe their stairs go both ways.

There's an xkcd on this whole topic, so appropriate that I was sure I'd dreamed it until I went looking.

Rikibeth @313

That certainly looks like a Maytag model number, but there seems to have been some badge engineering going on. A company bought the rights to use the name on air conditioning, and stuck the badge on cheap units assembled in Asia.

You give the number M3X05F2-BC which fits the pattern recorded in this article. That could just be you have read wrong digit as the second character.

It's rather critical of the Maytag brand. You've mentioned the noise, and some have barely minimal efficiency. And, reading between the lines, a bankrupt manufacturer may make filters hard to get, whatever the badge on the case.

Anyway, if you have the part number wrong that will mess up web searches. But one or two bits of fiddling around with the number suggested that filter stocks are running out.

I'm glad I don't need this kit, but it doesn't seem dreadfully expensive, at least.

Open threadiness: I don't know if this court ruling will really get rid of the monstrosity of a no-fly list. I can hope so, but it seems to be relatively popular with the powers that be[1], so I imagine the no-fly list will stick around.

It's always been amazing to me that the no-fly list just got widely accepted by most Americans. I mean, what could be more American than having a secret list of people who weren't allowed to fly, but couldn't find out why, or even that they were actually on the no-fly list?

[1] Bipartisan powers that be. If only one party supported it, you could see how to vote to get rid of it.

I found this post by Zeynep Tufekci really interesting. It's short enough not to need a summary, but basically she's pointing out that the unethical research angle on the Facebook story is much less disturbing than the idea that big companies like Facebook are routinely manipulating us (and researching ways to do it more effectively) via algorithms. You can imagine this kind of manipulation becoming *really powerful* over time, for everything from helping social movements Facebook likes to winning elections. And alongside the personal beliefs of Zuckerberg, Facebook (and Twitter, and Google, and Microsoft, and...) has business interests, some of which may not be too obvious from outside.

Dave Bell, thanks. The second digit is definitely a 3, and I've seen reviews of that specific model online (bad ones) - just no parts listings. Now I know why. And the toll-free service number has a Fedders website listed beneath it.

It's a shame about Fedders. When I was a kid those were the units my family had, and they lasted for literally decades, and their filters were washable.

The one I have definitely seems underpowered for the space it's trying to cool. As I said, it was free, but I wonder if I could persuade my dad that it's a bad bargain and get something more suited to the square footage.

But probably the answer is "run it until it breaks, or until the filter is so grubby that it kicks off my kid's asthma," and then get a new one.

abi, #324: Particularly the mouse-over text.

albatross, #326: Two points. One, I agree with your that this is good news. Two, I was sorely tempted for a few seconds to make some flip, offhand comment about how "ridiculous" it is to be so bent out of shape about something that trivial, just to let you see how it feels when someone else casually disses something that's important to you.

abi:

Fair enough, though perhaps this is just somewhere we disagree.

I certainly don't want to offend people or hurt them with my words, and within some pretty broad limits, I generally try to use the polite terms of the day when I can.

I also don't accept that everyone everywhere has the right to demand that everyone else change their language on the basis of being offended or feeling excluded. I imagine (when I phrase it in that extreme a way) that almost nobody really thinks everyone everywhere[1] does have that right, and so we're probably disagreeing on where the boundaries are. But also, this is mostly a discussion about manners--where does the desire not to offend someone bump up against other values like communicating clearly? That's a little different than what is a good thing for a social movement to try to do.

As far as what is or isn't ridiculous, I imagine that's one of those things that can't really be argued out. I know from my own experience that I often find attempts to force the world to take another step on the euphemism treadmill to be pretty silly, even when I broadly support the goal of the people pushing for the language change. I have seen many other people with the same reaction, but it's not like I have polling data or anything, so maybe my circle of acquaintance simply has an unusual notion of what's ridiculous.

[1] Also, I guess I'll point out that I fundamentally don't agree with the often-expressed notion that the morality of this sort of thing depends on who is more/less privileged, or whose group has more often been kicked around. I've seen the arguments, but they always read to me like special pleading.

abi @ 324... I was told variations of that, growing up. The lesson I learned from it is a great anger at having the burden put on me, and watching the creeps who hurt me get away with it.

abi 324:

Yes, that's a perfect response to the "sticks and stones" line.

Nasty names and words are a *different* thing from physical assault, and are in general (though not always and everywhere) less severe, but they can be seriously harmful. Sufficient ridicule and verbal nastiness with no physical bullying at all can make the target's life a living hell. Indeed, ISTM[1] that most people have some personal experience with this. And yet, the saying still continues on.

[1] Again, maybe this is my unusual circle of friends.

HLN: Area woman discovers that the knee pads from her Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) kit are also good for knee survival while scrubbing floors. "The sellers of this house appear to have believed than an occasional damp mop will keep the grout on tile floors clean," she said, "but they were wrong." The good news is that the bathrooms in this narrow house are small, which would reduce the area of tiled bathroom floors to scrub, if ambitious former owners hadn't installed a bathroom on every floor. "Installing a bathroom in the basement with no window and no exhaust fan seems kinds of pointless," she said, "and what's wrong with linoleum floors?!"

Rikibeth @328

It is possible to get dust-filter materials, usually an open-cell plastic foam which is cut to size. You may see this sort of material as a vacuum cleaner filter. It might need some supports to stop the filter being sucked into the fan.

My cyclone-based cleaner has a final filter on the exhaust which looks rather minimal, but it does make a difference. Similar materials are used for engine air-intake filters in motorsport.

There are certainly possibilities for a replacement filter.

"The Gunfighter" is giggle-inducing. I'm glad my life isn't narrated.

Lee #174: WRT picking a "stellar GoH", if your convention travel budget will cover it, simply ask someone who's from a long way away. If you look to east coast authors, or further afield (European or South African or other non-American) the timing of the Locus awards will be a non-issue because they wouldn't normally even consider going to them.

Speaking for myself, as a Locus award winner who would like to attend the Locus award weekend some year when I'm nominated, I have never done so and probably never will -- because getting there involves at least two flights, over 12 hours in the air, and 8 time zones' worth of jet lag, at my own expense. I'm only ever likely to get to the awards if I happen to be on the West Coast for some other reason around the time they're happening. And while I like the west coast cities, I get to visit maybe once every 3-4 years (file under "jet lag").

Note that I'm not putting myself forward for your local con -- I just hope this gives you a useful new angle to chew on.

Rikibeth @ #262:
Would that all of life had the Fluorosphere's moderation team.

Word. I've recently been spending some time on another forum, and I still don't know the people there well enough to figure out who I want to avoid and who I simply don't always agree with.

I've heard a lot of suggestions for jetlag, and some of them have worked pretty well for me; I don't know if they're generally or specifically applicable. Getting morning sunlight in whatever zone you're in seems to help, as does being determined to stay up until bedtime in the new time zone.

Going to a "massive parties all the time" situation, these may not be the most useful suggestions.

Niall @310, this reminds me of when we saw Robert McDuffie in recital in Virginia maybe fifteen years back, and I went back to maybe gush a little and buy his CD, and I mentioned that the last time I'd seen the piece he played was when I saw Cho Liang-Lin play it at Georgia Southern College around 1981. "I was at that concert!" he said.

See also: WORLD, and the smallness thereof.

Charlie Stross @336: Inasmuch as the con Lee's talking about takes place in Houston, Texas at the end of June, I'd think that the heat alone would keep you away.

Rikibeth @305: Nothing is as invisible as a bisexual person in a long-term married opposite-sex relationship. Every so often I wake up, pinch myself, and have to remember who/what I am.

... In other words, you're not the only person around these parts who feels the need to vent in that direction.

David @340 ... Houston? Texas? June? ... Yeah. (Mind you, I just got home from two weeks in Orlando so nothing's entirely impossible. But Texas is not on my list of favourite US states to visit, and anywhere in the south in June would leave me a hostage to industrial strength aircon.)

However, I maintain my point: just approach potential GoH's who live far enough away that they wouldn't normally attend the Locus awards.

Open-threadiness: Moody Gallery in Houston, July 12-August 9, an exhibit of works by my most-senior aunt.

I don't remember where I first saw this (maybe here?), but I thought it apropos to the discussion:

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can also hurt me. Stones and sticks break only skin, while words are ghosts that haunt me.

Slant and curved the word-swords fall
to pierce and stick inside me.
Bats and bricks may ache through bones,
but words can mortify me.

Pain from words has left its scar
On mind and heart that’s tender.
Cuts and bruises now have healed;
it’s words that I remember.
- Barrie Wade

OK, weird. I did a Preview, which hung, so I went back to Making Light's front page and reloaded the thread. And there's my post.

No big, I guess, but I wasn't expecting that. Sorry about the formatting oddity.

Charlie, #336: Oh, how I wish our con's travel budget extended to overseas authors! It's good advice, but sadly non-feasible for us.

We lucked out this year with David Gerrold, but that was partly because my partner (1) was the conchair and (2) has been interacting with David on Facebook for several years. The person we're trying to snag for next year has indicated that they would like to come, but has a commitment to the Locus Awards that takes priority -- which means that they probably wouldn't be willing to give us an answer until Locus announces their date, which (from all the research we can do) it seems that they don't do until a couple of months out, and we need a GOH lined up long before then.

P J Evans @343: I want to go to her house. We have similar tastes in bric-a-brac.

347
Long, narrow apartment, as I understand it.
(I'll admit to supplying some of the leaves she uses.)

Words can reflect thinking, but they can also shape thinking*. So for me, using acceptable labels is not only about respecting how others wish to be called, it is also aspirational. Maybe one day, I'll use non-biased & non-discriminatory terms instinctively, but for now I make a conscious decision to describe the chair of a meeting (instead of chairman) , humanity or humankind (instead of mankind), etc. so I remain mindful of my own biases. And by being mindful today, maybe one day I won't need to be.

*That words are powerful won't be news around here.

Words can reflect thinking, but they can also shape thinking*. So for me, using acceptable labels is not only about respecting how others wish to be called, it is also aspirational. Maybe one day, I'll use non-biased & non-discriminatory terms instinctively, but for now I make a conscious decision to describe the chair of a meeting (instead of chairman) , humanity or humankind (instead of mankind), etc. so I remain mindful of my own biases. And by being mindful today, maybe one day I won't need to be.

*That words are powerful won't be news around here.

Cute story to tie to the gender-identification thread:

Our aikido dojo was arranging a "family photo" of all the black belts, before class one day.

A friend of mine, someone who began training at this dojo around the same time I did, walked up to me with the teasing remark, "You see something all of those black belts have, that you don't?" He was referring to facial hair: all of the black belts in the photo were men.

Without missing a beat, I replied, "Listen, son, let me tell you about what happens to a woman when she gets to be my age..." and went on to describe the effects of falling estrogen levels, rising (relative to the estrogen) testosterone levels, and the famous old-lady chin hairs.

It was wicked, wicked fun, seeing my friend's eyes get wider as he realized the thicket he'd just crossed into.

Crazy("So, son," said I, stroking my chin, "I wouldn't even need to shave, eh?")Soph

Apologies for the double post. I got a "No data received" error the first time ages after clicking the "Post" button.

And when I refreshed the thread, my comment hadn't showed up, so I tried posting again. The ML server is very very slow at updating comments at the moment.

janetl@33 "What's wrong with linoleum floors?"

Old linoleum can get shreddy, as well as coming in colors that look like they're from the wrong decade. I don't like tile floors in bathrooms (cold, hard, slippery when wet, has grout that needs scrubbing), but the best thing about it is that nobody is going to decide to "improve" it by installing carpeting, because it's much harder to nail tack strips into a tile floor than into a boring-but-adequate linoleum floor.

Now, you might ask "Why would anyone do that? They must have been total idiots!" Area man thinks that must have been part of the explanation, and has muttered many detailed suggestions of specific ways in which they were idiots while pulling many rusty nails out of the floor with pliers, after having earlier removed the carpeting. There was enough other subfloor damage from various causes that area man hired a professional to use leveling compound to get it smooth enough for vinyl, which has for the most part replaced traditional linoleum.

I am not sure that a tiled bathroom floor is the best way to a "wet room" status, but carper is so obviously shifting into reverse on that road…

And it is one of those things that can depend a lot on the underlying construction methods. From pictures I have seen, some US housing looks likely to flex in ways which can make it hard to maintain the water-seal for a tiled floor. So what is the answer?

I can attest to the shreddy nature of old linoleum. If I ever win the lottery, I'm gonna do a whole house upgrade, not least being the kitchen floor. Which now occasionally tries to capture me as I attempt to leave.

And the whole carpets in bathrooms thing? I mean, seriously!? For someone with digestion as wonky as mine this is a...[inadequate adjective] thing to contemplate. Not to mention the odd toilet overflow. For which, of course, the carpet would be the perfect summoning spell.

Dave: Repurposed tanker car?

It's awfully convenient to tell other people that they shouldn't be affected by insults. Does anyone know whether other cultures have an equivalent to "sticks and stones"?

I use gender-neutral language reflexively, but it doesn't affect my imagination all that much. A few years ago, I heard a mention of a Shakespeare scholar, and then was surprised to find that the scholar was a woman. My hope is that my use of language increases the odds that younger people won't be surprised by that sort of thing.

Any thoughts about fun but ungendered clothing would look like? I brought up the subject to an analytical friend who pushed me about the clothes, and I realized I had no clear idea. So much of clothing is about gender signaling.

I've always guessed that the "sticks and stones" thing originated as a form of bravado - something that a bullied kid invented to try to convince bullies that their words were ineffective.

That it got turned into something that bullied kids were supposed to believe is galling.

Hyper-local news: author gets back from vacation to discover that combination fridge/freezer is malfunctioning: freezer works fine, but fridge compartment has warmed up and won't refridgerate. Bummer. Four bin bags of food waste later, confirm fridge is non-functional. (They run on the same compressor and the electronics seem to be working, but ...)

Today: walked into local John Lewis department store, found sale in progress, found Which? Best Buy rated fridge/freezer that appealed, then found a one-off display model with some dings on the freezer door reduced to 2/3 of regular price.

Delivery scheduled for next Wednesday. Now to get on with normal life again.

Lee #346: I think you might be over-estimating the cost of intercontinental travel. Even in peak season, and with the dollar relatively weak, it should be possible to book a return economy class flight from the UK or elsewhere in Europe to Houston for under $1000. (Assuming a 300-person con with a typical budget, this should be just about manageable without breaking the bank.)

Re: carpets in a bathroom, several elderly ladies of my acquaintance (including my grandmother, who recently spent three weeks in a hospital after falling over and fracturing a part of her pelvis) like to have carpets in the bathroom for extra traction, and because poor circulation means their feet are cold anyway, and why should they make it worse, and bathroom rugs are a hassle and occasionally slip around. It's a safety thing for them.

My grandmother's bathroom is, however, equipped with a lovely big window, and she lives in a climate where the weather is mild enough that the window can be opened for eight months of the year without incurring massive heating costs.

Bill, #353: My condo in Nashville, which was brand-new (I was the first owner), had carpeting everywhere except the kitchen. Yes, that meant in both bathrooms. One of the things I did was to find out who they'd gotten the kitchen flooring from and have the carpet in the lower half-bath replaced with the same stuff; I also had that extended to the area immediately inside the rear door (which is where I normally went in and out) to limit the carpet damage from tracked-in water. Never did get around to doing the upper bath, though.

Nancy, #357: Ungendered clothing IMO would be anything which is routinely worn by a lot of people without regard to gender. Right now the only thing I can think of that qualifies would be jeans/chinos/cargo pants and a regular T-shirt; the shirt may contain a gender-signaling message, but it doesn't have to.

Naomi, #358: I think it's more complex than that, and related to magical thinking. Someone who already has a lot of self-confidence can indeed shake off the negative effects of name-calling, and the phrase is a recognition of that. But it doesn't help someone develop that level of self-confidence, even though it's used that way. IOW, the people who can say it don't need it, and the people who need it won't be helped by it.

"Answer straight: what would be its purpose?"
"To place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent."

- Jefferson about the Declaration in '1776'

Lee; And partly due to necessity of cut, and partly just because we can, even jeans and cargo pants often have attached gender signals.

But it's tiny, and subtle, and everywhere. My son (2 1/2) has a lot of second hand and hand-me-down clothes, and I can reliably ID the few that were originally intended for girls: The jeans with the occasional line of pink stitching that are meant to be size 4 but fit him now, if he rolls up the ankles. The plain turquoise t-shirt with the tiniest bit of ruching at the shoulders and the front of the neck opening. The purple onesie with a particular kind of bumpy edging around the neck hole. The t-shirt in easter pastels I've been using as a night-time t-shirt while his actual pyjama top was in the wash; something about the shape of the neck hole, again.

Now, I'm already pretty sure he's a cisgendered boy (It's early, and I'm open to being wrong - but, let's just say that when a cousin whom I babysat when she was around my son's current age later came out as trans, I just kind of nodded and thought 'that fits'), and yet he wears all his clothes without any thought or concern - for now. I keep wondering when it will start, though, that he starts trying to ID things as 'for girls'. Because I'm sure it will, even if he doesn't get it from me.

(and in one way he does; I definitely dress femme, in long skirts and the not-infrequent bout of hot pink. His dad definitely dresses 'male'.)

In my experience, "ungendered" generally means "not marked as female", with a few outliers in the realm of formal fashion. But that's a whole different rant on the way in which gender equality gets co-opted into meaning "Everyone should aspire equally to things deemed appropriate for men."

The 'sticks and stones' saying is intended to buck up children, instead, all too often it fucks them up instead. It also teaches them (well, it taught me at any rate) that adults don't comprehend what they're going through.

Words and not offending:

I'm in the final stages of getting my book ready to send off to my publisher (very exciting) and my retired-editor aunt has indicated that describing something as "a lunatic event" is inappropriate. Help! Is there a word I -can- use? Is "a crazy event" okay? "A wacky event"? (although that really doesn't convey what I'm trying to say). I'm really having problems here. I'm trying for humerous here and don't want to be accidentaly offensive.

(The event in question is spending the longest day of the year running multiple seven or eight 5K courses, travelling for maybe 30-60 minutes or more between them).

Catching up.

On girls changing how they run, throw, [x] when they hit puberty, talk to women gymnasts. Hips get wider, legs change angle, and they get these floppy weights on their chests up near their shoulders. Their center of balance changes, and and continues to change over a period of years. There are probably a number of sports that carry this awareness. Martial arts is one I can think of. The rest of us have to adapt to those changes with no idea why doing [x] now makes me lose my balance.

Words hurt. I was never physically abused as a child, yet I still bleed from the damage inflicted on me by well-meaning parents. I've been working on healing for years, and am taking stronger steps now. One of the pleasures of living alone is that I have no one else to blame. It's eye opening.

Being a regular reader here, I am aware of pronouns. I was treated in the local ER by a slim person, no beard or even stubble, no obvious breasts, long hair caught in a clasp at the neck, soft tenor voice. When the doctor left the treatment room, I stuck my head out and said, "um, Dr. [Y]..." I had several people look at me with an amused look, of the we're going to let someone else in on the story variety. "What pronoun does Dr. [Y] prefer?" By their expressions and body language, they were pleased by my choice of question. Dr. [Y] prefered "he".

Velma, ow, said with tears in my eyes. I am of an age that if I lit a candle for everyone I cared about who needed it, I'd risk burning the house down. So zen hugs and zen candles, energy for healing and coping.

dcb 367: Call it bizarre or extreme or complicated, or bizarrely complicated or something.

Xopher @369: The problem is, it's not bizarre and it's not complicated. And extreme... That depends on your point of view: I ran five 50-mile races last year and this is really minor compared to those. (And those 50-milers are as nothing compared to Marathon des Sables, the Barkley ultramarathon, trans-continentals etc.) But at the same time, it's not exactly an event most people would consider sensible...

I'm really struggling to find another word that fits as well as "crazy." I've been to several websites discussing alternatives to the use of "crazy" and not found any solutions that fit.

counter-intuitive?
strange?
unlikely?
inadvisable?
don't-try-this-at-home-kids?
nonsensical?

dcb @370: If it's not bizarre or complicated or extreme, I'm not entirely sure how it's "crazy", since those are the things being implied by that word when I see it. Ridiculous? Unusual?

Kip W. @371: Nope. None of those fit either!

Is it really so bad to use "crazy"? Of an idea? (That's a serious question)

dbc @373: Is it really so bad to use "crazy"? Of an idea?

It's going to depend on who you ask. Some people are hurt by it; some people aren't. I don't find it particularly offensive, but then, it doesn't get applied often to me, so I wouldn't. I've been trying to use it less, but also haven't been working as hard on that as I have been on certain other words. Language is a fuzzy and poorly lit beast at the best of times, I'm afraid.

Fade Manley @ #365: In my experience, "ungendered" generally means "not marked as female"

I've long been fascinated by pre-WWI clothing for toddlers, which to modern eyes appear uniformly feminine. I'm not sure if it was genuinely ungendered (very practical, I would imagine, for hand-me-down purposes in an era of larger families) or whether there were style differences that would have been visible at the time. Certainly skirts are probably better than trousers for children still in diapers.

Could you use one of the more colorful, less recently clinical syonyms, like "completely bats"?

I'm with Fade. What's "crazy" about it? I thought it was odd to do a bunch of runs connected with non-foot travel, but why is that crazy?

dcb, how about "off the deep end" or some suitable-to-your-story equivalent of "a few sandwiches short of a picnic"?

A few bricks short of a full load?

Should I feel guilty for wearing my Firefly shirt because people mistake it for a POW-MIA shirt? It uses the famous silhouette, but also has a silhouette of Serenity, and while it says "All Gave Some - Some Gave All," it also says "Serenity Valley."

I don't think the people who nod approval or tell me somberly that they approve are Firefly fans.

Fade Manley @374: Thank you for that.

Xopher: The runs are set courses in fixed locations. Normally, people run (or jog, or walk) one of these (free, timed 5K runs) on a Saturday morning. Running seven or eight of them in one day, complete with car, bike or public transport travel in between, is... rather more difficult. In context, "this crazy event" implies something out of the ordinary, which some people might think excessive - but which is also a very good, positive challenge. To my mind, "crazy" encapsulates this quite well. However, having been informed that the use of this word might be considered problematic by some people with mental health problems (whom I would never call crazy) I'm trying to find an alternative.

abi @376: I've considered "this nutty event"- but when I went onto some websites to read up about this I read that if someone objects to "crazy" then "nuts" or "bananas" are also considered inappropriate.

Note: I'm not using it to label a person.

OtterB @378: nope. The former goes too far and the latter doesn't work at all (I'm not referring to a person, for one thing).

Serge Broom @379: Like "a few sandwiches short of a picnic", "a few bricks short of a load" really doesn't convey what I'm trying for at all.

dcb, #370: What about "eccentric"? Or even "bizarrely eccentric"?

Xopher, #380: If that were happening to me, the shirt would promptly be assigned to the "only wear this for things where there are going to be high concentrations of other fans" group. If people aren't getting it, wear it preferentially where people are likely to get it.

Lee @382: Those don't work either. I was trying for a jokey, light hearted and positive tone - some people may think doing this is extreme and crazy, others might not. But if it's crazy then it's crazy in a positive way.

Never mind. Fade Manley @374 answered my question - confirming that some people might find the use of "crazy" offensive in any context. The other responses have confirmed that there is no appropriate synonym for the idea I'm trying to convey. Forget it.

#362 ::: Lee

Even t-shirts.... If I'm buying online, I'll probably have to choose between a men's cut and a women's cut for the shirt, even if the slogan is the same. I miss being able to just buy a t-shirt.

dcb: Eccentric? Extreme? Wildly eccentric?

dcb... Bonkers?

dcb: I appreciate your consideration of others in your wording. Would something like "wild" do - as in wild party, wild night out - even if it doesn't convey quite the same sense?

dcb - how about unhinged?

Nancy Lebovitz @384, it seems to me (and I could be wrong) that "mens t-shirts" are what were formerly just "ordinary" t-shirts, with straight sides.

As opposed to women's t-shirts, which tend to be wider at the chest and narrower at the waist, and are sometime cut shorter in length.

Thinking about it, it might be a positive step that the previously unmarked case is now marked.

388 ::: Cassy B.

Yes, the men's shirts are what used to be standard t-shirts. As a matter of my somewhat vague gender identification, I strongly prefer being able to buy non-gendered t-shirts. It's a thing in my head, not about the physical features of the shirt.

388 ::: Cassy B.

Yes, the men's shirts are what used to be standard t-shirts. As a matter of my somewhat vague gender identification, I strongly prefer being able to buy non-gendered t-shirts. It's a thing in my head, not about the physical features of the shirt.

Clifton #386 & dcb:

I was about to suggest "wild & challenging".

"I don't think we should be focusing on Loki. That guy's brain is a bag full of cats. You can smell crazy on him.'
- Bruce Banner

Cassy, Nancy: Okay, professional expertise here. We call the standard T-shirt "unisex". Both men and women buy and wear them. Depending on the manufacturer, we may order the blanks as "men's", "unisex", or "adult".

Women's-cut shirts... are a whole different nest of snakes. There is a reason we don't carry women's-cut shirts in most of our designs. In one catalog from one supplier alone, there are 72 different cuts of shirt labeled "women's", and no matter which one we use, the women who prefer women's-cut shirts will say we have the wrong kind. The sleeves are too short or too long, they wanted a crew-neck or a V-neck or a scoop-neck, the torso is too short or too long or too wide or too narrow, they wear a size [X] shirt but our size [X] doesn't fit, etc. We do print a very few designs (those targeted specifically to the female market) on one variety of women's-cut shirt, but even on those we also print them on unisex shirts... and more women will buy those than the women's-cuts.

I stand by my previous statement. The standard-cut adult-size T-shirt is ungendered.

Buddy of mine, upon seeing "The Gunfighter," offered up this meta-analysis:

That was awesome. Apart from the excellent comedy, I like the "If we start shooting, the voice wins" nice commentary on divisive contemporary media. Also, a hopeful (at first) take on privacy loss / domestic spying / etc. -- that we might all behave better without our secrets. Or not, as it turns out!

393 ::: Lee @393, I appreciate your professional expertise.

I am one of those who usually buys ungendered or "men's" t-shirts; I'm curvy but long-torsoed, and the short-midriff cut of many (but not all) women's-cut t-shirts is unflattering on me.

Cassy

I just got a call from one of those "Computer technical support" guys. Asked him if his mother knew what he was doing, and if she would be disappointed, or maybe she raised him to be a crook. Got him angry enough for him to tell me to fuck off.

Meanwhile . . . someone flew a camera drone through a fireworks show!

Fireworks drone view

The Indonesian food for America Day turned out delicious, although I want to play with the balance of spices, and maybe put the lemongrass etc in a cheesecloth next time so it can be fished out.

Nancy Lebovitz @311: that is most excellent, and now I am working on figuring out how one's gender could be 'sovereign'. I am master of my own, perhaps?

Rikibeth @314, your kid is excellent. I may use that next time. Although I am fond of: "my orientation is 'people are cute and I can't deal with it' and my gender identity is 'crap, there's a test? I didn't study for it!'" still doesn't quite fit. what is gender anyway.

Nancy Lebovitz @317: a gender which is too real to be named
*contemplates* I like it.

Xopher @322: I've gone around saying "my gender identity is 'transvestite'" for a little while now, partly because I'm annoyed at the people who claim transvestism is inherently appropriative of transgender experience, and partly because neither gender's typical clothing feels consistently right, so I'm pretty much always in drag if I'm in a recognizably gendered aesthetic.

@words thread: today in "words matter" news, I discovered that my sibling uses the term "self-harm" to refer to any action that a person takes that results in harm to them, except for a truly unforeseeable accident: for instance, negligently walking into something that they really should have seen, or smoking. Whereas it's deeply important to me to only use "self-harm" to indicate actions taken with the intent of causing harm to oneself. The depth to which I care about this and their to-me-inexplicable-and-obstinate refusal to change their definition surprised me quite a lot.

Well, that was interesting. Somebody pretended to be me on Slacktivist. Rather, that person used my name to spew out rather vile things that were so unlike what I'd say that others recognized him as a troll. I don't think I was hacked. This was apparently done by some loser who hangs out there and who regularly swipes other people's names.

dcb@367: "Ludicrous" or "ridiculous" are often used in the same place that "crazy" could be, and they have no connotations involving mental illness. They both sound a little disapproving, but everything within half a mile of "unusual" does. The English language is a tool of the Man, and it's keeping us down!

398
I knew it wasn't you.

Stefan @396 Someone did that at our local fireworks last night. It was pretty annoying actually, since there was a constant little red light and a blinky green light, up, in the way of viewing the fireworks.

dcb @381: Running seven or eight of them in one day, complete with car, bike or public transport travel in between, is... rather more difficult.

My phrase for this would be "ridiculously extreme."

Stefan Jones @396: Fireworks drone view

I'd love to see that done in 3D.

There's a positive facet of "crazy" that "ridiculous" doesn't have: "crazy like a fox", "crazy wisdom", "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct."

I think "absurd" shares a little of the same positive facet, mostly because of "credo quia absurdum".

And "wild" does too.

So to modify Soon Lee's modification of dcb's suggestion, maybe instead of "lunatic event" you could say "wild and absurd event".

estelendur 397: I'm pretty much always in drag if I'm in a recognizably gendered aesthetic.

One of the interviewees in Word Is Out said "We're all born naked, so anything that anyone wears at any time is drag."

Serge 398: Same thing happened to me a while back. Before the people there who knew me came in, others had already named the troll. Apparently his style is quite consistent (in other words, he's Johnny One-Note).

PJ @343
Yay! If the exhibit makes it to NYC area, let me know.

Just out of curiosity, is there an end-run around this Hobby Lobby bullshit? Can their female employees go to the exchange during the next open enrollment and get a different plan, since their employer has gotten exempted from offering full coverage?

dcb@370, I was thinking "silly" might work, especially if walking rather than running were involved, though Nancy's suggestion of "eccentric" or some of the multi-word descriptions are probably better.

I'd always interpreted the "sticks and stones" thing as primarily to teach young boys that hitting people who hadn't hit you first wasn't a necessary or appropriate response.

The spammer over on the other thread has "locksmith" in their name, and I had a pleasant lock-related event the other night, so I'll use that as an excuse to tell it here.

I was over at the storage place cleaning out junk, and one of the neighbors there, whom I've met before, came by looking for help; she'd just locked her purse in her storage unit, complete with her car keys, storage unit key, spare storage unit key, phone, etc. None of the tools I had with me were appropriate for opening the lock except by doing significant damage to the door, but I've got a friend C__ who lives across town and for some years has been corrupting all of our friends by teaching us lockpicking. So I called her, and soon she came by with her box of picks, and the friend who'd been visiting her toting a bolt cutter, and a minute or two after that the padlock was unlocked and the purse retrieved. A good, or at least improved, time was had by all.

(Lockpicking's legal in most states, if you're not picking a lock you're not supposed to, and it's popular computer-hacker recreation. In California, if you're not a licensed locksmith, you can't accept money for working on locks, but you can still do favors for your friends. C__ complains that most locksmiths don't know how to pick locks; it's an art, but cutting or drilling the lock and selling the customer a new one is a lot more reliably. I really need to find my picks, which are in some random toolbox, and probably should also get a bolt-cutter to keep in my car as a backup.)

Lee @ 406

As far as I know, buying an exchange plan instead of taking the Hobby Lobby plan would be possible, but I see no reason anyone would.

The holding depends on the fact that there is already a system in place for providing problematic forms of contraception when the employer objects; from the employee's point of view, it should be exactly the same whether the employer pays the insurer directly or not (in the workaround, the insurer pays directly; it works since contraception is cheap relative to pregnancy). Nothing employee-facing is any different between Hobby Lobby's plan and a "normal" plan; it's just the accounting at the insurer that is different.

Since we're talking locksmiths and locks, I'll tell my latest story, which involves a locksmith but is more about the positive uses of social media.

I'm moving to Boston. Dorchester, specifically. The closing on the condo was Monday, and I've been here with my Awesome Kid all week, painting the place and getting administrative stuff done. My parents (who own it) were very firm that we should get the locks changed ASAP, on the grounds that we had no idea who the last owner had given keys to over the last seven years.

Well. No phone book for choosing one at random, and I'd rather have a recommendation anyway.

There's a Twitter account I've been following since we started house-hunting, called @WelconeToDot. Sort of a neighborhood gossip for Dorchester (lately it's been retweeting a lot of kvetching about neighbors with fireworks). So I put out a tweet saying "Boston friends & @WelcomeToDot, recommendations for a locksmith? Not an emergency, just need doors re-keyed." @WelcomeToDot retweeted me, and within about 10 minutes I had an enthusiastic suggestion. Called him, made an appointment for two days later, and the job was done entirely satisfactorily.

So bless Twitter for letting me reach out like that!

Taking "ludicrous" as a starting point, how about ironically going to the opposite, as in "a not at all ludicrous notion" or whatever?

Re: un-gendered clothes. I think 'work clothes', eg, overalls, dusters, steel toed boots, generic t-shirts, might qualify. Yes, some are re-cut specifically for men or women, but the ur-examples are so function oriented as to be gender less. Which is to say, they fit well enough for the job to be done, but poorly enough to be obvious that they aren't for social signaling. As noted, it doesn't take much alteration to gender clothes. Maybe the definition of un-gendered clothes are one worn where signaling is irrelevant to oneself.

Of course, wearing such things is a masculine privilege, so...
I'm just speculating here. I hope no offense is taken.

I get that part of the difference underlying the ungendered-vs-women's clothing skewed dichotomy is that men's apparel is clothing, while apparently women's clothing is fashion. A plain T-shaped upper body garment is, in the dim times, a utility piece of underwear that managed to seep its way to the surface for a variety of reasons (US summer weather being perhaps the chief of these). The same shirt cunningly shaped is about being (sexually, I would gather) attractive, not just clothed. There's typically going to be some difference around the waist between men's and women's pants because of the difference in hip structure, but again I deduce that after that women's jeans are again driven as much by fashion as by fit (not a lot of the latter considering all the complaining I hear).

Personally, my big beef about T shirts is that the tails are all too often too short for long-waisted people such as myself.

Lee @ 406: An American friend who did research on this said that the biggest issue with Hobby Lobby is that they're trying to use their religious exemption to have their cake and eat it too: To not cover every contraceptive (Apparently some forms are covered) AND still be allowed to claim the 100% coverage that prevents their employees from being able to look elsewhere.

C. Wingate @ 414: I hope you're talking from the designer perspective. Because otherwise you're putting a lot of assumptions on the women who choose to buy women's t-shirts, and since you said not one word about comfort, I'll just say you missed a little.

(I even have some women's t-shirts of "the wrong cut", per Lee @ 393, which are still an improvement over unisex t-shirts and their assumption my shoulders go halfway down my upper arm.)

#413 ::: Kimiko

The starting point for me thinking about ungendered clothing was a rant about unisex clothing being intolerably dull.

I don't feel quite that strongly on the subject, but I started wondering about unisex clothing which is fun and/or expressive.

415
I've been dressing close to generic unisex for years. Basic white shirt for work, either long or short sleeved - with pocket(s) because I could drop the badge in the pocket and keep it out of the way - and slacks; generic craft-store tee and jeans on weekends. Jeans and slacks are a problem, because stores tend to stock 'stylish for 20-somethings' more than 'comfortable'.

I shop at Goodwill on the weekend now and then. If I find a nice shirt or pair of pants, it pays off. Being preworn tends to take off that "brand-new" edge.

While "crazy" is problematic, what about "crazily"? Doesn't seem to me to carry quite the same connotations, or at least to be as directly involved, as in "some people might say it's crazy, but ...". My first mental response to dcb's original post was "over-enthusiastic", so what about "crazily over-enthusiastic" as a possibility?

Re: T-shirts: OK, I'm short and at least plump. If a man's T-shirt is going to fit my chest, it will not only come halfway down my shoulders (which are narrow even for thin women), but also end up down below my all-too-well-padded bum, almost able (but oh, not quite) to audition for an overly tight minidress. It certainly doesn't work over jeans, and if tucked inside, looks like I'd crammed a whole other T-shirt in there. Women's petite for me every time. I really regret not being able to wear a few of spouse's souvenirs from networking conferences, but them's the breaks.

It amuses me that XL t-shirts fit me well because I sure don't feel extra large.

Some medical scrubs are unisex; others are modified in a femme direction. I don't think I've seen any that looked masculine-only, i.e. would cause raised eyebrows if worn by a woman.

Thanks, everyone, for the suggestions. Some (such as "ludicrous" or "ridiculous" or "silly") really don't convey what I was trying for at all; others are closer.

Eccentric isn't quite there. "Challenging but fun event" might just about work... or following on from joann @419, perhaps "enthusiastic (!) event." (I'm also keen not to add in too many words as I'm presently editing to get the book back down to c.100,000 words, as indicated in the contract. 10 days ago I realised it had crept up to nearly 108,000 but I've reduced it to about 101,500 at the moment.)

Note: I've just been speaking with a relative who is a psychologist working in clinical mental health and she agrees that it's problematic, that there are no good synonyms without the same potential mental health connotations as crazy, and has said she'll discuss it with her colleagues. I'll let you know if I get anything useful back from her.

Jacque @402: re. "ridiculously extreme" that really does depend on your POV. Compared to the events I've already mentioned, or something like the Bob Graham Round (66 miles, 42 peaks, about 27,000 feet of ascent - to be completed in under 24 hours) it's a doddle! (I dream of being able to consider starting to train to attempt a Bob Graham Round, and that's with six 50-mile trail ultras behind me.)

Serge Broom @398: Symapthies re. the troll wearing your name.

Would "An (extremely) odd thing to do" be a more neutral way of phrasing "crazy"?

dcb @ 423... The strange thing is that I don't think I'd ever visited Slacktivist so I wonder where the troll had come across my name. Thankfully, PJ Evans and others who are familiar with m blogging very quickly spotted that racist loser as not-me.

Serge @ 425: Well, we had a troll who was sockpuppetting regulars' names here during the threads about the Hugos, and someone said the same one was active on Slacktivist then (Including using Teresa's name there.). So it could be old carryover from that. Why they'd use your name this long after, I don't know.

dcb @ 423: "over-the-top"?

Sten @424: but I don't think it's odd!

janetl @427: "over-the-top" doesn't work because it's NOT. The only reason I didn't take part in it last year (I would have loved to) is because I was away that weekend doing 30 miles one day, 16 miles the next day recce runs for the Lakeland 50 (miles) a month later.

Lenora Rose @ 426... Why? Who knows what lurks in the hearts and minds of those losers? If he expected me to be peeved by his payback, it didn't work. Actually, I was rather amused.

dcb: I'm starting to get the feeling that no semi-synonym works because *you* don't actually think the idea is "crazy", either.

This is not intended as insult, but an observation that might make finding the right mindset of the person talking, and therefore the right word, easier.

Lenora Rose @430: Interesting. I'm the person talking/writing - this isn't a novel, it's a (hopefully inspirational) running book. And I find "this lunatic event" or "this crazy event" describes it just about right! It's sort of crazy - but in a GOOD way. Some people might find it excessive, but for others it's just a bit of a challenge or a fun way to spend the day. - The sort of thing where someone might say "that's crazy - let's go!" Does that help?

re 414: Yes, of course: gender labelling of clothing is something done by manufacturers/retailers, after all.

Well, the Nook for Windows app kinda sucks. I'm trying to use it to read the Hugo nominees. Anything you import is in one huge blob in the My Stuff section, with no way to move or organize anything.

I was going to just move everything onto the reader, but some things are only available as PDFs, and the Nook app doesn't handle them well at all. They show up illegibly small, and I haven't found anyway to change the size of the display (unlike the epub-format ones).

Also, with TWELVE stories included in support of Ellen Datlow's nomination as Best Editor - Short Form, if I put everything on the Nook app at once I'll get confused about what's nominated for what (because as noted above they're in one huge blob), and checking the nomination list isn't a good solution because after reading that many stories (of various lengths, and my brain really doesn't distinguish in memory between novellas and novelettes, for example) I won't necessarily remember which title went with which story (I know, I know, but it's a problem I've had).

So I'm going to let the categories drive, and go to the Nook app to read each story or novel excerpt in turn, and decide each piece of the ballot before moving on. That way I'll at least complete SOME categories.

Which is all way better than I would have done before the packet. I have no idea how people voted for Short Story before the internet, because unless you subscribed to ALL the magazines it was too late to acquire the nominated stories by the time the nominations came out.

I'd say moonstruck, but to most, I think it would mean under the influence of love. (Okay, I did say it, but I still think that.)

I forget to mention the most annoying thing. Though other things are more inconvenient, it's much more annoying that the User Guide button brings up ad copy about how great the Nook is. NO instruction on how to do anything, just happy horseshit about all the things it does and how much you're going to enjoy using it. Not even a FAQ.

The poor quality of the programming is inconvenient. Calling ad copy a User Guide is offensive.

I was looking up lyrics recently to "She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain" to see if the verses I remembered were standard or family inventions. I found a lot of different versions, naturally, and all of the verses I remembered were in there in one or another, but almost none had the sound effects, and none had all of them. Did anyone else sing this growing up, with sound effects? We used to call out a suitable sound after the first and second line of each verse, and after the last line would sing all of the sound effects so far in reverse order. (Snore sounds, scratch scratch, yum yum, chop chop, Hi Babe!, Whoa Bess!, Toot Toot!)

The only verse I don't remember singing was "We will all sing Hallelujah when she comes." Did anyone sing this? What was the sound effect? I could imagine "Praise God" or something similar.

@436:

Funny you should ask. My chorus had similar issues last April, when we sang "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain" at our children's concert. At the first rehearsal there was much spirited debate as to the "correct" stanzas and hand gestures. Interestingly, the conversation was entirely held by the women (mostly altos). The men watched us with stunned expressions as we argued "pink pajamas" and "Woo hoo!" vs "red pajamas" and "Scratch scratch". Finally, one of our baritones asked "Where do you learn this stuff? Is there some sort of secret class for girls?!" To which our female director chuckled and said "Careful, you're very close to the mysteries!"

What we settled on:
"She'll be comin' 'round the mountain when she comes" (Toot toot!)(pull whistle cord)
"...driving six white horses..." (Whoa back!) (pull back on reins)
"...wearing pink pajamas..." (Woo hoo!)(sensuously rub arm to feel fabric)
"And we'll all come out to greet her..." (Hi, babe!) (wave)
"And we'll all have chicken and dumplings..." (Yum yum!)(rub belly)
Repeat first verse.

dcb - out there?

Re: women's T-shirts-- My household has occasionally received gifts that came from Duluth Trading Co., so I knew who they were, but lately these commercials have been showing up on TV.

They advertise items of women's clothing, not according to how they might affect the perceptions of others about a woman's appearance, but according to how they function for the women wearing them. Radical. Revolutionary. I love them so much.

433
Calibre can handle PDFs, along with most other formats. KOBO's (free) desktop reader is also supposed to handle PDFs, and it's not hard to use.

Second the recommendation for Calibre for reading ebooks on a computer.

"Is there some sort of secret class for girls?!"

I've long been fascinated by the schoolyard and summer camp as transmitters of the oral tradition. I worked at a BSA camp for four years and I can definitively state that the subsection of songs that are used are very different than those I was exposed to at Girl Scout camp. (Of course, there's no reason for the Boy Scouts to have the song "Mountain Girls," for example.)

By the way, can anyone tell me why even a minor case of food poisoning is so incredibly draining? The incident was Wednesday, and this morning I was so exhausted I literally cried when I had to take the kids out. (And when I came back, slept for another three hours.)

It would be annoying if I had the strength to be annoyed by it.

I think food poisoning is so draining because the body tries to throw out anything that is in the stomach (and, usually, the kidneys) so there's no nutrition left in the system. And it generally clears out the intestinal flora/fauna as well, so digestion doesn't proceed smoothly even after the food poisoning is gone. Consider probiotics or yoghurt to help with that, if you haven't already.

Calibre is also useful for converting ebooks to your reader's preferred format - this might fix the PDF problem Xopher's having.

I suspect that food poisoning is draining for the same reason flu and bad colds are: ALL THE RESOURCES are spent fighting off the bug. (This implies to me that immune reactions are energy-expensive.) I caught whatever was going around back in May, and it absolutely flattened me, even without any particular GI distress. I'd long ago learned the hard way to stay hydrated when I get sick, but even so—whew! (Pro-tip: I figured out recently that bicycle-style water bottles are the right tool for the job: makes it possible to drink while lying down. Which is a blessing when even getting up to go to the bathroom requires ALL THE SPOONS.)

Xopher #433:

If you are using Nook for Windows and are dissatisfied with it, have you considered looking into Calibre? It's an open source/free software e-book reader/library/converter that runs on all the major desktop platforms (Windows/Mac/Linux).

It's able to interpret multiple ebook formats and display them, it'll allow you to edit the metadata on books (including adding your own), as well as search, sort, and organize based on that meta data, etc. I have, for instance, created a custom metadata field called "Hugo", and twelve ebooks have the value "2014.EditorShortForm.Datlow" for that field.

It is supposed to be able to connect with and download to devices, but I haven't bothered to figure out that part yet.

#444:I've got gestational diabetes, and milk products spike my blood sugar, so I can't right now. And Jacque, unfortunately one of the hallmarks of when I get food poisoning (only when I'm pregnant, dammit) is that water starts me retching. It's awful.

Thanks, everyone. I'll check out Calibre.

B. Durbin @448: there are non-milk probiotics as well -- check with a health-food store if you have a local one. And I'm sorry for your distress!

I am a supertaster. Well, was. Several months back, I noticed food tastes bland, and I can eat bitter things without flinching. In and of itself, it's not a problem. What is a problem is that my sensitive nose went away, too. The resulted in my getting the worst uti I've had in years, because the first line of detection is smell.

What could cause thie and how do I get it back

Kimiko @413, that's something to think about, yah. Although my problem is I'm vain: I want to show off the body I may or may not have (depending on gender presentation of the day) ;)

Serge @421: I wear an American Apparel women's Large t-shirt, and wear a 14 1/2 neck 32/33 sleeve men's button-down, which is nearly as small as they come. I think AA women's shirts run small, yah?

@452. zzzz.....

Lin Daniel, I've heard that zinc deficiency can affect one's sense of smell. Supplements worth a try?

You have to be careful with zinc. The Wikipedia page for anosmia (loss of smell) has a long laundry list of possible causes, including both zinc deficiency and the use of zinc-containing nasal sprays (including some labeled homeopathic).

The list of possible causes looks like anosmia would make a good symptom to appear in an episode of House, MD. I'd suggest asking your doctor about it.

Jacque @ #446

Urgh! This moose is currently under the weather with the worst cold in several years (not helped by accidental dehydration that sort of snuck up on me yesterday) A forced visit to the local supermarket for tissues, milk, cold remedies, etc., followed by drinking a lot of water seems to have improved matters, but I may still need another day off work. Bah!

Next move is to see if Berocca (sp?) improves things.

Lila @422:

Some medical scrubs are unisex; others are modified in a femme direction. I don't think I've seen any that looked masculine-only, i.e. would cause raised eyebrows if worn by a woman.

I can't offhand think of any clothing that would cause raised eyebrows if worn by a woman but not for a man, but that may be geographical, or just what sorts of people I tend to interact with most frequently. What sorts of clothing would do that where you're located?

(Some sorts of lack-of-clothing, notably going topless, would cause raised eyebrows when a woman does it but not a man, but I don't think that's the same thing.)

448
Acidophilus caplets and capsules work. (Had food poisoning. Once.)

lorax @ #458, if a woman showed up to work in the administrative dept. of the hospital I work at wearing a sportcoat, tie, oxford shirt, pants, and lace-up oxford shoes (i.e. the male uniform), there would be considerable buzz.

The female executive uniform is narrow knee-length skirt, heels, feminine blouse, jewelry, makeup and styled hair.

Cassy B @ #156:
I'm late getting here, but: the House has no role in Presidential nominations. It's the Senate whose advice and consent is required. (Yes, filibuster; but it's still essential to hold the Senate.)

PSA for anyone who, like me, is going to Worldcon and is staying offsite (anyone else staying at the HI hostel in Southwark?) with plans to public-transit it around London: London buses are no longer accepting cash fares. Best thing to do is to get a Visitor Oystercard, but those have to be ordered in advance and can take a few weeks to arrive.

(This was in the Progress Report, but I managed to miss it.)

Teka Lynn 437: I'd forgotten the hand motions! You're right, we used to do that. I didn't think this was a girl thing, though - how odd.

While we're on the subject of the Hugos, how does one judge the Editor categories? What does one look for?

Lila @459: The female executive uniform is narrow knee-length skirt,* heels,* feminine blouse, jewelry, makeup and styled hair.

Probably just as well I'll never be in a position to have to deal with that. That ensemble represents all of the worst characteristics of the "female" dress style, IMHO.

* The better to hobble the wimminfolk, and keep them in line.

Teka Lynn #437:

I pretty much learned your version, modulo the line about pink pajamas, which I do not remember *at all*. Where I learned what I did was in 4th grade music class (music teacher came by once a week, rolling her piano from classroom to classroom). We had hardbound songbooks, and I'll bet there's a whole lot of kids who were 9-10 in the mid-60s who had the same book.

Generally: I learned stuff there, other things at summer YWCA sleep-away camp, still other stuff at a YMCA day camp. There was almost no overlap, partly because both camps had a bunch of traditions, partly because the music counselor at the YWCA place was in the throes of the folk music movement.

Lila (459): a woman ... wearing a sportcoat, tie, oxford shirt, pants, and lace-up oxford shoes (i.e. the male uniform)

Minus the sportcoat and tie, that's what I wear to work all winter. And I do wear a blazer when the office heating is inadequate. (In summer, I usually wear a long, flowy skirt instead of the pants.) But I'm a librarian, and we're known for our sensible shoes and dowdy* clothing.

*This is no more accurate than any other stereotype. But it's not completely inaccurate, either.

Jacque, one of the things I like about being a physical therapist assistant is I never, ever have to wear heels, pantyhose, or makeup. I wear scrubs + athletic shoes for the inpatient job and polo/sweater + khakis + flats for the outpatient job. (Similar or identical to what a male colleague would wear.)

I don't object to skirts or dresses, but I'm profoundly uncomfortable being out in public in clothes I can't run or fight in. That rules out heels and pencil skirts.

Em @461 (and anyone else needing to use public transport at Worldcon): You can pick up a PAYG Oyster instantly at any tube / DLR / overground station but I don't know how easy it is to reclaim unused credit if you're not likely to visit London again for the foreseeable.

The best part about summer camp song tradition is when one of the counselors sings you a song that they're "not supposed to." I finally looked this one up, and it's a Tom Lehrer song! Rickety Tickety Tin

Teka Lynn #437:

Our version had "wearing her red flannels" (presumably an itchy wool union suit) with fingers clawed on the other arm, "scratch, scratch".

All extant versions imply the lady dressed, erm, casually when she went tearing round the mountain.

estelendur @ 452... Sizes for men and women are a great mystery to me, especially women's. That being said, I try to keep it simple for my own vestments. One reason I favor short-sleeved shirts is that my upper limbs are a tad on the longuish side, out of proportion to the rest of my tall self.

I think the only clothing sizes I've seen that make sense are men's jeans. Waist measurement in inches, inseam measurement in inches. Of course then they throw in different fit options to confuse the issue.

This is why I don't buy clothes online, or anywhere I can't try them on first.

@465, 470: The "pink pajamas" took me by surprise too. The version I had known, and everyone else I knew (mother, teachers, kids etc etc) was "red pajamas". You say "scratch scratch" while, well, scratching and with the appropriate look of distaste/irritation. She's clearly supposed to be wearing itchy flannel in this variant.

Where all the silky, sensuous pink pajama singers came from, I don't know, but at rehearsal I was in the minority.

B. Durbin, my much older sister sang that to me and my niece and nephew when we were little! I think all three of us still remember it (I know I do).

(She also read us The Hobbit, a chapter at a time, for bedtime stories. Favorite chapters: Riddles in the Dark and Flies and Spiders.)

@436: Oh! I do remember the "Hallelujah" stanza! I only sang that one at church. The response is "A-MEN!" while stomping your feet as loudly as possible.

Dave Crisp @468

Refunds on Visitor Oyster Card are described here.

It is possible to get either the full or visitor Oyster Card on arrival. The Full card has a higher deposit, but it can be refunded at a Ticket Office.

The main thing is to only use one method of loading your Oyster Card. Visitors to the UK apparently only need to show their passport, but if the top-up payments are a mix of cash and card-payments, they will only post you a cheque in sterling.

UK residents will need a proof of address.

The Oyster Card can carry virtual versions of the assorted travel cards and passes, or just money for Pay-As-You-Go. If it's just money you can let somebody else use the card.

It's possible that the full Oyster Card will work out less expensive, depending on how long you intend to stay in London, as you could buy a weekly Travelcard which would be loaded on the Oyster Card. That cannot be done with a visitor card.

Best check the details for yourself.

Is anyone else going to be at Detcon1? Should we consider trying to plan a Gathering of Light?

Mary Aileen, #466: I would say "practical" instead of "dowdy". While there's some overlap between the two, it's possible to wear clothing which is both practical and attractive.

My "professional woman" look, back when I had a day job, was blazer, slacks, nice blouse, and low-heeled pumps -- usually not flats, but with no more than 1" of heel, and some of them were wedges. Jewelry was earrings and maybe a necklace, makeup was lipstick and eyeliner, and my hair was however I was wearing it that year; I have zero patience for hair-styling routines that take half an hour. Sometimes I would wear a skirted suit, but never one with a pencil skirt.

OTOH, some of my female friends who are lawyers complain that the "courtroom uniform" still requires skirts and high heels -- and that wearing low heels or flats will get you a reprimand from the judge for "unprofessional dress". Mind you, the judge gets to wear robes.

It strikes me as slightly odd that in an Open Thread starting on the subject of bicycles, nobody has mentioned the Tour de France yet, which has just spent two days in Yorkshire. People seem to have been surprised by the crowds.

Mark Cavendish crashed in Harrogate and is out of the race.

Chris Froome is currently in fifth place.

The Sky Team decided not to include Sir Bradley Wiggins this year.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry started the race from Harewood House. Neither William nor Harry wore a necktie.

The Cóte de Buttertubs sounds odd, but there was the Cóte de Jenkin Street in Sheffield.

Tomorrow, Cambridge to London. No King of the Mountain points on the third stage, just an Intermediate Sprint in Epping Forest.

Lee@477

I'm going to Detcon. Having a Gathering of Light sounds fine to me.

Em @461: Actual Londoners can confirm, but I'm pretty sure that Oyster cards can be bought at all train stations and manned tube stations. It's how I got mine.

London after all runs on tourists and wouldn't make every tourist have to one through the mail.

We have a recording of Pete Seeger singing "She'll be coming round the mountain with the little additions at the end of each in (whoa back, scratch scratch, yum yum, and so on). Since it was audio only, I have no idea if he did the hand gestures.

Whereas I'd never encountered that aspect of the song until acquiring that recording as an adult. Just for a random bit of data.

Hallelujah/ amen/ stomp makes sense. I guess I didn't sing this in church. I really don't remember, but it could have been summer camp, family, or girl scouts. Family, I think.

We sang "Whoa, Bess" instead of "whoa back" - well, I *think* we did. I didn't get my first hearing aid until I was 15. We also did red flannel and scratch scratch. I had the impression that long underwear was referred to. And we sang the verse "We will kill the old red rooster when she comes (chop chop)" before the chicken & dumplings one. A lot of people apparently skip that one.

Lee (477): I would say "practical" instead of "dowdy". While there's some overlap between the two, it's possible to wear clothing which is both practical and attractive.

I agree. "Dowdy" was my nod to the librarian stereotype. In fact, most of what my colleagues and I wear is quite attractive as well as practical, and some of it is downright fashionable. Or just plain eccentric.
---------
Re "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain": We just sang it straight. I never heard of any of the additions (interjections/hand motions) until this thread.

Dave Bell @476: Now I'm Very Confused. The Tfl page says, "It is not possible to buy a Visitor Oyster card when you are in London." Also, different pages show different rates!

Lila @#459 I'd have to say that "female executive uniform" depends on the industry and role. One interview where I came in a suit, first person I met was a woman in jeans, running shoes, and I think a sweater, who introduced herself just as "Josée" - she was the Chief Operating Officer of the corporation and effectively President, in a software-as-a-service business.

The CTO was a male, dressed about the same.

Similarly, in a different software company, I worked for a VP who tended to dress much like any of the software team, jeans and shirts. Now, at board meetings or the like, she would dress "business", just as at the Christmas party she would wear a dress.

But in the office, we pretty much all wear/wore polo and jeans as the daily uniform.

One woman who was my manager transferred to a sales engineering job. She commented that her clothing expenditures skyrocketed because she again had to have "consulting clothes" as you describe.

AKICIML: Has anyone read Apparitions: Ghosts of Old Edo? (collection by Miyuki Miyabe; copyright 2000, published in 2013 in the U.S.) The story "The 'Oni' of the Adachi House" has some fascinating resemblances -- in mechanisms, not in plot -- to "Casey Agonistes", making me wonder whether McKenna (who served in a river gunboat in China, and in WWII and Korea) may have picked up some interesting tropes to drop into his stories, without the bleedover of structure that I'm told is visible in Cordwainer Smith. Can anyone comment knowledgeably on whether Oni appear in Chinese or Korean mythology as well as Japanese?

McKenna died at about the same age as Mike Ford, and left far less material because he'd only started writing for publication after his Navy retirement sent him to college. I'd love a peek into the parallel world where he had more time to turn out his idiosyncratic work.

Where I worked, if someone showed up in a suit, wearing a tie, or otherwise in Serious Business Dress, we'd ask if they had something else going that day. Even the big managers didn't usually dress like that.

Serge Broom @ 323: one would \hope/ the staircases go both ways; I recall a kids' book about a firehouse pole that was installed upside-down, with resulting mayhem....

albatross @ 327: ah yes, the world catches up with SF again; see (e.g.) the Pohl story about a tabletop town, and the manipulation of Delphi odds in Brunner's The Shockwave Rider.

Charlie Stross @ 359: what a mess! Mine at least had the courtesy to die in the middle of December -- although it did so the day after the most usable outdoor steps were ripped out (to be replaced by something less likely to acquire a thin but firmly-attached layer of sheer ice).
      @ 360: I've been hearing lots of moaning recently about London costing significantly >$1000 from the US East Coast. (I was very amused recently when Delta stock fell on their report that weak demand was lowering their international revenues; isn't it nice when the free market actually works?) And that can be a lot of money for a small convention; other GoH costs are nowhere near that size at most U.S. conventions.

various, re T-shirts: Boskone used to get noise from a strongly-figured member about the lack of female-cut convention T-shirts; she felt that the default ("male"?) cut was too tight. We tried them; they sold badly. Possibly because they just weren't made as well. (I don't know whether the person in charge of T-shirts didn't look far enough -- is it even possible to find a shirt with extra chest room in 100% cotton? -- but I hear a lot about female-specific clothing typically being not as well-made as male-specific.)

Sam Chevre @ 410: the problem with that approach is that in order for the employees to get govt. coverage the employer must (per news later this week) sign a form attesting that contraception is excluded from their ACA-mandated coverage for religious reasons; SCOTUS made an emergency ruling (just before baling for the summer) in favor of Wheaton College that even requiring this form was an inappropriate burden on the religious.

B. Durbin @ 443: what do you call a minor case? I've had suspected cases that didn't involve "trying to expel everything" (thanks for the reminder, Tom...) that snuck up on me for that reason; alternating chills (>3 blankets) with fever (blankets? are you <not-all-there>?) can be draining by themselves. Possibly the body reacts so severely because evolution (e.g., ]tribes[ with vigorous displays will have fewer people incapacitated by a semi-common food pool)?

re office clothing: my penultimate tech job featured "casual Fridays" -- which all of the line people I knew (and many of the managers) ignored because they dressed to suit themselves (especially in summer, when the A/C went off at 6pm). The one exception was a woman who dressed much more sharply on Fridays; I guessed that she went out on the town straight from work but never asked.

CHip @ 488... Like the pole that Adam West used to slide back up to Wayne Manor?

CHip, Serge:

In Patricia C. Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles, there's a magician whose house has two staircases, of which one only goes up and the other only goes down.

Thanks very much for the advice re: Oyster cards. I think I'll wait and just pick up a zone 1-3 one with a week on it (that covers buses as well as the Tube, right? And the DLR?) since I'm going to be spending eight days in town.

While I'm soliciting advice, there is one night during the con when I'm likely going to be departing too late to take public transit (paaaarties!), and while there are many places where I'm willing to walk for an hour and a bit by myself at one in the morning, London isn't one of them. Is there a cheap cab company? Do they take credit cards, or should I be sure to have cash on hand? How much can I expect to pay for a five-mile trip? I'd appreciate any advice. I've been to London a bunch of times, but not this area of it - mostly I stay in and around the West End and the museums and only venture further during the day, so cabs have not been a consideration.

#488 CHip: A "minor case" for me is one in which the expulsion of food from the wrong end only lasts a comparatively short period of time, as opposed to the case I got with my first pregnancy, which consisted of twelve hours of me lying on the cold bathroom floor, inadequately dressed, because any time I tried to move I'd start retching again. Food poisoning is always miserable, but that was sheer torture.