One thing I've not seen mentioned anywhere yet is how deep the river is, how wide, how fast the currents, etc. Does anyone know?
Hmmmm.
When I first encountered the word "gay" as a word that didn't mean "homosexual" and also didn't mean "happy and frolicky", it was on Battlenet playing Starcraft. There, it refers to a "cheap"/"cheesy"/"cheating"/otherwise dishonorable tactic, or alternately an exceptionally clever tactic designed to infuriate the opponent so thoroughly that (assuming they survive the tactic) they become unable to think straight and ultimately lose the game. (How one viewed it tended to depend on whether one was using it on someone, or was the target.)
Likewise, when "stupid" or "lame" is used in that kind of context, it doesn't actually mean stupidity (or idiocy, as "wally" would imply). It's actually almost the opposite - sort of a form of "clever" except laden with negative connotations.
From there, for me anyhow, the term "gay" sort of continued to develop to encompass cleverness-with-negative-connotations in all sorts of situations other than video games. It's a little like Nelson on the Simpsons doing his "ha ha!" point-and-laugh.
So that's where we are now, when people can say "banning gay marriage is so gay!" and mean entirely different things with the first "gay" and the second. Because the word no longer means "homosexual", anymore than it refers to happy frolickingness nowadays either. Also it's everywhere. Sure, sensitive people will refrain from using it in the presence of homosexuals, but other than that I don't think it's going to get stamped out.
On the bright side, though, every generation has its slang, and sooner or later it'll fade out as younger people want to differentiate themselves from the people who came before.
#101 D.: The things one can do with any of those words and an appropriate grimace are limitless.
Heh. There's a chat channel I belong to where I can convey a wide variety of things just by how I spell "hmm."
I have suppressed the urge to rant about this particular matter, but it gets harder, and I am reminded that many people have insufficient vocabularies.
I hope you're not insinuating that I'm asking the question because you think I lack vocabulary. I'm asking because there are a number of social contexts where it becomes relevant to use a shorthand term and quickly move on. Everyone within the context knows what is meant, communication successfully occurs, and stopping to be extra articulate (or adding qualifiers like "no offense to [group of people]" for that matter) just doesn't fit. It's sort of a "when in Rome" thing.
#105 dcb: For a person, why not use "You're a right wally"? (New Oxford Dictionary of English defines a "wally" as "a silly or inept person")
Silly or inept people might object to that.
Or is that too lacking in clout because it doesn't actually "highlight the perceived negative qualities of a particular group of people"?
My question was to find a word to replace those that highlight perceived negative qualities of groups of people. :p Surely you've noticed the same thing about insulting shorthand terms? Especially since your suggestion is another one? Ever wonder why that is?
I like Michael Weholt's list. ;)
No idea yet what I'll start using. Possibly "rubbish."
Hmm... okay, so "gay" is bad, as is "lame" and "retarded" and "crazy" and "idiot" and ... well, just about every shorthand insult is based upon highlighting the perceived negative qualities of a particular group of people. There are times, though, when I'd rather just say "omg that's so [fill-in-blank]" and get on with things, and not stop to rant out a full-fledged dissertation about exactly what I've just found offensive. That's the whole point of having shorthands. Anyone have a suggestion for a good, one-word, all-purpose word to fill in my blank with?
#65 Leah Miller: I suppose I conventionally think of fanfic as "derivative works produced by fans of currently copyrighted material without permission from the author." But that's not the real definition, it's just what comes to mind for me.
Hmmm. "Derivative works produced by fans of currently copyrighted material without creative control from the author." ?
Meg Thornton #81: What, no hot stock tips? How about the notices from Myspace? Or the animated porn images?
Mine is mostly nonsense spam - random words and phrases thrown together for both the sender and subject line. I never open any of them. It breaks my brain enough already just trying to parse meaning out of the subject lines.
Unfortunately, because I check a colleague's email for him when he's out of town, I have to actually look at the spam there to make sure they aren't ham (I don't know who all of his colleagues are). He gets at least ten times more than me. It's how I know what any of them say, because otherwise I wouldn't open those, either. The IT dept has recently put in some new filters, though, so hopefully there will be many fewer of them next time he wants me to check his email. (He likes having me do it so that he doesn't have to filter the spam while he's out of town....)
*reads moon article*
*twitch*
o.O
My work email is through Mozilla, which has a decent set of filtering options of the form "If [from/to/cc/bcc/subject/etc] [is/contains/begins with/ends with] ABC, then [move to XYZ folder/flag in some way/delete]." As blacklisting goes, it works well.
All it needs now is to have it set up in the opposite direction for wall gardens (where all email is rejected unless it's on a whitelist). I have two email addresses that are set up as wall gardens, but they require me to specify the exact email address that is approved. This is bad if I might get a number of different ones from, say, a utility company or bank. Such places tend to have a "send out mass info/no replying" address, a "send out monthly account info/no replying" address, a "confirmation that you've paid us" address, a "what we use to reply to a problem you've initiated a discussion about" address (can be several people), etc. It would work a lot better if I can say "approve anything with a sender that contains 'company-name' somewhere in it."
I once lived near a small university where one of their slogans was "Where the women are women, and the men are too."
Marilee - actually that would be "androgyne." "Hermaphrodite" would refer to the physical sex organs, not the gender of the brain.
Sex is determined by genes (presence of XX or XY chromosomes). Brain gender (wiring for abilities, behavior, etc.) is determined by hormones during fetal development. Lots of things can go wrong during fetal development. If the sex organs get screwed up, you end up with intersex individuals. Then there are all the ways bad hormone timing can screw up brain development, one of which is that the brain gets wired for the opposite gender from what the genes say. That's where transsexuals come from. (Organic chem joke - some people like to think of "normal" people as being cis. ;) )
Oh wait. I do know one other good link. Venus Envy isn't an intro text per se, it's a cartoon about a teen MTF that's drawn by an MTF, and it's also very enlightening.
Also, just found this 101 intro and an FTM site for the opposite perspective from Jennifer's primarily MTF site.
@#93 Caroline: here's a slightly more direct page to her Gender Dysphoria 101 - it's the first one I read and therefore the one I tend to refer people to. There are others, but I've not found any that were quite as illuminating as that one. (And alas, now that I go back and look for the other ones I used to know, the links all seem to be broken.) Other than that, the best thing to do is to ask some real transpeople about their experiences. The main point to remember there is that you use the pronoun that they ask you to use, regardless of their actual physical appearance.
About the BBC test - the flip side of looking at it as "women are bad at math and science" is that "men can't multitask worth crap, and are terrible at remembering the locations of each specific thing in a big disorganized mass of things" (the memory test with the cartoon household objects where some got switched in the second set; all I had to do was read the instructions and I already knew I was screwed). I've been noticing this firsthand in the past several months of working at a busy Chinese takeout, where the manager is female and expected me to have all of the same abilities to match up people's faces with their food orders (without looking at the tickets), and remember whose tickets belong to whom, and in what order they were placed there, even though we just tack them up with magnets in random order. She's also amazing for her ability to remember who ordered what without writing anything down (sometimes it gets busy enough in there that she doesn't have time), and in matching them to their phone numbers. After several massive screwups on my part, she's finally starting to realize why I do things the way I do, and not the way she does them, and no longer complains about it. At some point soon I'll probably write up a lengthy diatribe of my gender clash experiences on that front.
Hmmmm.
Gender is not actually the same thing as sex. It is possible to have a male brain, with masculine abilities and interests and reactions to things, while also having female body parts. And vice versa: a female brain with feminine abilities, interests, and reactions, while also having male body parts. Sometimes you can't just check your pants to find the answer.
Stuff that's working right is seamless and invisible and looks easy. It's only when something is wrong, or broken, or unfinished, that the something gets noticed.
Are there real, significant differences between genders? Do they matter? Ask a transperson and they will tell you yes.
Transgender 101 here
#38 Darkrose said: "The Pentagon said U.S. Northern Command was monitoring the situation from its headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado,"
I bet the SGC was worried about replicators. Think maybe they called Rodney in from Atlantis?
What, Carter isn't good enough for you??
Would pitch sessions make more sense for nonfiction?
Regarding my comment at 169 - that was meant kiddingly. ;) I have no special "inside knowledge" to the workings of "Julie Field's" mind. I just saw someone link to the Wikipedia entry, followed it, read it, and saw what I saw...
Of course, now I'm curious whether an Atlanta Nights chapter is really going to get submitted, and if so which one. ;)
Hmmmm. The Wikipedia entry mentions chapter 15 of Atlanta Nights. Does that count as fiction that TNH has written? ;)
*perks up* You can get paid to break software? Where?
(and here I've been doing it for free...)
Yay working "view all by"!
One thing I've been wondering for a long time now ... if people throw their hats in the air to celebrate things, do they ever get their hats back at the end? Or do they make sure only to bring disposable hats to such occasions?
I know I'm easily confused here, especially since this blog seems to have become one of my primary sources of news ... but ...
3. Bush’s Post-Katrina Power Grab - We’ve all noticed how often these changes, supposedly intended to fight terrorism, are neither needed nor used for that purpose, and how almost all of them reduce our liberty and our protection under the law.
From the comments to "Never counting the cost" a few entries down:
Gary Townsend said: As commentators Eric Alterman and Mark Green have reported, Bush's 'advisors have admitted that the staff usually limits him to three or four thirty- to forty-five minute "policy time" sessions per week, about what Bill Clinton engaged in per day. Then, more often than not, the president sloughs off responsibility with the admonishment, "You guys decide it."
If this is true - the president is not, in fact, actually doing the job that we're paying him to do - then who is really responsible for all the power grabbing?
(I also realize that someone might've addressed this somewhere already; I haven't had time to read the other thread in detail yet (been a bit absorbed with Miss Snark lately ;) ). Sorry if I'm going over stuff that's already been gone over.)
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