baubles of my mind's eye

avioletintheyouth:

ironmangetlow:

WHATS THIS? 

WHY, IT’S A MOTHERFUCKING INTERROBANG.

Not only does it have a sweet-ass name, but it’s a fucking amazing piece of punctuation.

Does your teacher bitch at you for using a “?” and a “!”? Well then, this is the thing for you!  YOU JUST PULL THIS BITCH OUT, AND WIPE THE GRIN OFF THAT  MOTHER-FUCKER’S FACE. Watch as their mind is blown that you’re using famous punctuation from the NINETEEN SIXTIES.

True. Fucking. Facts. This glorious character was invented by Martin K. Spekter in 1962. That’s right, even its creator had a bad-ass name.

BUT. ALAS. THIS MIND-BLOWING, ELEPHANT ORGASMING PUNCTUATION NEVER GOT TO BE  DECLARED  “OFFICIAL”. That’s why it doesn’t show up in all your fancy ass computer fonts.

SO YOU KNOW WHAT I SAY‽ I SAY WE BRING BACK THE INTERROBANG. USE IT WHEN YOU CAN. SPREAD THE WORD. RE-BLOG THIS SHIT. 

shit i’d interrobang dat

I WOULD INTERROBANG DAT. 

(Source: the-brass-savateuse, via jetstomadrid)

crashinglybeautiful:

Definition

pronunciation | “kO-mO-‘re-bE\ 

(Thank you, theantidote & other-wordly)

(via guerrillamamamedicine)

kiskolee:

L’esprit de escalier is the story of my life.
Also, pochemuchka.

(Source: youwereyourownpony, via guerrillamamamedicine)

fishy:

bibliosaurus:

wideeyedoptimist:

The following vocalizations are fairly common to most cats:

• Short meow: ”Hey, how ya doin’?”
• Multiple meows: ”I’m so happy to see you! Where’ve you been? I missed you!”
• Mid-pitch meow: A plea for something, usually dinner, treats,…

(Source: catster.com)

fahshion:

20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words from Around the World

Toska - Russian – Vladmir Nabokov describes it best: “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”

Mamihlapinatapei - Yagan (indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego) – “the wordless, yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start” 

Jayus - Indonesian – “A joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but laugh”

Kyoikumama - Japanese – “A mother who relentlessly pushes her children toward academic achievement”  

Tartle - Scottish – The act of hestitating while introducing someone because you’ve forgotten their name. 

Cafuné - Brazilian Portuguese – “The act of tenderly running one’s fingers through someone’s hair.” 

Wabi-Sabi - Japanese – Much has been written on this Japanese concept, but in a sentence, one might be able to understand it as “a way of living that focuses on finding beauty within the imperfections of life and accepting peacefully the natural cycle of growth and decay.”

Tingo - Pascuense (Easter Island) – Hopefully this isn’t a word you’d need often: “the act of taking objects one desires from the house of a friend by gradually borrowing all of them.” 

L’appel du vide - French – “The call of the void” is this French expression’s literal translation, but more significantly it’s used to describe the instinctive urge to jump from high places.

Ya’aburnee - Arabic – Both morbid and beautiful at once, this incantatory word means “You bury me,” a declaration of one’s hope that they’ll die before another person because of how difficult it would be to live without them.

Saudade - Portuguese – One of the most beautiful of all words, translatable or not, this word “refers to the feeling of longing for something or someone that you love and which is lost.” Fado music, a type of mournful singing, relates to saudade.

(click through to source for a couple more)

Ya’aburnee is so beautiful.

(via plushieborg)

nathanonline:

There are many things rape is not:

• consensual sex
• affectionate contact
• a bear hug
• a tackle
• eye contact
• an argument
• a surprise
• overburdening
• an athletic loss
• a neutral metaphor

There are only a few things rape is:

• forcing sex on a person
• despoiling a population or place
• [a mustard plant or grape residue]

No one rapes your Internet connection, or rapes you in a debate. No one rapes your ask box with spam. People don’t rape with their eyes, that’s called “eye-fucking.” You are not raped with a passionate hug. No one rapes you at basketball or rapes you with a tackle, playful or athletic. You don’t want someone to rape you, because then it isn’t rape. Wanting to rape does not mean wanting to have sex. You do not want to rape people to whom you’re attracted, unless you are a rapist.

As long as I’m talking about it, here are some misconceptions:

• Nonchalance toward rape does not combat the stigmatization attached to victims.
• The word rape does not give itself power. The power comes from the context of the word for victims.
• Rape victims are not asking you to be hypersensitive by asking you not to belittle or to trigger a trauma.
• I’m not violating your right to free speech by asking you to be considerate.

If you read this and felt attacked, ask yourself why. We don’t say “sexually abused” metaphorically, so why say rape? I’m not asking you to never use the word. I just believe it should only be used when you seriously mean rape. When we live in a world without millions of victims, we can talk about redefining or reclaiming it.

I even have alternatives, though there are obviously many more:

• ravish
• ravage
• exhaust
• overwork
• pulverize
• obliterate
• trash
• defile
• squash
• clobber
• pommel
• destroy
• burden
• defeat
• massacre
• trample
• vanquish
• overpower
• thwart

(via dailymurf)

dr-grumbles:

fuckyeahlgbt:

What is a gender-neutral pronoun? What does English need a new pronoun for, anyway? Many people have expressed the need for a singular gender-neutral third-person pronoun: that is, a pronoun to use when someone’s gender is unknown or when the individual is neither male or female. Such instances occur when addressing transgender and genderqueer people who don’t feel comfortable being addressed with masculine or feminine pronouns, computers or robots with artificial intelligence, sexless fictional creatures, angels, and the God of many monotheistic religions. “He,” “she,” or “it” won’t do, “one” doesn’t work when speaking of a specific person, e.g. “Samus washed one’s dishes,” and in some cases even a singular “they” just won’t work – specifically when a name is used, e.g. “Charlie tied their shoes” or “Sam thought they were late to the party.” (For more information, check out the comprehensive links page.)

Over the centuries, hundreds of new words, or neologisms, have been proposed, with the vast majority being abandoned by all but their creators. There are a few exceptions: the pronoun “co” used by residents of the Twin Oaks Intentional Community, “zie/hir” and its derivatives used by people in the transgender/genderqueer community, and Spivak pronouns (ey/em/eir) used in the genderqueer community as well as in some text-based online games and computer textbooks. There is some valid argument by linguists that it’d be extremely difficult for the English language to pick up new pronouns at all, but in the Internet age, sometimes your only clue toward someone’s gender is a username, and, like the long-awaited adoption of the honorific “Ms.”, the need for a gender-free pronoun may overcome the barrier of language limits. (I originally found the comparison of epicene pronouns and “Ms.” in an essay by Jed Hartman.)

One of the biggest problems facing the adoption of a new gender-neutral pronoun is the lack of unity and organization among supporters of the idea. People propose new pronouns without knowing about the scores of previous ones, and people interested in using gender-neutral pronouns can’t find any they like, or can’t figure out why they like or dislike certain forms. My aim is to compare and contrast the most usable epicene pronouns, and also provide text with the pronouns inserted so those curious can see each pronoun in action. My criteria were influenced by that of the two most in-depth comparisons of gender-free pronouns I’ve found: one in the Evaluation page of the Gender-Neutral Pronoun FAQ, and the other in the Pronouns article on the Footnotes site. I’ve included a couple variations that neither of them explored, but their arguments were very influential to mine.

The title of each pronoun links to the first few pages (and concluding paragraph) of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, available for free from Project Gutenberg. I did this not because I think Alice should be made gender-neutral, but so that the readers have the opportunity to see for themselves how each pronoun fits into a larger narrative, one many of them may already be familiar with.

This table was taken and edited from this Wikipedia page.

1. Ne/nem/nir/nirs/nemself

Ease of pronunciation: 4/5
Distinction from other pronouns: 4/5
Gender neutrality: 4.5/5

Although relatively obscure, this has become my favorite contender. It follows the formats of existing pronouns while staying more gender-neutral than any but Spivak – you could call it gender-balanced. “Ne” is n+(he or she), “nem” is n+her+him, “nir” isn+him+her. Because it has a different form for each declension, it doesn’t lean towards following male or female patterns – patterns made very obvious when you read works about obviously male characters with female-patterned pronoun forms. The letter “n” itself can stand for “neutral” – a property we are searching for. A reader may be uncertain how to pronounce “ne” at first glance, but pronunciation of the other forms is relatively obvious. One problem when reading aloud is that the “n” sometimes blends with words ending in “n” or “m,” but it didn’t occur as often and wasn’t as problematic as “zir” with words ending in an “s” or “z” sound (see entry #4).

2. Ve/ver/vis/vis/verself

Ease of pronunciation: 4/5
Distinction from other pronouns: 4/5
Gender neutrality: 4/5

“Ve” is another good option, found in some science fiction, without a specific bias towards either gender. The declension is again gender-balanced, being evenly split between forms that resemble “he” and “she.” But it does feel a bit more gender-heavy than “ne” – since “ver” and “vis” directly derive from “her” and “his,” readers are more easily reminded of the gendered forms.  There are some cases where “ve” will bleed with words ending in “f” or “v” sounds, like “of” or “if,” but this wasn’t a problem very often – maybe about as often as with “ne.”

3. Spivak (ey/em/eir/eirs/eirself)

Ease of pronunciation: 4/5
Distinction from other pronouns:2/5
Gender neutrality: 5/5

Spivak is the most gender-free pronoun that parses well in English (as opposed to “ta” or “thon,” which are also gender-free but simply don’t work in the English language), since it derives from “they” rather than from a mix of “he” and “she.” The problem is, not only does it remove the “th” from “they,” it also changes its grammatical structure. Even ‘singular’ they is grammatically plural (i.e. you would say “they were in the building” rather than “they was in the building”), while Spivak is grammatically singular. The claim that the Spivak pronoun is “more natural” to say than other neologisms is undercut by the fact that it doesn’t actually have the same structure as the already-existing forms.

Furthermore, when spoken aloud, not only does “em” sound like “him” in speech, but people already write a plural “them” as em or ‘em in informal writing, making the Spivak pronoun more ambiguous.

4. Ze/Hir and its derivatives

(ze/hir/hir/hirs/hirself)

Ease of pronunciation: 3/5
Distinction from other pronouns: 2/5
Gender neutrality: 2.5/5

“Ze and hir” is the most popular form of gender-free pronoun in the online genderqueer community, derived from the earlier “sie and hir,” which were considered too feminine/female-sounding since “sie” is German for “she” (among other things), and “hir” was a feminine pronoun in Middle English. The current forms are still leaning on feminine, by using the same declensions as “she.” “Hir,” although it’s supposed to be pronounced “here,” is read as “her” by many people unfamiliar with the term, and the less-gendered alternative, “zir,” along with “ze” itself, often runs into problems when it follows a word ending in an “s” or “z” (or “th”) sound, sometimes sounding just like “her” and “he.” For example, read this sentence aloud: “As ze looked up at the stars, ze realized that this was zir favorite moment of them all.” This isn’t as much of a problem with “ze,” which doesn’t follow words ending in s/z terribly often, but the problem occurs much more often with “zir” than it did with any of the declensions of “ne” or “ve.”

5. Xe/xem/xyr/xyrs/xemself

Ease of pronunciation: 2/5
Distinction from other pronouns: 2.5/5
Gender neutrality: 3/5

“Xe,” it turns out, is supposed to be pronounced the same as “ze” – apparently it was an aesthetic change in order to distance the pronoun from its “sie/hir” roots one step further. It also balances the genders in the way “ze” does not – but it runs into the same pronunciation problems when following words ending in “s” or “z” sounds, and the pronunciation is much more difficult to guess at – I assumed the “x” would be pronounced “sh” or “ks,” which would be either much too gendered or much too unpronounceable to even be considered. All in all, it has slight advantages over zie/hir in its gender-neutrality, but it keeps the same difficulties in pronunciation and is even more difficult to read than the original.

Honorable Mention: Shklee (links to YouTube)

It’s nearly impossible to pronounce, but that’s kind of the point. Used in the Futurama film The Beast With A Billion Backs, it was the pronoun used for Yivo, a planet-sized alien of indeterminate gender. Years ago when I first started searching for and asking about gender-neutral pronouns, there were cases when this was the only gender-neutral pronoun anyone was aware of.

What’s next?

This post and the list of comprehensive links is an attempt to consolidate information about gender-neutral pronouns for people who are interested but simply didn’t know about them.

The next step will be convincing people who like the idea of a gender-neutral pronoun but don’t think people would ever adopt one that it is possible. I’m not sure how to tackle this problem yet. There’s two possibilities I’ve been able to think of: firstly, to look into people in the communities where a gender-neutral pronoun has been adopted and ask them about difficulties they faced when implementing the word, whether they got used to using it over time, and why or why not. Secondly would be to form some sort of experiment where people who hadn’t used gender-neutral pronouns before could try using them. It’d have to be in some sort of closed environment, since the effort of teaching every single person you know about these pronouns just isn’t worth it in experimental stages. Looking at the trouble transgender people have had trying to get others to use new pronouns for them, it’s not worth the effort for anyone just interested in the general sense. If you start using the pronoun in an environment where everyone knows what you’re talking about and you don’t have to explain yourself to each new person, most of the tedium involved in experimenting with a new pronoun disappears. I’m not sure how to go about something like that, though – maybe start an online forum, or a group within an already-existing social network? Not just the “I support this” groups on Facebook, but one where people could experiment conversing with these pronouns.

I’ll keep thinking about this, but if you have any ideas or insight, or know of anyone else already trying something like this, drop me a line in the comments. I’d be delighted to hear about it.

This is a very interesting and relevant discussion of linguistics.

(via queerlyfantastical)

i-am-the-lighthouse:

A table of Non-ableist alternatives for “crazy”.
See the full text version by clicking here. 
Corrections and criticisms welcome in my ask box.

(Source: flapjackstate, via dailymurf)

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, Guo Xiaolu (via morningbreaks) (via ozil) (via iloveozil) (via thelittledancer)

Sidenote: If I could take one phrase out of the English language, it would be “provocatively clad” (or “provocatively dressed”). What, exactly, is a provocatively clad woman provoking? Erections? When I see a dude at a bar wearing one of those white COCKS hats, I feel provoked into punching him (although I restrain myself, obviously); when I see this young man without any pants on, I think, “those are some nice thighs, I would like to see more of that.” Yet I have never once heard a man’s style of dress described as “provocative.” Even when he’s wearing a hat that simultaneously advertises his favorite sports team and his junk. Even when he’s pantless and smoking a cigarette on the potty.

- Jill at Feministe

thefeministhub:moreapologies:padaviya:

melisthename:genderqueer:transpride:arkityp :: .

… and how changing it (the way most English teachers try to promote - free of variants of ‘to be’, but without explaining why) can clarify your sense of reality.

And remember kids, like a computer, your mind runs on software - something you can tweak, hack and develop … and can uninstall! (tho usually only by installing something over it.)

This article reminds me a lot about what David Bohm was getting into in his Wholeness and the Implicate Order, about creating a new grammar that reflects the fact that so many parts of reality aren’t discrete objects.

For instance, i poke you. But the you before i poke is a slightly different you, because you’re a bit disgruntled at being poked for no reason. And if this disgruntled you decides to retaliate, then the me you will be poking will have been affected by all the previous interactions.

I know that’s a really bad example, but there’s so much of our dynamic, interdependent world that’s not even acknowledged by our language. (At least without horridly awkward linguistic contortions.) And this unrealistic language we use has a huuge effect on our perception of reality.

Unlike that book, i find this article accessible enough to read the bulk of it!  [Gawd, it’s been like, 3 years since i last picked that thing up right before prom night’s existential oddness. And only made it to, like, the 2nd chapter >.< Time to get back to reading it?]