S e n t e n t i o l a

This post is cute and amusing and I like it.  But also I think in that scenario the reviewers are totally right and the ‘me’ character is totally not.

Also wow it’s really annoying that there’s no good way to reblog ‘chat’-format posts to add commentary.  Hence my just linking to it.

Killing core characters

sententiola:

So Tumblr, I’d like your help with something, if you can.

A while ago I wrote a rambly thing about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and somewhere in there I kind of made up a theory to explain what bugged me about the death of one of the characters.  Here’s what I wrote (and I’ll censor for spoilers, although you probably all know it anyway — see the original post for the uncensored version):

I think as audiences we get used to, and get quite good at, working out whether a character is being presented to us as someone we should care about or as someone who just advances the plot.  And when a character we’ve been asked to care about, and have agreed to care about, is subsequently disposed of purely to advance the plot, it’s offensive.  When real human beings are exploited or treated as tools whose only value is instrumental, it denies their inherent value as people and that offends our sense of justice.  Obviously when it happens to a fictional character it isn’t the same thing, but I think it offends in a similar way if that character has been one of the core characters whom we care about for their own sake and not just because of the role they play in the larger drama.

I think it’s also a counter-productive thing for a writer to do because it reminds the audience of the artifice of the whole exercise: we know we’re watching fiction, but you’ve invited us to make the imaginative effort of thinking of this particular character, unlike many of the ones we see in a given episode, as an actual person.  If you then do something that transparently reduces that character to a narrative device, you remind us that it’s all fake and that actually none of the characters are real people, which seriously imperils our ability to keep believing in or caring about anything that’s happening.

If [••••] had been killed for reasons that served [••••]’s own storyline and therefore respected her integrity as a character rather than just a role, it would have been sad but not offensive.  If [••••] had been killed because sometimes bad things just randomly happen in this fictional world, that again would have been okay.  If [••••] had been when she was still just a character who seemed quite nice and who was important to [••••••] but who wasn’t really important to the audience, that would have been fine because audiences accept that sometimes characters are just devices.  (Compare the death of [•••••]: she was a very long-running character but it was always clear that she had no real existence or purpose except as part of Buffy’s emotional landscape, so killing her in order to traumatize Buffy didn’t offend in the same way.)  But killing [••••] purely to trigger a development in [••••••]’s storyline was, I think, neither fair to the audience nor a good piece of writing.

So that’s the theory.  It was off-the-cuff but I’ve been pondering it since then and it still seems plausible.  And I’d quite like to expand it a bit and maybe work it up into an article for Ferretbrain.  But the thing is, I’d like to test the theory against a few more examples, just to check that it works (or to find out that it doesn’t work before I make myself look silly).  And I’m having trouble thinking of other examples, either ones that fit the theory or ones that disprove it.

So that’s where I’m hoping you can help.

Can you think of a fictional character who you felt was killed off (or otherwise abused) just to provide a plot-point for another character?  Did it bother you or did you think it was okay?  Were they a ‘core’ character who you were invested in for their own sake, or a supporting character?

Also any general thoughts about the theory and whether it works or not would be welcome!

For thoughts that won’t fit in a reply, please visit my ask-box or submit.  I won’t publish messages unless I check with you first, and if this does turn into an article then I’ll give you credit for your input (unless you don’t want it).  If you think your followers might be interested in helping, please feel free to reblog!

Just bringing this back in case anyone missed it last time.

Also relevant is this post in which I try to explain how I think the above proposition is distinct from (though overlapping with) the idea of fridging female characters to provide motivation for male characters.

kiriamaya answered your question: Killing core characters

I’m reminded of all the zillion and one ladycharacters who are killed off solely for a dude’s development. As if ladies aren’t people.

Yes, there’s definitely overlap with that idea.  But I think it’s conceptually distinct.  If I’ve understood it correctly, the criticism there is that killing a female character to create motivation or plot for a male character is (at least if done disproportionately, which it is) misogynist, regardless of whether the character who gets killed is a lead character or a supporting one: either way, it plays into the general trend of treating women (fictional or otherwise) as if their only importance is derived from their effect on men.

What I’m suggesting is that killing a lead character (of any gender or none) to provide motivation or plot for another character (of any gender or none) is bad not because it’s sexist (although it may be) but because it draws attention to the fact that all the characters, including the one for whose sake the dead character has been killed, are just devices in a completely artificial process.

I don’t know whether one of those ideas is a subset of the other or whether they’re just things that overlap, but I feel like in principle they’re separate things.  But what does anyone else think?

Killing core characters

So Tumblr, I’d like your help with something, if you can.

A while ago I wrote a rambly thing about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and somewhere in there I kind of made up a theory to explain what bugged me about the death of one of the characters.  Here’s what I wrote (and I’ll censor for spoilers, although you probably all know it anyway — see the original post for the uncensored version):

I think as audiences we get used to, and get quite good at, working out whether a character is being presented to us as someone we should care about or as someone who just advances the plot.  And when a character we’ve been asked to care about, and have agreed to care about, is subsequently disposed of purely to advance the plot, it’s offensive.  When real human beings are exploited or treated as tools whose only value is instrumental, it denies their inherent value as people and that offends our sense of justice.  Obviously when it happens to a fictional character it isn’t the same thing, but I think it offends in a similar way if that character has been one of the core characters whom we care about for their own sake and not just because of the role they play in the larger drama.

I think it’s also a counter-productive thing for a writer to do because it reminds the audience of the artifice of the whole exercise: we know we’re watching fiction, but you’ve invited us to make the imaginative effort of thinking of this particular character, unlike many of the ones we see in a given episode, as an actual person.  If you then do something that transparently reduces that character to a narrative device, you remind us that it’s all fake and that actually none of the characters are real people, which seriously imperils our ability to keep believing in or caring about anything that’s happening.

If [••••] had been killed for reasons that served [••••]’s own storyline and therefore respected her integrity as a character rather than just a role, it would have been sad but not offensive.  If [••••] had been killed because sometimes bad things just randomly happen in this fictional world, that again would have been okay.  If [••••] had been when she was still just a character who seemed quite nice and who was important to [••••••] but who wasn’t really important to the audience, that would have been fine because audiences accept that sometimes characters are just devices.  (Compare the death of [•••••]: she was a very long-running character but it was always clear that she had no real existence or purpose except as part of Buffy’s emotional landscape, so killing her in order to traumatize Buffy didn’t offend in the same way.)  But killing [••••] purely to trigger a development in [••••••]’s storyline was, I think, neither fair to the audience nor a good piece of writing.

So that’s the theory.  It was off-the-cuff but I’ve been pondering it since then and it still seems plausible.  And I’d quite like to expand it a bit and maybe work it up into an article for Ferretbrain.  But the thing is, I’d like to test the theory against a few more examples, just to check that it works (or to find out that it doesn’t work before I make myself look silly).  And I’m having trouble thinking of other examples, either ones that fit the theory or ones that disprove it.

So that’s where I’m hoping you can help.

Can you think of a fictional character who you felt was killed off (or otherwise abused) just to provide a plot-point for another character?  Did it bother you or did you think it was okay?  Were they a ‘core’ character who you were invested in for their own sake, or a supporting character?

Also any general thoughts about the theory and whether it works or not would be welcome!

For thoughts that won’t fit in a reply, please visit my ask-box or submit.  I won’t publish messages unless I check with you first, and if this does turn into an article then I’ll give you credit for your input (unless you don’t want it).  If you think your followers might be interested in helping, please feel free to reblog!

Shake it like a bowl of soup.

thecurvature:

WHY would you shake a bowl of soup, unless you’re looking for first degree burns all over your lap? WHY?

This Sam Cooke lyric has boggled my mind ever since I first heard it. I want to laugh hysterically, but instead just end up sputtering at how nonsensical it is.

I can see shaking a can of soup before you pour it, to remix the contents??? But the lyric doesn’t say can. It says bowl. Which, again: ow.

A google search saw the suggestion that the lyric must have started as “shake it like a bowl of jelly” but was changed for the rhyme. But I find this completely absurd, because 1. You can’t just RANDOMLY change words in songs to make things rhyme. Can you imagine changing “you’re sweet like candy” to “you’re sweet like steak” just because the previous line ended in the word “make”? IT WOULD BE COMPLETELY ABSURD. And 2. I really do feel that Sam Cooke was a better songwriter than that.

So I just really, really want there to be a reason why people in the early 60s would shake bowls of soup. I mean, margarine used to come in plastic bags with yellow dye, and people used to put meat inside jello, and 7-UP and milk was considered a tasty treat. Who KNOWS what weird soup-related customs folks were up to back then?

So why would people in the 60s want to shake a bowl of soup? If you don’t know, just make up something hilarious.

I didn’t have many dealings with soup (or existence) in the sixties but here are a couple of guesses:

1. If you’re having soup out of a can or a carton, you might shake the can / carton before opening it in case the soup has separated out a bit.  You wouldn’t actually be shaking the bowl of soup because it wouldn’t be in the bowl yet, but I guess if you loosely think of ‘a bowl of soup’ meaning ‘a quantity of soup equivalent to a bowl and which I am in fact intending to put into a bowl soon’ then it almost works.
2. You might ‘shake’ a bowl of soup by moving the bowl in a kind of circular motion so that the soup swirls around in the bowl — maybe to make sure it’s evenly mixed and stop the heavier ingredients settling at the bottom.  It’s a bit of a stretch from the normal meaning of ‘shake’, but it does sort of fit with the movements Cooke is describing (‘move your body all around’ and ‘make your body loop the loop’ with your ‘hands on your hips’ could be a hula kind of thing).
3. Sometimes song-writers just go for something that sounds good even if it doesn’t make much sense.  Especially if it’s the sixties.

(I completely agree about the ‘changed it to rhyme’ theory.  That just isn’t how song-writing works. You don’t write a line ending with ‘jelly’ and then get to the end of the next line and only at that point think ‘Oh wait, not much rhymes with jelly…’  And if you did, you’d look for an alternative with the same number of syllables.  And every line in the chorus ends with a punchy consonant: soup, loop, hips, slip, whip, roll, soul, might, right, light.  ’Jelly’ is not a remotely plausible candidate.

And regardless of whether it was originally ‘jelly’ or something else, you’d just never get into that position in the first place.  It’s a very short and simple couplet.  You wouldn’t even bother writing it down until you’d thought of the whole two lines.  If you got as far as the second line and realized it didn’t work, you’d just scrap it and start again from nothing.)

(via nuditea)

silentpunk:

“The parents’ plotline is my favorite part of teen melodrama.”

— no one

(via supcakes)

My so called life anyone?

(via yeahgrrrl)

Joan of Arcadia anyone?

I really liked the way My so-called life used Angela’s parents to resolve the problem the writers were stuck with when it got cancelled.  [Spoilers.]  They’d obviously wanted to set Angela up with Jordan and then play that out over another season or two and eventually she’d grow out of him and meanwhile Brian would get less self-righteous and stuff and they’d get together.  When they didn’t have time to do that, they could have just chucked her and Brian together, but it would have been too early and wouldn’t have worked.

So they let Angela choose Jordan and ride off on his bike, because he was the right choice for her at that point.  They didn’t reward Brian’s Nice Guy tendencies.  But at the same time over the last few episodes they filled in the parents’ back-story — her mum having to make the same sort of choice, going with the hunk, eventually ending up with the geek — to show how it could play out over the long run that we aren’t going to see.  That was well played.

I haven’t seen Joan of Arcadia — would you recommend it?

ohumyes:

sententiola replied to your photo: [image is a screenshot of an empty text document,…

TITLE!

THE TITLE IS STILL “TITLE!”

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE GODDAMN FUCK I’M DOING

JAMIE COME WRITE MY PAPER

I like the style you’ve started it in.  I’ll have a go at continuing in the same style.  Here it goes:

· • ·

TITLE!

Introductory section leading to what follows…

Explanation of significant terms and their usage.⁽¹⁾

Heavily — and, of course, formally — punctuated passage of analysis with, it may be suggested, a hint of argument; important and reputable propositions.

Fig. 1: illustrative diagram

More adventurous phase: a certain stylistic flourish, allusive and alliterative, accompanying more radical arguments.  Unconventional syntax?

Punchy conclusion!

_____

⁽¹⁾ Footnote.

(Source: tiny-puppy-teeth)

Image is some text saying ‘434.  When authors type out accents phonetically.’  In small print at the bottom it says ‘fuckyeahfan-fiction//tumblr’.

tchy:

loch-ness-hamster:

fuckyeahfan-fiction:

Submitted by: transsexualtransylvania

THIS IS A RECURRING THEME IN MY FANDOMS AS OF LATE. I’m getting used to it and I write it out a little bit but some people do it waaaay too much :x

I have so many opinions about this sort of thing. On one hand, yes, it can be kind of irritating if an accent is written so thickly that it’s hard to understand. On the other hand, an accent is usually an important part of who a character is, and sometimes the accent changes not only the way they say certain words, but also the particular words that they use—and in that case you just have to write it out phonetically.

This is especially true of characters who speak a non-standard dialect, or in an accent that originates somewhere that there is or was colonial rule. In those cases, I think it’s very important not to “clean up” a character’s accent for the sake of writing. Having them speak King’s English would not only be a lie to the character, it would also be yet another case of erasure against the people who speak with that accent—who have historically been told that in order to sound “educated” or “intelligent” or “civilized,” they have to drop their own dialect in favour of conforming to “proper” English. Accents are still very much a marker of race and class, and ignoring them in favour of making things easier for the privileged speakers of “standard” English is pretty problematic.

So, as far as I’m concerned, accents in fiction are pretty great, even if they inconvenience me—and I do my best to represent them, too, even if that means looking up dialectal dictionaries and compiling a glossary for personal use (which I have done for the sake of a character). I’m tired of being told that accents shouldn’t be written out, or being worried that my writing won’t be taken seriously if I do write them. It’s very possible to walk the line between making your story comprehensible to most English speakers and accurately representing an accent in writing. Complaining about the minor inconvenience of reading an accent is really not looking at the big picture.

(Of course, this is all coming from the perspective of an upper middle class, educated white kid whose first language is English and who is widely regarded in his region as “not having an accent,” so if I’ve made any egregious fuck-ups here, or should really just shut up on the subject, please tell me off.)

Yeah, I’m completely on board with the suggestion that it’s problematic to take a character who, in the historical or geographical or cultural or racial setting, would be speaking English with unorthodox grammar, idiom, &c. and effectively ‘translate’ their dialogue into orthodox ‘proper’ English.  To take an extreme but clear example, writing Bob Marley as a character and having him say ‘old pirates, yes, they abducted me; sold me to the merchant ships’ rather than ‘old pirates, yes, they rob I; sold I to the merchant ships’ would erase his Jamaicanness and his Rastafarianism (and, because this is an extreme example using an actual person, would also misrepresent the lyric he actually wrote).  It may make life slightly harder for a reader who isn’t familiar with that type of Jamaican English but it’s perfectly comprehensible and if it isn’t comprehensible (and if it needs to be — I find quite a lot of the dialogue on The West Wing incomprehensible but it usually doesn’t matter) then the writer needs to work harder on the surrounding context to help make the meaning clear.

On the other hand a large part of regional or sub-cultural accent is often pronunciation rather than the selection or arrangement of words, and in order to indicate the pronunciation writers sometimes deliberately depart from conventional spelling to convey a sort of quasi-phonetic effect.  Which is really a separate thing from what you’re talking about, Tchy, so it doesn’t contradict what you say, but I think it’s another aspect of what the original image relates to.  So for example to prompt the reader to read those lines in Bob Marley’s accent a writer might write ‘ol’ pirates, yes, dey rab I; sold I to the marchent ships’.  Now, this is the white leading the white here, so there’s just as much chance of me going wrong as you, but from what I’ve read and heard I think there may be problems here too.  Not that it makes it harder to understand, but that it marginalizes and others Marley’s pronunciation.  Because it isn’t as if he, when writing the lines down, would actually have written them with those non-standard spellings.  The spellings aren’t his.  They’re deliberate misspellings by the writer, and they tend to indicate that the writer regards the pronunciation as mispronunciation.  If you have to spell a word wrongly to indicate how a character is pronouncing it, it suggests that the pronunciation is wrong.  If, of the two most popular pronunciations of ‘tomato’ in the white English-speaking world, I spell one ‘tomato’ and one ‘tomayto’, I’m clearly positioning the British pronunciation as normal and correct and the North American one as aberrant; if I spell them ‘tomahto’ and ‘tomato’ I’m allying myself with the North American one and othering the British one.  Also because that kind of deliberate misspelling looks funny and is often used for comical characters it tends, whether intentionally or not, to make it easier for readers to regard the character’s way of speaking as a source of amusement.  And finally the writer is assuming something about their readers, because if I use misspelling to indicate to you, the reader, that you ought to hear the words ‘old pirates, yes, they rob I’ in a Jamaican accent, I’m assuming that you aren’t already hearing every word in the book in a Jamaican accent, because I’m assuming you aren’t Jamaican; so it can alienate exactly those readers whose speech is intended to be represented.  (I’ve used an example that brings race, nationality, and colonial history to the fore, but of course similar issues can arise with class, for example with the ‘comical cockney’ type spelling.)

Which means one needs to tread a line between suppressing linguistic difference and othering it.  But I suspect — though I speak hesitantly because I’m both white and not a writer — it can in many cases be done without too much difficulty.  For example one can just tell the reader what a character’s accent is — ‘Marley spoke with a Jamaican accent’ — and trust that that, along with an accurate rendition of Jamaican vocabulary, syntax, and rhythm, will enable the reader to hear approximately the right sounds in their head.  And if it’s a crucial plot-point one can perhaps remind the reader by having other characters mishear or misunderstand.  Of course it also partly depends on the view-point of the narrative: if you’ve got a first-person narrator it’s perhaps more okay to have accents significantly different from the narrator’s own represented by misspellings, if that really seems necessary, and if the narrator is the sort of person who thinks of their own pronunciation as ‘right’ and other people’s as ‘wrong’.  Or one could use misspelling to deliberately point out the issue by having, for example, a cockney narrator who writes her own dialogue with ordinary dictionary spelling and uses comedic misspelling to represent how the received pronunciation of upper-class Londoners sounds to her.  The color purple deals with the whole issue very neatly, it seems to me, by the fact that it’s written as a series of letters.  That means that the spellings are whatever spellings the character would use when writing, rather than conscious misspellings by the writer, but spelling can still give the reader an occasional tip about how the character probably pronounces the word (because it’s fair to assume that if she thinks an unusual word is written in a certain way it’s because that’s how it sounds and she’s never seen it written down).  I haven’t got my copy to hand but here’s a random snippet from Google books:

But what do it look like? I ast.

Don’t look like nothing, she say.  It ain’t a picture show.  It ain’t something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself.

Anyway, I don’t know.  That’s the impression I’ve picked up from things I’ve seen and heard, filling in the gaps with my uninformed intuitions.  These are really things for less privileged people than me to take the lead on, but it’s an interesting topic so I thought it would be worth nudging it along.

(Source: )

I never understand what it means when a text says, “[Whodyamacallit] had a greedy/happy/sad look in their eyes.”

torayot:

wholesomeobsessive:

torayot:

wholesomeobsessive:

torayot:

What does it mean?

They mean facial expressions but can’t be bothered to write that?

Aha!

I thought it meant literally in their eyes - as in the irises and pupils - rather than the configuration of parts around the eyes and elsewhere on the face.

It’s just easier to write or something.  And sometimes facial expressions are so subtle it feels like it’s all in the way they’re looking at us.  It’s hard to describe the slight movement of facial muscles that convey emotion.

That’s true. Thank you (and Katerz) for clarifying. Just thinking about this makes me think even more sharply about how I don’t much know how to deal with people.

I agree with the above, but also I think there genuinely is some kind of literary convention that you’re supposed to be able to tell someone’s expression from looking at their actual eyeballs.  See also ‘twinkle in their eye’ and suchlike.  I think there may be some very slight scientific basis for twinkliness of eyes being related to eyes getting a bit more watery and therefore reflective when the person has certain emotions or something, but essentially the use of phrases like that in descriptive prose has almost nothing to do with observed reality, it’s just the repetition of phrases that writers learn from reading other writers’ descriptive prose.

I like writing about songs

So here is a game.

Send me an ask mentioning a song.  If it’s a song I know, I’ll write something about it.  If it’s a song I don’t know, I’ll try to find it and listen to it and then write something about it.

And then.  Um.  Everyone will be happy forever.  And.  Things.

garlandgrey:

I cannot fathom the notion that the best I can expect is the opportunity to pull great swathes of information in and critique them in a way that allows other people to have feelings about that information, and increases their esteem of me for the service.

Blogging is so hard to do well and so time consuming. You have to clock in each day and find something interesting, and find something else, and read all the things everybody read yesterday, and then you extrude some bouillon cube of culture to feed to those in your social group to raise your status within the daily list of people who are “doing it right” - that perfect balance of curated content that makes a person seem as if they are privy to a much larger, more finely curated wealth of information and therefore worthy of your attention - but then you get the sads and don’t write for a few days.

[Click the link above to read more]

Been thinking about this post for a few days.

See, that there, already, is an example of what I’ve been thinking about.  Which is that it must be kind of a drag to have a high-profile blog.  I’ve been thinking about this post for a few days, and only now, after it’s no longer current and things have moved on, am I writing some thoughts about it, and that’s okay.

It’s okay because this is just my little tumblr with a hundred and twenty-two followers (at least a couple of whom are probably bots — hi!).  Nobody comes here wanting to know my position on the latest political event or pop-culture phenomenon or Tumblfight.  Nobody regards me as a spokesperson for anyone else or an expert on anything.  It’s great.  I feel no obligation to do anything in particular with this tumblr.  I can post nothing at all for days on end, or I can post long rambles about gender or history or grammar, or I can reblog pictures of cats.  As long as I’m keeping up with how my friends are doing, I’m satisfied and nobody complains.

The thought of trying to achieve a ‘perfect balance of curated content that makes a person seem as if they are privy to a much larger, more finely curated wealth of information and therefore worthy of your attention’ seems pretty frightening.  Cool if you can achieve it, I guess.  And I can see the appeal of being thought of like that.  I do get a thrill when people with high-profile blogs — like Garland or Jaded — reblog me or link to me.  I can imagine it would be exciting to be up there, and I can think to myself that I could get there if I put in the hours of work Garland mentions.

Luckily I’m too lazy for that.  Plus, not only is being a big(ish) social justice blogger hard work, you get into that bind.  You know, the one where you’re big enough that people expect you to comment on things and if you don’t comment then they think you don’t care — Glasses Kid got an anonymous ask the other day complaining that she doesn’t write enough about, well, things she doesn’t know about, basically — but on the other hand the more you write, especially about issues you haven’t got direct experience of, the more likely you are to slip up, and even if you don’t slip up you may still be distracting attention from the people who do have that direct experience and are the ones people ought to be reading.  Whichever way you go, someone will criticize.

None of that, thanks.  And actually it’s even simpler for me because my privilege is so extensive that I’m pretty well always automatically in that ‘you have nothing useful to say about this issue’ box.  Which makes me wonder why I post about social justice things at all.  Maybe it is what Garland says: something to feed your social group to raise your status.  Or maybe it’s just the desire to try out new ideas as you learn them.  To see whether I can apply what I’m learning to new situations.

Writing is a big part of how I think.  Writing and talking.  I find out what I think by trying to explain what I think.  So tumblin about this stuff is very useful for me.  But once I’ve done my writing-thinking, worked out my ideas, is there any good reason to publish them?  Maybe not.  But this is a small tumblr and most of my followers probably know more about all this stuff than I do anyway, so I figure I’m not doing any harm.  I hope.

Hmm.

(via gargledyarn-deactivated20110418)

Suddenly people are reblogging some massive rambling post I wrote ages ago, apparently?

I don’t know the extent of the phenomenon, of course, because Tumblr no longer tells you when you’ve been reblogged.  (Which is an interesting new development in the very topic that, according to my very fuzzy recollection, the post was about.)

So.

I guess I should really read it so I know what on earth I said.

Image is a photograph of the face of a leopard looking fairly impassive and wearing a monocle, shown against a meme-type segmented background of cyan and Persian blue.  The caption at the top reads ‘SIT DOWN TO WRITE STORY ABOUT LOVE, TRUTH, AND INFINITY’.  Beneath it reads ‘WRITE SOME GAY PORN INSTEAD’.

fyeahwriterleopard:

(submitted by aphilologicalbatman)

What do you mean ‘instead’?

(via ladysaviours)

I Feel Like

sadydoyle:

Everyone is a dick sometimes. But the best and most profound thing that happened to me recently was that my boyfriend made risotto — a key dish! It’s so fancy, and yet so easy! — and we watched the Joss Whedon joint “Roseanne” on Netflix streaming, and I thought it could use pepper, so I got up to get the pepper grinder, and he gave me a really genuine smile when I brought it into the living room for him to use also, and he said “thank you” like I’d done something incredibly considerate. It’s not one of those moments you can quantify. It was like, “oh, right, I love and am loved by another person, and love is often something that lasts for a while and then fails, but in this moment, another person loves me enough to be overcome with joy that I brought him a pepper grinder which is pretty insignificant, and I know probably the worst parts of him, and he knows probably the worst parts of me too, and we’ve both behaved badly (pettily, selfishly, over-reacting-ly) in each other’s vicinity, and also we know weird not-for-general-consumption shit about each other, like: I will spend money I don’t have on expensive bath stuff, and: he does really terrible impressions. And right now he’s beaming because I brought him a pepper grinder of all things, so no matter how much either of us has the power to suck, we also both have the power to be genuinely liked and loved by another human being who knows us well, and this has happened before and I’ve subsided into either not really knowing the other person or having a distant but deeply felt friendship with them, and in either case if this doesn’t work we might also hate each other pretty profoundly for a while, so it’s not like this is a guarantee of anything that will happen in the future, but also: Both of us are human beings worthy of love, me included, so that’s something, I guess.” And then I thought about why this was a surprise to me, and it was the fact that I anticipate that not even the most public parts of me will be accepted by the world at large. Some people will say things about loving me, and some people will scream at me; you enjoy the love, you get ready for the screaming. And then I wondered why that was, and it was like: Oh, right, I am a lady on the Internet and/or a feminist on the Internet, MY BAD. And I thought about how surprising it was, to me, that another person could get actually close to me and not revile me. And I was not pleased, with the state of the world, in which this could come as a surprise.

(via sadydoyle-deactivated20110608)

On moulds and metaphors

Can we talk about moulds?  (If you are from some parts of the Anglophone world you may prefer that we talk about molds, which is fine by me.)

Actually, first, let’s talk about idioms based on metaphors.  You know the kind of thing: wearing your heart on your sleeve, letting the cat out of the bag, living hand to mouth, and suchlike.  In particular, I’d like to mention two things that happen to metaphors when they become sufficiently widely used and well established to be idiomatic.

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