27, CA, sociology, queer theory; gender is queer, sexuality is queer, everything about me is pretty freaking queer~ Part-time dreamer~ Full time weirdo~ Human shaped struggle extraordinaire~ transmasc NB they/them pronouns
Awkward…
Finally logged back in after who knows how long (why I’m here now idk), and half the people I knew/followed are deactivated. Guess the great Tumblr migration finally happened…?
really fucked up some of the way y’all assume Butches are more likely to have regressive/transphobic values, or worse yet, are more likely to be terfs.
in my experience as a trans woman and a lesbian, Butches are always the absolute first to put themselves out and defend both the lesbian community and the LGBT community at large from this kind of violence. i could not count the number of Butches who have made me feel safer from transmisogyny & more valued to the lesbian community.
part of me is like “what the fuck do you mean next week is august when last week was mid april” but then the other part of me is like “approximately 7 years have passed since december 2019 and july 2020″ so that’s fun
dead metaphors are really interesting honestly and specifically i’m interested in when they become malapropisms
like, the concept being, people are familiar with the phrase and what people use it to mean metaphorically, but it’s not common knowledge anymore what the metaphor was in literal reference to. people still say “toe the line” but don’t necessarily conjure up the image of people standing at the starting line of a race, forbidden from crossing over it. people still say “the cat is out of the bag” without necessarily knowing it’s a sailors’ expression referring to a whip being brought out for punishment. some metaphors are so dead we don’t even know where they come from; like, there are ideas about what “by hook or by crook” references, but no one is entirely sure. nobody knows what the whole nine yards are.
and then you throw in a malaprop or a mondegreen or two, where because people don’t know what the actual words of the expression refer to, they’re liable to replace them with similar sounding words (see “lack toast and tolerant”). so we can literally go from a phrase referencing a common, everyday part of life to a set of unfixed, contextless sounds with a completely different meaning. that’s fascinating. what an interesting piece of the way language and culture are living, changing, coevolving things.
maybe part of the reason we can’t figure out where some phrases come from is that over time the words themselves have changed! one of the theories about “the whole nine yards” is that it’s a variant of “the whole ball of wax,” which some people further theorize was originally “the whole bailiwick,” meaning just “the whole area”! the addition of “nine yards” might be related to “dressed to the nines,” which might reference the fucking Greek muses! language is so weird and cool! (and I only know any idioms in two languages!)
the point is. I just came across the words “nip it in the butt” in a piece of published, professional fiction, and now I can’t stop giggling.
J.K. Rowling, world famous author, billionaire and owner of several mansions in Scotland and England recently decided to threaten to sue The Day, a daily news service for British teenagers for publishing an article about her being transphobic.
Remember, this is the same J.K. Rowling who regularly complains about “cancel culture” and trans people trying to silence her.
As far as J.K. Rowling goes, this principle only applies to the rich and famous.
And The Day does not have the resources needed to fight her, so they gave in:
“We accept that our article implied that what JK Rowling had tweeted was objectionable and that she had attacked and harmed trans people,” says The Day’s apology.
Let this be clear: J.K. Rowling is not transphobic in the same way the Ku Klux Klan is not racists.
Sue me, J.K.!
The good news is that J.K Rowling, by doing this, has shown the whole world what kind of hypocrite she is. This further undermines the legitimacy of the TERF’s transphobic crusade agains transgender children.
