“It’s digestible” is pertinent!! Okay, for those of you who haven’t researched Crisco for writing fic about gay sex in the mid-late 60s:
The first-edition of The Joy of Gay Sex, published in 1977, declared, “Vegetable shortening may be the best lubricant, since it is not only greasy but also digestible”[4] Such a statement perhaps gives new meaning to the companies boastful declarations that “Its digestible” and “Crisco has been making life in the kitchen more delicious for years.” Similarly, in the 1978 sex manual The Advocate Guide to Gay Health, Crisco even earned an entry in the book’s index. Discussions of the shortening’s use as an anal lubricant indicate its popularity, with statements such as: “The lubricant, typically the cultic Crisco, must be copious.”[5] In fact, Crisco was so synonomus with gay sex that discos and bars around the world took on the name, such as Crisco Disco in New York City, which was one of the premiere clubs during the 1970s and early 1980s. Other clubs or bathhouses, such as Club Z in Seattle, even featured murals with Crisco. Thus, Crisco was conversely also one of many things that led to the formation of gay identities during the 20th century.
from this essay: http://www.columbia.edu/~sf2220/TT2007/web-content/Pages/drew2.html
Love this post for so many reasons but most especially because this is from all the way back in 2012 and and yet not a single blog in this thread is deactivated
Love the gay history, but i just wanna correct that the “it’s digestible” in the gay stuff was a reference to crisco’s tagline it had been using since 1911, the actual meaning of its digestible is because it’s main competition came from “enhanced” lards which were rendered pig fat mixed with non food thickeners that literally did not digest and caused people to basically just shit out pig cream, since crisco was veggie based the body digested it along with the food
This post is the opposite of net zero information. Not only did I learn several new facts about gay history but also we rounded our way back to the original question of the tag line and the mini obelisks.
approximately 44” x 44”, features 15 species from the southwest us, took a few weeks to design, and one or two months to piece. everyone say thank you birds.
"How was your day, honey?"
"Not great. Had to pick the kids from school early because the ship went back in time. There's a confused Roman centurion in the living room, btw. How was your day?"
"Couldn't get much work done because Jerry got taken over by a space parasite."
"Again?"
"I think at this point he's doing it on purpose."
Child in the Enterprise daycare, drawing a picture entitled My Family: "This is me and this is my daddy and this is my daddy's transporter duplicate and this is my mommy and this is the subspace entity that poses as human that used mommy as it's template that calls itself her sister and this is our dog and this is the shape-shifting salt-vampire that snuck on board disguised as our dog but decided it likes dog food better than salt so now we have two dogs."
If you regret a permanent body alteration you got and your immediate thought is "raise the legal age for everybody who can do this" instead of "Maybe I, specifically, was a dipshit" you need to get Gotten by a mountain lion
ok but like, surely if anything would drive you to suggest raising the legal age, it's that? legal ages are a pretty ugly crutch in general fir lots of things, but, well, kids do tend to be ... inexperienced with the world.
To clarify, I don't have an opinion on what kinds of bodymods should be assigned what legal age, but surely there's some evidence that would compel one, on a personal level, to believe the laws are too lax.
If they're of legal age they're definitionally not kids, and there are countless existing warnings and barriers for getting permanent body alterations. Your personal regret is obviously one thing, "I wish someone had stopped me" is a common excuse espoused by people who feel present day shame or regret. But one's own regret doesn't give them the authority to attempt wrestling the entire legal apparatus to bend society towards stopping other people from attaining those same body alterations, just because you wish you'd had more barriers to run into to stop you from getting what you thought you wanted
having read some Martha Wells interviews it does really tickle me to imagine that when Murderbot asks for a ride, ART is basically doing that thing where you decide to entertain an obvious scam artist for a bit. Like, "Well, this is most likely a corporate spy, but I guess I am spying back on corporates right now so sure LOL let's see what the humans told it to do to trick me"
And then said 'corporate spy' spends 8 straight hours curled up on a chair watching TV and ART is like, "Oh shit you're like, a real person with no agenda. Let's hang out actually"
i swear it used to refer to a story using a very formal, almost workplace safety-type tone of dialogue that's unintentionally jarring in context and feels like the writer is trying to make extra sure the characters come off as healthy and nice to the story's detriment, now it seems to frequently refer to characters having any conversation about their feelings at all or even stories that are about therapy/are deliberately evoking that sort of verbage throughout as a stylistic choice. very odd.
Division of labor in the home is one of the most important equity issues of our time. Yet at this rate it will be another 75 years before men do half the work.
The optimistic tale of the modern, involved dad has been greatly exaggerated. The amount of child care men performed rose throughout the 1980s and ’90s, but then began to level off without ever reaching parity. Mothers still shoulder 65 percent of child-care work. In academic journals, family researchers caution that the “culture of fatherhood” has changed more than fathers’ actual behavior.
Sociologists attribute the discrepancy between mothers’ expectations and reality to “a largely successful male resistance.” This resistance is not being led by socially conservative men, whose like-minded wives often explicitly agree to take the lead in the home. It is happening, instead, with relatively progressive couples, and it takes many women — who thought their partners had made a prenatal commitment to equal parenting — by surprise. Why are their partners failing to pitch in more?
The answer lies, in part, in the different ways that men and women typically experience unfairness. Inequality makes everyone feel bad. Studies have found that people who feel they’re getting away with something experience fear and self-reproach, while people who feel exploited are angry and resentful. And yet men are more comfortable than women with the first scenario and less tolerant than women of finding themselves with the short end of the stick. Parity is hard, and this discrepancy lays the groundwork for male resistance.
Though many men are in denial about it, their resistance communicates a feeling of entitlement to women’s labor. Men resist because it is in their “interest to do so,” write Scott Coltrane and Michele Adams, leaders in the field of family studies, in their book, “Gender and Families.” By passively refusing to take an equal role, men are reinforcing “a separation of spheres that underpins masculine ideals and perpetuates a gender order privileging men over women.”
While interviewing working parents for a book on parenthood, I spoke with one dad in Vermont who said: “The expectation among my male friends is still that they will have the life they had before having kids. My dad has never cooked a meal. I’ve strayed from that. But subconsciously, the thing that makes you motivationally step up and do something when you’re not being asked …” he trailed off, and then said: “I have justifications. It’s a cop-out.”
Take love out of the equation and focus on the workplace, and it’s clear how this plays out. Studies show that male employees sit back while their female co-workers perform the tasks that don’t lead to promotion. In a series of lab studies, the economists Lise Vesterlund, Linda Babcock and Maria Recalde and the organizational behaviorist Laurie Weingart found that in coed groups, women are 50 percent more likely than men to volunteer to take on work that no one else wants to do. But in all-male groups, the men volunteer just as readily.
In an interview with NPR, Dr. Vesterlund explained that the women do the work “because they’re expected to.” The men “come into the room, they see the women, they know how we play these games.”
We play the same games at home. I interviewed couples separately and found that the women were often angry, while many men didn’t seem to realize there was a problem.
The couples offered three explanations for this labor imbalance. The first was that women take over activities like bedtime, homework and laundry because men perform these tasks inadequately. But this isn’t “maternal gatekeeping,” the theory that men want to help but women disparage their capabilities and push them out. Instead these seem to be situations that necessitate the intervention of a reasonable adult.
A mother in California said: “It’s important to me that my sons are not falling asleep in class and that they’re not late for school. My husband does not share those priorities, so I do bedtime and school drop-off.”
The dad in Vermont explained: “I do laundry when I need it. When it comes to the kids’ laundry, I could be more proactive, but instead I operate on my time scale. So my wife does most of their laundry. Let me do it my way and I’m happy to do it, but if you’re going to tell me how to do it, go ahead and do it yourself.”
The second explanation involved forgetting or obliviousness. A mother in Illinois said: “My husband is a participatory and willing partner. He’s not traditional in terms of ‘I don’t change diapers.’ But his attention is limited.” She added, “I can’t trust him to do anything, to actually remember.”
A dad in San Francisco said that many of the tasks of parenting weren’t important enough to remember: “I just don’t think these things are worth attending to. A certain percentage of parental involvement that my wife does, I would see as valuable but unnecessary. A lot of disparity in our participation is that.”
Finally, some men blamed their wives’ personalities. A San Diego dad said his wife did more because she was so uptight. “She wakes up on a Saturday morning and has a list. I don’t keep lists. I think there’s a belief that if she’s not going to do it, then it won’t get done.” (His wife agreed that this was true, but emphasized that her belief was based on experience: “We fell into this easy pattern where he learned to be oblivious and I learned to resent him.”)
A father in Portland, Ore., confirmed that his wife takes on more but said: “It has to do with her personality. She always has to stay busy. No matter what day of the week it is, she has a need to be engaged, to be doing something.”
Many mothers told me they had tried to change this and had aired their grievances with their partners, only to watch as nothing changed. A mother in Queens said she spent three years trying to get her husband to do more before coming to terms with the fact that maybe it was never going to happen. “He notices the unfairness, but he just accepts it as something we have a disagreement about,” she said. “How much convincing of the other person can you do?”
All this comes at a cost to women’s well-being, as mothers forgo leisure time, professional ambitions and sleep. Wives who view their household responsibilities “as unjust are more likely to suffer from depression than those who do not,” one study says. When their children are young, employed women (but not men) take a hit to their health as well as to their earnings — and the latter never recovers. Child-care imbalances also tank relationship happiness, especially in the early years of parenthood.
Division of labor in the home is one of the most important gender-equity issues of our time. Yet at the current rate of change, MenCare, a group that promotes equal involvement in caregiving, estimates that it will be about 75 more years before men worldwide assume half of the unpaid work that domesticity requires.
If anything is going to change, men have to stop resisting. Gendered parenting is kept alive by the unacknowledged power bestowed upon men in a world that values their needs, comforts and desires more than women’s. It’s up to fathers to cop to this, rather than to cop out.
It’s a little bit more of a bummer than most citizen science projects, but I wanted to give a shoutout to dBird, where you can report dead or injured birds throughout the USA to provide data for NYC Audubon. We might not all have time for a daily eBird checklist, but hopefully you don’t come across as many dead birds - if you do, the whole process took me under a minute to report a sighting. There’s less than 2000 birds reported for 2024 as of this post (which isn’t a lot, given how many birds die annually), so if and when you sadly find a dead bird, think of dBird’s conservation efforts and send in your report!
A REAL LIST OF ACTUAL NAMES AND THEIR (approximate) PRONUNCIATIONS:
Siobhan — “sheh-VAWN”
Aoife – “EE-fa”
Aislin – “ASH-linn”
Bláithín - “BLAW-heen”
Caoimhe - “KEE-va”
Eoghan - Owen (sometimes with a slight “y” at the beginning)
Gráinne - “GRAW-nya”
Iarfhlaith - “EER-lah”
Méabh - “MAYV”
Naomh or Niamh - “NEEV”
Oisín - OSH-een or USH-een
Órfhlaith - OR-la
Odhrán - O-rawn
Sinéad - shi-NAYD
Tadhg - TIEG (like you’re saying “tie” or “Thai” with a G and the end)
No, no, this is the orthographic equivalent of installing Windows on Mac.
The Latin alphabet was barely adequate for Latin by the time it got to the British Isles, but it’s what people were writing with, so somebody tried to hack it to make it work for Irish. Except, major problem: Irish has two sets of consonants, “broad” and “slender” (labialized and palatalized) and there’s a non-trivial difference between the two of them. But there weren’t enough letters in the Latin alphabet to assign separate characters to the broad and slender version of similar sounds.
Instead, someone though, let’s just use the surrounding vowels to disambiguate–but there weren’t enough vowel characters to indicate all the vowel sounds they needed to write, so that required some doubling up, and then adding in some silent vowels just to serve as markers of broad vs. slender made eveything worse.
They also had to double up some consonants, because, for example, <v> wasn’t actually a letter at the time–just a variation on <u>–so for the /v/ sound they <bh>. AND THEN ALSO Irish has this weird-ass system where the initial consonant sound in a word changes as a grammatical marker, called “mutation,” so they had to account somehow for mutated sounds vs. non-mutated sounds, which sometimes meant leaving a lot of other silent letters in a word to remind you what word you were looking at.
And then a thousand years of sound change rubbed its dirty little hands all over a system that was kind of pasted together in the first place.
My point is, there is a METHOD to the orthography of Irish besides “fuck the English.” The “fuck the English” part is just a delightful side-effect.
And moreover, there are some really good linguistic reasons why the Irish monks picked these particular letter combinations to stand for these particular sounds (note that this is based on a Scottish Gaelic course I took many years ago so bear with me if I get a few details wrong).
Let’s start with <bh>. Now, the Latin alphabet at the time didn’t have a letter for the /v/ sound, but it did have an alternative way of writing the /f/ sound, which was spelled <ph> when it was borrowed from Greek (for other historical reasons). Well, /p/ is a sound that’s produced by letting a burst of air out from behind your lips while your vocal cords aren’t vibrating (it’s a voiceless bilabial stop), and /f/ is a sound that’s produced by letting a small amount of air out from behind your teeth on your lips while your vocal cords aren’t vibrating (it’s a voiceless labiodental fricative). So <ph> is kind of like a more breathy <p> (/h/ is a fricative like /f/). And /b/ is the same as /p/ except your vocal cords ARE vibrating, the exact same way that /v/ is like /f/.
So <p> is to <ph> as <b> is to <bh>.
Adding <h> to a consonant to indicate a sound somewhat similar to the base letter was very common in post-Latin Europe: English, Irish, French, German, and many other European languages ended up with <ch>, <sh>, <th>, <gh>, <wh>, and so on. It just happens that some h versions are found in some languages and not others, and pretty much every language uses the h variations to stand for different sounds. (Especially “ch”).
Now let’s get to vowels. There are two groups of them: /i/ and /e/ are one group, while /u/, /o/ and /a/ are another. The traditional Gaelic (Scottish and Irish) terms for these groups are that /i, e/ are slender and /u, o, a/ are broad, but linguists also split them up, as front and back vowels.
Front vowels /i/ and /e/ tend to pull consonants along with them, in very many languages, especially /t/, /d/, /k/ and /g/. It’s a process called palatalization and there’s a whole Wikipedia article about it. So the <si> in words like “Sinead” is palatalized just like the <si> in Latin-derived words like “precision” (not to mention all the words in “-tion” and rapid speech pronunciations like “didja” and “gotcha”). Palatalization also explains why English has “hard” (=broad=non-palatalized) and “soft” (=slender=palatalized) pronunciations of <c> and <g>, which are split by the same set of vowels – compare “cat” “cot” “cut” with “ceiling” or “cite”. (The pronunciation of <g> is more complicated which is why no one can agree about “gif”.)
And English spelling also retains or adds a silent letter where it would cause palatalization confusion. Think about words like “peaceable”, “placeable”, “changeable”, “salvageable” – normally a silent “e” is dropped before -able (bribable, adorable), but it’s kept here. Or the “k” added in “mimicking”, “frolicking”, “picnicking” despite “mimic, frolic, picnic”.
Mutation (changing the initial sound of a word for grammatical effect) does seem to be particular to the Celtic branch of the Indo-European family tree, although various kinds of mutations are found in other languages.
Irish spelling looks weird if you take English as a starting point, but if you take Latin as a starting point (which it was), both Irish and English do different (but sometimes related) weird things.
And let’s not forget that much of this grief arose from trying to represent vowel sounds in an alphabet (Latin) that was borrowed from another alphabet (Greek/Etruscan) that was adapted from another alphabet (Phoenician) that was pretty just like “in the beginning, fuck vowels.”
@literary-potato I’ve lived in Ireland my entire 24.5 years and I’ve never seen anyone spell Orlaith like that - and my name is literally Niamh, Naomh is neither an alternate spelling nor a masculine version. It means “saint”. Oh, and there’s a G on the end of Aisling.
@cosmonauthill As above posters have pointed out, making the conversion from Irish phonemes to Latin letters is a weird and not-straightforward process. As a result, there are often numerous ways to spell Irish names using Latin letters. (The variations in spelling are also probably due to the fact that, for a long time, people were pretty loosey-goosey about spelling and it’s only recently in history that we’ve gotten super fussy with precise, ‘correct’ spellings – see: the many spellings of Shakespeare.)
Aislin is a variant of Aisling that I’ve seen, although I’m aware Aisling is the more common version by far (I think I’m biased to the no-g spelling because my first exposure to the name was a non-g Aislin).
Orlaith has numerous acceptable spellings in use including the one I gave. I selected the one with an ‘f’ because it is the least intuitive spelling out there. (versus “Orla” which is pretty much phonetic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orla_(name)
Naomh is not, as you rightly point out, a masculine or alternate version of Niamh. The two names are etymologically distinct, a fact which I considered mentioning but decided to omit because it disrupted the flow of the post. I lumped them together since it was a guide to pronunciation, not etymology (though on further research it appears some people pronounce Naomh differently, as “NAYV” or “NAHV”, and if you adhere to that pronunciation then yeah it shouldn’t be lumped with Niamh). Naomh is definitely a less common name than Niamh, but it is not unheard of. (Do a quick Facebook search – there’s plenty of profiles with people by that name, and judging by the last names and profile pics I’d guess they’re all Irish or of Irish descent, not American hipsters mis-spelling things to be cool). On further investigation, it also seems like there’s different pronunciations of Naomh floating around – “NAYV” or “NAHV” are also used.
A lot of the reasons for these spellings is actually history. For example, the distinction between broad and slender was originally a purely allophonic distinction, determined by adjacent vowels, so the use of silent vowels to distinguish broad and slender was derived initially from vowels that were originally present, and subsequently extended where needed
The use of bh for /v/ wasn’t someone simply copying the Latin ph. In fact, it originally wasn’t even spelled that way at all! The traditional Gaelic script used a dot above the letter rather than a digraph with h
This reflected a sound change that was also initially allophonic (and indeed, there was a period when it had become phonemic, but wasn’t yet indicated in the script, so b could be used for both sounds, and then that diacritic was adopted to distinguish the new sound, and then, of course, when new words were borrowed with the /v/ sound they logically used that same convention; using a diacritic was convenient since it made the change in spelling very minor and you could even add the diacritic to texts that didn’t make the distinction). When the traditional Gaelic script was replaced with the modern script, the dot diacritic was also replaced with a following h. That part was probably influenced by the use of consonant + h diacritics in other languages (especially English), but the fact that /v/ was indicated by an altered b was already there. That diacritic is still used, though, in contexts where the traditional Gaelic script is used
Because that historical lenition process is reflected in the grammatical phenomenon of mutation, the use of -h or the dot diacritic is quite useful, since an orthographic alternation between, e.g., an initial b- and an initial bh- preserves the relationship between the words much better than if it were something like b- and v-. Especially useful since several of the lenitions become homophones, if you’re looking up an unfamiliar word that occurs in lenited form, using a consistent orthographic representation (dot above or h) lets you easily figure out what the base form is. Dh and gh are pronounced the same, for example, but the use of that convention lets you know that if you encounter a word starting with dh- in its lenited form, you’d look it up in a dictionary with d-, and likewise gh- you look up under g-. If they were written the same way, you’d have to guess which letter the base form had
EDIT: Actually, I made an error on bh, although I was still correct about it not being a simple copying of ph. Quoting Wikipedia “In Old Irish, the overdot was only used for ⟨ḟ, ṡ⟩, while the following ⟨h⟩ was used for ⟨ch, ph, th⟩ and the lenition of other letters ⟨b, d, g, m⟩ was not indicated, lenition being generally understood due to word position (somewhat like in Danish). Later the two methods were used in parallel to represent lenition of any consonant (except ⟨l, n, r⟩) until the standard practice became to use the overdot in Gaelic type and the following ⟨h⟩ in Roman type. Thus the dotted letters (litreacha buailte “struck letters”) ⟨ḃ, ċ, ḋ, ḟ, ġ, ṁ, ṗ, ṡ, ṫ⟩ are equivalent to letters followed by a ⟨h⟩, i.e. ⟨bh, ch, dh, fh, gh, mh, ph, sh, th⟩.“
Either way, though, it’s still a representation of a sound change in Old Irish
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