I usually tell my students that “close reading” means looking at what is actually on the page, reading the text itself, rather than some idea “behind the text.” It means noticing things in the writing, things in the writing that stand out. To give you some idea of what this means, I’ve made up a list of five sorts of things that a close reading might typically notice: (1) unusual vocabulary, words that surprise either because they are unfamiliar or because they seem to belong to a different context; (2) words that seem unnecessarily repeated, as if the word keeps insisting on being written; (3) images or metaphors, especially ones that are used repeatedly and are somewhat surprising given the context; (4) what is in italics or parentheses; and (5) footnotes that seem too long. This list is far from complete—in fact, no complete list is possible—but the list is meant to begin to give you an idea of what sorts of things we notice when we’re doing close reading.
What all five of my examples have in common is that they are minor elements in the text; they are not main ideas. In fact, your usual practice of reading which focuses on main ideas would dismiss them all as marginal or trivial. Another thing they have in common is that, although they are minor, they are nonetheless conspicuous, eye-catching: they are either surprising or repeated, set off from the text or too long. Close reading pays attention to elements in the text which, although marginal, are nonetheless emphatic, prominent—elements in the text which ought to be quietly subordinate to the main idea, but which textually call attention to themselves.
Most of you have been educated to ignore such elements. You have been taught to seek out and identify the main ideas, dismissing the trivial as you go. This has had to be trained into you: read to a young child sometime, you will notice she has the annoying habit of interrupting the flow of the story to draw attention to some minor thing. Close reading resembles the interruptions of that child. It is a method of undoing the training that keeps us to the straight and narrow path of main ideas. It is a way of learning not to disregard those features of the text that attract our attention, but are not principal ideas.
Jane Gallop, “The Ethics of Close Reading: Close Encounters,” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Vol.16, No.3 (Fall 2000), pg.7-8 (x)
im not joking btw im talking about how it used to be pretty common for communist writers to use she/her to refer to a generic worker/person/etc as a #feminist thing. it's more common to use gender-neutral language now but the problem is people are still constantly assuming that the default person is male, even when non-gendered language is used. she/her at least has the effect on the reader of like, giving them a stern look and saying "remember women exist". anyway i want us to bring this back
and before anyone gets silly, no it's not misgendering people who don't use she/her, unless you believe all the cis male writers who did/do this also believe that Everyone On Earth Is A Woman. it's a political writing choice
MRI machines and cooling units and AC and IT systems in hospitals are breaking due to the heat. Lab equipment is failing. Some cancer treatments cannot be done due to machine failures. A&E overcrowding is worse due to heat related health issues and sheer amount of people is making the heat in hospitals worse (and the AC! Is breaking!) Patients with appointments are being advised to bring in "a lot" of water with them to be able to safely attend. Fans cannot be used in hospitals. Norwich has no functuoning MRI scanners right now. And the staff have to keep working through all of this, they are getting ill and sleep deprived which is compounding issues further. This is not normal 👍
[video transcript: a video of a brown tabby kitten playing with a jug. the kitten slides into the jug, and then a different, black kitten pops its head out. a watermark at the bottom of the video reads “@ Kitten_Faces” end transcript]
“I’ve certainly stopped by the Reflecting Pool from time to time. I even lived in the nation’s capital for five years. It always seemed more or less fine: water, reflecting, no evident swampiness. I started googling at first and Google AI told me how this has really been a big deal for ages and no one had been able to fix the problems. But when I looked at the articles they were getting this from it was all stuff from the last month, with sections that were longer versions of the snippet I just showed you.”
—
Trump’s New Leak in the Back Reflecting Pool Legend
This is one of the truly insidious, deadly, and dangerous aspects of AI use in search results, and it’s entirely by design.
The oligarchs and tech fascists want to manipulate reality (or at least the public perception of reality) by substituting their ideological lies and false bullshit for actual facts. They tell the AI to ignore sources they don’t like, and to privilege those that they do, and this is what we get.
It’s *vital* that we teach kids (and reeducate adults, if necessary) to never use AI for this sort of information gathering. It’s so dangerous to let this happen without any pushback.
We are told that AI is a tool and that it is transforming the world and that ignoring it is like trying not to use light bulbs. But, of the multiple problems with AI, one big one is that I am not allowed to own this tool - I am only allowed to rent access to it. Unlike a lightbulb or a hammer or a computer, I don’t control the tool and I don’t control the results of using it.
There’s a theory that early Europeans started saying “brown one” or “honey-eater” instead of “bear” to avoid summoning them, and similarly my friend has started calling Alexa “the faceless woman” because saying her true name awakens her from her slumber
English has an avoidance register used in the presence of certain respected animals, which sounds fancy until you realize it’s spelling out w-a-l-k and t-r-e-a-t in front of the dog.
Iceland does! They are the illhveli, literally “evil whales”, and they live to kill you. They love nothing more than killing and eating humans and sinking their ships. Their greatest enemy is the steypireydur (that’s blue whale to you), which is the greatest of the good whales and the protector of sailors.
All evil whales are, well, evil. So evil that if you speak their name at sea, they will hear it and home in on you. So instead you use all sorts of euphemisms for their names. Also if you try to cook their meat it literally disappears from the pot. That’s right, they’re so evil, you can’t even eat them.
They include such types as the hrosshvalur (horsewhale), with big eyes and a red mane and tail. This is probably the best known and most feared of the lot.
The raudkembingur (redcomb) is especially cruel and bloodthirsty even by illhveli standards. If you manage to escape it, it will die of frustration.
Good luck escaping the mushveli (mousewhale) though, it has legs! And will clamber onto the beach in pursuit!
Or what about death from above? The stökkull (jumper) leaps high into the air and pile-drives boats to pieces.
Meanwhile the skeljungur (shellwhale) sits in the path of boats and lets them get wrecked on its shelly hide…
… while the sverdhvalur (swordwhale) slices through boats with its dorsal fin.
The katthveli (catwhale) is relatively harmless though. It meows.
The same can’t be said of the lyngbakur (heatherback), a classic island fish that lets sailors get on its back and then dives, taking them to a watery grave.
The nauthveli (oxwhale) on the other hand specially targets cattle, attracting them into the sea with its bellow before tearing them apart.
How can you avoid all these murderous whales, like the taumafiskur (bridlefish) here? Any of a number of ways, including getting a steypireydur to help. There are substances, ranging from angelica to sheep dung and chopped fox testicles, that they find abhorrent. And you can distract them with loud noises and barrels.
For more, I assure you this link will answer all your questions.
Jews do this with the Name of G-d, which I will not be writing here because You Do Not Do That. But if you’ve ever heard or seen a Jew say “Hashem” when referring to G-d, you’re literally hearing them say “the Name” instead of, well, the Name. Likewise, “Adonai” is not the Name either–it means “lord.”
Incidentally, this is why we no longer know exactly how the Name was pronounced, because it took a few hundred years for vowels to be invented in Hebrew (and they’re still not used in everyday writing), and so the vowels in the Name were never written down. We have a pretty decent guess because part of the Name can be reconstructed from other words, but that’s really all it is–a guess.
And to bring this full circle, this is also why we don’t know what the word for “bear” should actually be in English, but to give you an idea of how off the mark it is, we do know “Arthur” and “Arcturus” both descend from the original actual word.
The neat thing about reconstructive linguistics though, is that we can kinda get an idea of what the word might have sounded like if it wasn’t replaced, by feeding it through predictable sound changes. Because I’m a strange person, instead of looking up a reconstruction I’ve decided to use my amateur linguistic ability to attempt to reconstruct it through to English myself.
(Please keep in mind I’m not qualified)
So where do we start? Proto-Indo-European, of course. Proto-Indo-European is the reconstructed language of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, which eventually spread across almost all of Europe and a good swath of Asia before developing into languages like Latin, German, Turkish, and Hindi. The PIE word for bear was something like “h₂ŕ̥tḱos”.
The very first thing we need to do is centumise the k, making “h₂ŕ̥tkos”
The syllabic r gains a vowel “h₂úrtkos”
Now we can get rid of that pesky laryngeal consonant. “úrtkos”
By this point the language has already taken on a Germanic quality, but we’re not quite at Proto-Germanic yet.
Time for Grimm’s Law, the thing that makes Germanic be Germanic. The t becomes a þ but the k is unchanged, producing “úrþkos”
The little sibling of Grimm’s Law is Verner’s Law, which changes that s into a z for “úrþkoz”
To finish off Early Proto-Germanic, o and a merge, giving us “urþkaz”. Notice how I’ve removed the stress marker; all root words in Proto-Germanic have initial stress so that marker was no longer necessary by this point.
No further changes seem to occur in Proto-Germanic, so we can say that perhaps, the early Germanic people would’ve called bears “*urþkaz” if they weren’t afraid of them. Or, more specifically, the plural form would be “*urþkōz”
The only Northwest Germanic step is a-mutation, where due to the a in the following syllable, the u becomes an o, giving “orþkaz”.
Now we’re in Proto-West-Germanic, and we’re inching closer to English.
In Scandinavia, that final z is now an r, but here we’re chopping it off entirely for “orþka”.
And now by this point England and Frisian are still one language, but distinct from the others of the area.
We need to chop off that final a now. “orþk”
Ahh, welcome to Early Old English. It’s now roughly 500 C.E., so we’ve come a long way. Interestingly, nothing seems to happen here for the entire Old English period, so in 1066 C.E. we have “orþc”. I have my doubts that such a consonant cluster is valid, but unless I’ve horribly missed something, that’s where we currently are. And… it stays that way up through Modern English. So I’ve probably done something wrong around where the z disappeared.
Anyway if somebody more qualified than me would like to blow me out of the water with a more accurate reconstruction, feel free. I’d appreciate it.
I’ve seen “orx” and “orse” suggested as potential reconstructions.
… wait, do we know orc isn’t derived ultimately from h₂ŕ̥tḱos? etymonline traces it to Latin orcus and then gives up with “of uncertain origin,” but it doesn’t feel like an entry that’s had enough research to trust.
I decided to pop it into Wikipedia, and apparently Tolkien explained exactly where he got it. It’s lifted from Old English orcneas, a word that seems to be giving linguists hell and a half in translation to modern English, but one prominent suggestion is “demon-corpse.”
Demon -> feared and evil thing that can do a great deal of harm -> that lives in the woods and looks somewhat, but not fully, human? -> bear?
The logic is there. Drag it across millennia and I can see it.
I don't know which of you needs to hear this but "narc" is not short for "narcissist" when someone calls you a "narc" for snitching they are calling you a "narcotics officer"
sometimes hockey players get little presents, hand made stuff, when they go greet the fans and sign stuff before or after games
and it's always been really cool to get stuff and they appreciated it but it was also never really that personal
but after they've come out their fanbase obviously gains a bunch of new demographics - the gals gays and theys are on their side now!
so, now they have a little collection of stuff that is about them together
friendship bracelets with HOLLANOV inbetween a 24 and 81 - shane surprises a lot of people online (and tbh also his husband a little) bc not only did he put it on then and there but it can also be seen in paparazzi pics and when he walks into the rink sometimes
a picture of them, drawn in pencil, stunning work - they frame it
ilya LOVES the shirts he gets and wears them out all the time (im not gay but my husband is, faguette with a rainbow coloured baguette under it, i *love* my boyfriend but instead of saying love its a heart with shanes head photoshopped into it, i put the bi in bitch, etc)
Funny that the stereotypical cynic is an idealist who aged out of it. In my experience, the reverse is true. I was an extreme cynic as a teenager and then I noticed how profoundly limiting it was, and also that "cynics are cool and smart" was a message that was being constantly reinforced by corporate media for some reason.
#yes! cynicism reads as very juvenile to me#and yes prev often stemming from teen pain
Yeah, like I see black-pilled people on here and my default reaction isn't "oh, these must be world-weary old warriors who've lost their faith in humanity", it's "these people are in their 20s and need a hobby"
You know what? Fuck it I'm adding more context. Sesame Street has talked about the topic of death more than once and it's done with such gentle carefulness without watering down or censoring the heaviness of the situations. It treats heavy subject matter with respect and dignity and has been for DECADES.
From the early 1980s:
To 2025:
Hell, they even cover the devastating heaviness of MASS SHOOTINGS without censoring or watering anything down.
They've been doing this for YEARS, and it's ALWAYS handled with dignity, respect, seriousness, understanding, and love.
Whenever I see people censoring words because it "might offend" someone or the big ad companies that are currently trying to run everything? I just want to say to them: "What? Is Sesame Street too mature for you?" Because really...what the hell are we doing.
I'm back with even more examples! Sesame Street once again to this day is out here handling extremely difficult subject matter with incredible care and respect. "We can't let kids learn about uncomfortable things!" Oh, really now? Even though they're things that happen in everyday life that they'll face one day at some point anyway? Interesting. Let's see what else this show has covered that people (for some reason) think should be avoided and hidden. Here's more on death of loved ones and greif:
Or how about when someone is put into the foster care system because their home isn't safe anymore and their needs aren't being met?
Maybe some discussions about group therapy/getting help and support?
Hey look! Here's a segment about gender expression vs taught expectation, including unlearning harmful biases and what to do when you hurt someone on accident because you didn't know it was wrong!
Look! The topic of race and diversity! The importance of unity and equity!
They even also have a more allegorical take on discrimination and being looked down on for who you are, featuring Big Bird. The conflict is about how he's not being let into a club because the one bird running the club personally decided he didn't want someone like Big Bird there.
Big Bird goes out of his way to keep changing parts of himself in order to "prove" he can fit into this club if he just changed enough. The truth comes out though, and there's nothing he can do to gain the approval of that bird. He will never be good enough in his eyes, and Big Bird starts to hate himself. His real friends see this finally put their feet down, emphasizing that you should never change yourself just to fit into one singular narrow idea someone else has.
There's A LOT of different situations this can be an allegory for. Racism, sexism, homophobia, basically ANY form of exclusion is put on full blast in this 15 minute clip. Sesame Street can be both blunt and allegorical when approaching difficult topics, and it NEVER misses or looses the point.
It does an exceptional job in both styles of representation WITHOUT watering anything down. The more sanitized everything gets, the more radical Sesame Street is suddenly considered, hence why so many "particular groups" want it gone. Hmmm! I can only imagine why that could be, in this current political climate! (I'm being sarcastic)
When Sesame Street is suddenly labeled as "questionable" or "politically/agenda motivated" content...it says A LOT about where we currently are and who gets to decide what's "best" for kids or not. Don't fall for the censorship and topic-dodging excuses that are covered by the "But think of the children!!!" movement. Never fall for it, because you know which side you're on if you do.
Sesame Street proves kids can be taught and trusted with learning about these topics when it's handled with the right amount of understanding and care. It shows what all this "controversy" is all really about. What it's always been about, actually.
Don't fall for it, always side with Sesame Street.
There's a post sitting in my flagged posts that's been there for three plus years. It's a pair of onions in a bag that looks suspiciously like a pair of fat tits. Apparently it's flagged for everyone and God i wish i could show y'all
”This portrayal of a marginalized group was wrong then and is wrong now” and “This portrayal of a marginalized group was very progressive for the time period and paved the way for more representation while likely limited by factors outside of the creator’s control” are two statements that can and should ABSOLUTELY coexist and be kept in mind when interacting with older media
dededos
turnnoffyourmind
discoholicmusic
gummygunk
