the girl in the black hat

- Tiffany, UK - 30s - Illustrator etc - she/her - Little big lesbian

[wokefrogvirus]

let’s have a blast with mama

[oblivioustoast]

photographer credit from the notes!

[augustdementhe]

YAY, CREDIT. Go buy a print from him, if you're so inclined:

SHOP | kunalphotography

[catgirlforeskin]

trying to make a creative project without men and uproot any masculine words will drive one insane. There's the obvious stuff, right, swordsman becomes swordsmaid, count becomes countess, gladiator to gladiatrix and so on.

But did you know that "-er" is a masculine suffix, for which "-ster" as in "sister" is the feminine equivalent? Baker means a man that bakes, the historical feminine equivalent is a bakster, a webster is a female weaver. Some words already have the feminine as default, youngster, teamster, mobster, but most? Trying to be a principled feminist has you saying shit like goonster

[gwenadier]

Wait for real? Fascinating.

[catgirlforeskin]

for real! Lots of other examples too, anything "patr" comes from father, "patriarch" is the obvious one, but patriot, patron, patronym all would need "matr" for mother is instead. Pope and Papacy derive from "Papa" and would be Mome/Mamacy if you want yuri catholicism (hellworld!!) it's EVERYWHERE

[catgirlforeskin]

My favorite example, beyond the obvious ones like lord/lady, waiter/waitress, steward/stewardess, is housekeeper, which is now the more acceptable term for a maid, when maid, of course, just means "woman" and keeper is masculine, would be keepster or keepess but (to my knowledge) neither were used historically because, well, keeping wasn't something women got to do!

Likewise, waitress has fallen out of favor for host or server, which are also both gendered terms. (hostess or serving girl, respectively. Servant is also gendered, maidservant and servantess were used)

There's been a concerted push with a lot of these to phase out the feminine variants of these words and just treat the masculine variants as neutral, or find neutral alternatives like fireman -> firefighter (even though fighter is also gendered) because the feminine variants are seen as inherently lesser, which, yeah that's how women are seen.

There is a line you have to draw somewhere of "okay let's just treat this and below as gender neutral because, frankly, most words that just mean "person" mean "man" historically because women weren't (and still largely aren't) considered people, and otherwise we're going to shred the whole English language" and I get that.

BUT. I think a lot of folks draw that line at the start and insist that man/guy/dude/bro can be gender-neutral which is obvious stupid. And I think it's always worth having this investigation and questioning how we speak, it shapes how we think about worlds and people real and fictional.

Okay one last silly aside about barista, which is supposed to be gender-neutral from Italian but men got weird about it and then invented baristo so now -ista is kinda feminine? Typically it's just borrowed into English to sound Foreign (Sandinistas leading to the exonym Corbynistas)

[catgirlforeskin]

Bucket, Captain Lieutenant are gendered masculine btw, it'd be buckette captaine and lieutenante. It's not just an issue of suffixes being "ignored"(masculinized) when borrowed from french because we write Debutante with the e. Multiple times a month I stumble into new examples, the battle never ends

[gooned-out-tgirl]

hey i'd just like you to know ever since i saw this post it's been the only thing i think about when at work. Because of it i've tried imagining a version of english that is more feminine or even 100% fem. 1. it's been such a wild ride just going "my god how we speak is weird." 2. I has been a pure joy coming up with an idea for a world for a bee species and a lesbian lizard species to speak in this language.

[catgirlforeskin]

we are now sisters in arms in an eternal war 🤝

[greatcanadian-eh-hole]

Kate Box photographed by Jedd Cooney for Sydney Morning Herald

[chifuuichi]

This entire week has conspired against me to not be able to do the things I need and want to do and is stressfullll looking forward to it being over tbh

[artschoolglasses]

White Muslin Spencer, English, 1813-15

From Kerry Taylor Auctions

[pagewoman]

Dillington House, Ilminster, Somerset, England

[visual-poetry]

»swofehuper« by richard tipping (+)

[via]

[myterus-is-uterus-deactivated20]

men fabricated the idea that they are the default sex to compensate for their biological inferiority and general superfluousness

this is not just the “natural order” this is the language of a patriarchal culture

[rhysiare]

Omg no, you are wrong on so many levels and as a linguist this makes me ache something terrible. In my linguistics class in undergrad, we actually made fun of people who think like you along these lines and for good reason, because you are wholly ignorant and are choosing to spin narratives about things and fields which you know completely nothing about yet pretend you do.

She: This word evolved naturally from Old English from seo/heo which were just words to refer to feminine-female people evolving from Proto-Germanic words meaning ‘that/there’. He as a word evolved from the same ideas but Proto-Germanic words for ‘this/here’. Your idea of “patriarchal language” further falls apart when you compare this part of English to other Germanic languages, of which English is related, the words in German for he and she are “er” and “sie”, completely unrelated. So it is by clear happenstance, not some patriarchal conspiracy that the words “he” and “she” in English have similar form. 

Woman: Oh god this one always gets my goat when people go for this one. Man did not used to mean “male”, man used to mean “humanity/human being”, the old words in Old English for male adult person and female adult person were “werman” and “wifman” respectively, we can see this relation in words like werewolf and wife as being the remnants of the base “wer-” and the base “wif-”. Woman evolved phonologically from the word “wifman” by natural processes where the ‘f’ sound dropped and the ‘i’ became lax. Man dropped its “wer” stem for reasons mostly unknown but I can guarantee have nothing to do with “patriarchy” because phonological change has no basis in that.

Female: Male and Female actually come etymologically from two completely different words. Male comes from Old French “masle” which meant masculine, while Female came from Old French as well “femella” which meant young woman. This is another case, just like he and she, where the words coincidentally ended up looking similar without having any direct correlation in historical linguistic processes to make them as such.

Human: This word etymologically derives from Proto-Indo-European “ghomon” which means earthly being as opposed to heavenly being which would refer to gods. You have some small glimmer of hope here in that the word does eventually branch off into the word for “man” in some languages but this is still too small of a precedent to base any conspiratorial thinking like you are doing off of.

Person: This one offends me the most, simply because I love the fuck out of Etruscan language and your continued ignorance just irks me at this point. Person derives from “persona” from Latin which meant the same meaning, which ultimately derived from “phersu” Etruscan for ‘mask’ as Etruscans would often have theatre performers use masks to give identity to the performers. So never once did “person” have any meaning to do with “son”. So yes, this IS the “natural order” or language.

Please never proselytise your faulty ideology and misandrist thinking within speaking about word origins and morphology again, as unless you actually do fact checking, I will school the everloving hell out of you, stay in your lane.

[obsessedwithlanguages]

thank god for the explanation above

[scleroticstatue]

and the insult pussy is from the word pusillanimous, meaning coward, not the slang term for female genitalia, which comes from the Old German/Norse word for vulva, puse, which is also not the source of calling cats pussy, which comes from the Germanic root word for cat pūs, which is also not where we get the term sourpuss from because that comes from the Irish word for lip or mouth, pus.

[iwantmoreoctopusses]

The history of words is often more interesting than whatever one can deduce by just looking at the modern words.

[boomer-mythology-destroyer]

[nine-frames]

"Anyone afraid of the dark?"

Sunshine, 2007.

Dir. Danny Boyle | Writ. Alex Garland | DOP Alwin H. Küchler

[disaac]

Sunshine (2007) dir. Danny Boyle

[tiffbaxter]

🌟Beacon🌟

Custom book cover commission for a client for his girlfriend's birthday based upon her own novel writing. (Some details omitted from the cover design for privacy)

[bells-lettres]

local matchmaker losing it over yet another unrealistic demand from the clientele 🤣🤣

Translation by me. :))

[riverwindphotography]

Wild Falls and Wildflowers

(c) riverwindphotography, July, 2026

[marwyn]

Is your first name canon in asoiaf

Yes

No

Sort of (spelled differently, etc.)

Remaining time: 21 hours 58 minutes

Here’s the character list on the wiki for reference

[silkenscreen]

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) dir. Peter Weir

[peonies-and-dreams]

my summer of love

[chekhovs-guns]

okay but we should talk more about edward miller's artwork for the locked tomb series. like. these are so beautiful. the only style in which i would like to see tlt adaptation.

illustrations by edward miller for subterranean press edition of gideon the ninth by tamsyn muir

illustrations by edward miller for subterranean press edition of harrow the ninth by tamsyn muir

illustrations by edward miller for subterranean press edition of nona the ninth by tamsyn muir