grvsmth

Gender, language and other stuff.

[jdpink]

Mr. Ewing said he had previously kept 20 to 30 pairs of Yeezys in storage as a “safeguard” in case of a financial emergency.

For Sale: Yeezys, Never Worn

Kanye West fans reckon with what to do next.

[unclefather]

[kittydesade]

Spooky Shopkeeper: The price may be more than you expect to pay.

Me: Yes, I know how US taxes work, too.

[del3141]

Shopkeeper, increasingly exasperated: I’m trying to tell you that I’m evil and offering these wares with no regard for the harm they will do!

Me, also increasingly exasperated: I know what capitalism is too goddammit

[notquiteapolyglot]

To people who use "þ" as an aesthetic "p"

þink again.

[tharook]

getting thorny in the linguistics fandom

[tk-tako]

þorny*

[solarine]

That also goes for using ß as an aesthetic B. 

On my old server, there was a character named ßillyßadass.

This never failed to make me laugh, because that letter is not pronounced like B. It is a sharp S. 

That guy named himself SsillySsadass. 

[liquidstar]

Also to people who you Σ as an aesthetic E

that’s an S too, Σo maybe check next time

[slowspinningredemption]

oh boy

Д as an aesthetic A? Дon’t be a дumbass.

И as an aesthetic N? don’t be sillи.

П as another aesthetic N? stoп it.

У as an aesthetic Y? ty bad.

Ш or Щ as an aesthetic W? nope. it’s “sh” and “shch”!

Я as an aesthetic R? surprise! it’s “ya”.

ah yes, that classic horror film SNYEYAPOVUL DIAYAIES

[silvysartfulness]

This is pronounced Stargoat.

[dovewithscales]

Reblogging for Stargoat.

[justabrowncoatedwench]

STARGOAT

[darkestelemental616]

it’s Starglt, that’s a lambda

[thescribesloft]

Believe it or not this is actually teaching me about some language points that have been bugging me for a while now.

[reclaimingtransbutch-deactivate]

I'm a Transman Who's Detransitioning. Here's Why.

I’m a Transman Who’s Detransitioning. Here’s Why.

Like many communities, the transgender community has its share of controversial subjects. One in particular firing people up over the years is the concept of detransition. Detransition, or the halting or reversal of social and/or medical transition procedures, is a concept that frightens people. Framed as being about “transgender regret,” the idea of no longer pursuing transition or even one’s…

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[etirabys]

Given names in Korean are almost always two syllables, with the first syllable usually being shared with your siblings and cousins (all the children of the same generation of a family, basically). I just grew up with this and didn’t think it was weird until I had cause to explain it to someone yesterday, at which point I stopped and wondered if I was making all of this up, it seemed so weird, how the heck do they coordinate that? Do the parents of the first kid of the new generation decide, or something? That doesn’t sound right. I looked it up, and it turns out that family lines keep a constant character array in a poem:

The sequence of generation is typically prescribed and kept in record by a generation poem (bāncì lián 班次聯 or pàizì gē 派字歌 in Chinese) specific to each lineage. While it may have a mnemonic function, these poems can vary in length from around a dozen characters to hundreds of characters. Each successive character becomes the generation name for successive generations.[1] After the last character of the poem is reached, the poem is usually recycled though occasionally it may be extended.

Generation poems were usually composed by a committee of family elders whenever a new lineage was established through geographical emigration or social elevation. Thus families sharing a common generation poem are considered to also share a common ancestor and have originated from a common geographical location.

Which is mindblowingly cool, I think.

[allthingslinguistic]

New favourite example of structural ambiguity: “Fake degree claims dog prominent Spanish politicians.” 

[grvsmth]

The dog is MULTIPLE prominent Spanish politicians. That's some next level disguise work

[iguanamouth]

[unicornempire]

I. Love this. 

Love it.

Oh my god

yes.

[defilerwyrm]

This is it, I found it, the funniest post on this entire godsforsaken website

[hilarioushumorfromouterspace]

[carmenifold]

[shadowdarkleonidascrusade]

I didn’t think this post could get any better

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

THIS COMIC IS LEGITIMATELY HOW IT HAPPENED

[skeletonclaw]

An old comic I did re-drawn for publication.

[q-kip]

Creation of multiple patch designs

Hey ya’ll! I am raising money to produce some rad-ass patches!! Check it out, maybe back it, and share it if you can! I’d greatly appreciate it.

[grvsmth]

Are you a space queer who's sick of everybody's ableist bullshit? Sponsor my friend Kip's kickstarter!

[discardingimages]

all saints

Hours of Louis de Laval, France ca. 1480

BnF, Latin 920, fols. 180r, 181r, 182r

[graveyard-whistler]

[►]

[itkeepsusmoving]

I FUCKIN HATE/LOVE THIS

[neat-dyke-deactivated20190427]

Something that irks me as a really obviously gender non-conforming ‘cis’ woman is how quickly queer discourse writes off my experiences as purely ‘cis’ issues when I honest to god experience many of the oppressions and nuisances that we classify as transphobia. Without a doubt I experience more symptoms of transphobia than the ever growing group of essentially gender conforming people who use they/them pronouns and ID as trans without seeking transition-related therapies and the like. 

Sure, I view myself in terms of my female birth sex and that’s how I want it, but I’m a sometimes male-passing butch dyke in that very tenuous, ambiguous gender space–I am constantly assumed to be the ‘wrong’ gender, I am harassed or eyed with suspicion in bathrooms and other gendered facilities to the point of total avoidance, I must be hyperaware of how I am being gendered in public for my safety, and mainstream society is totally disgusted with me in the same way that it is disgusted by transgender people. Mainstream society hardly knows the difference if it does at all. None of this is even to mention how many non-trans identified people suffer from dysphoria!

This highlights the failure of purely identity-based understandings of gender and sex oppression. How we are treated is determined by who we are perceived to be in the world at large much more than it is determined by any internal identification. Gender freaks are gender freaks regardless of how they conceive of themselves. The classifier ‘cis’ fails especially in this respect. Is anyone who is obviously gender non-conforming not ‘cis’ regardless of our identification, since trans issues seem to concern us, or is it only the people who actively, consciously disidentify from their birth sex who aren’t cis? And if its the second option, how is that kind of classification useful for drawing conclusions about how gendered oppression works if it doesn’t explain why people like me experience what is essentially transphobia? When considering ‘cis’ but gender non-conforming people, cis and trans seem to be merely technical distinctions without much meaning beyond that. 

[old-school-butch]

I once had a woman in $200 jeans with rips in them, a crop top and blue lipstick lecture me for 20 minutes about my cis privilege because she ‘identified as non-binary.’ When I pointed out that she looked like a slightly blue-washed version of a typical goth girl whereas I’ve been a Butch lesbian since circa 1980, she said ‘that’s the problem, people misgender me all the time.’ Like… your identity is supposed to describe the problems you face in your life, not manufacture them.

[neat-dyke-deactivated20190427]

“…your identity is supposed to describe the problems you face in your life, not manufacture them”

[fallingasleepforever]

It’s difficult to talk about this because I’m not sure the right words but this is basically my experience as well. Most of the homophobia I deal with now is borderline transphobia in that people are verbally abusive due to me appearing very gender nonconforming and they don’t know what ‘I am’. I think it should be explained or at least explored that homophobia abuse towards gender nonconforming people is often transphobic in nature.

[neat-dyke-deactivated20190427]

Yeah, the way I would say it is that homophobia and transphobia aren’t really discrete from one another. This is especially true considering the vast majority of people don’t know really anything about trans politics or the difference between a gender non conforming person and a bona fide trans person (if there is one). A lot of homophobia is tied up in hatred and disgust of gender non conformity and it always has been, thats not a new thing. Gender non conformity has historically been a part of gay and lesbian culture (not just a trans thing), a community marker of sorts, and gender non conformity is then associated with homosexuality, which means that these markers make us targets for homophobic violence. Butch dykes have dealt with police abuse for looking ‘that way’ and flamboyant gay men have dealt with their fair share of street violence as well, all for deviating from gender norms in really obvious ways, for gender non conformity, as you say–and that’s what transness is too at the end of the day. 

[tejuina]

conversations about detransition are meaningless if they don’t address the reasons people do/don’t transition and the reasons they do/don’t detransition. is transition the best course of action for some dysphoric people under the current climate? sure. but saying that their transition is only a response to an innate gender identity and has nothing to do with misogyny and homophobia does a disservice to dysphoric people everywhere.

using the small number of detransitioned people as proof that transition is the right solution for most means nothing if we’re not actively fighting against homophobia and sexism and trying to ensure gnc people can live freely. if people such as myself transition because we’ve internalized those messages, what incentive would we have to detransition if society is not moving towards female and gay liberation?

my decision to detransition was, among other things, a way for me to reposition myself within feminism and had little to do with me having a female gender identity. what this tells me is that there are many people out there with whom I have a lot in common who would maybe detransition if the world were different.

tldr; if people transition because of reason X, they by and large won’t detransition unless X isn’t there anymore. so until homophobia and sexism don’t exist, we cannot say they’re not keeping some people from detransitioning.

[q-kip]

two cups up to no good.

[dinuguan]

[iguanamouth]

i met the HH mascot handler a few years back at a promotional event and me and a select few others were granted access to a room in the back where, once we were behind the safety wall with our infrared goggles, they removed the protective outer layer to our surprise and delight

most importantly : the nose is a part of the skull and is also made of bone

[allthingslinguistic]

Teaching phonetic transcription online

When I was teaching introductory linguistics, I had a problem with the phonetic transcription exercises in the textbooks I was using: they asked students to transcribe “the pronunciation” of individual words - implying that there is a single correct pronunciation with a single correct transcription.

An interesting post about how to teach and practice the International Phonetic Alphabet given that both audio files and IPA transcriptions are now commonly available online, from the blog of Angus Grieve-Smith. Excerpt: 

It immediately became clear to me that instead of listening to the sounds and using Richard Ishida’s IPA Picker or another tool to transcribe what they heard, the students were listening to the words, looking them up one by one in the dictionary, and copying and pasting word transcriptions. In some cases Roman Mars’s pronunciations were different from the dictionary transcriptions, but they were close enough that my low grades felt like quibbling to them.

I tried a different strategy: I noticed that another reporter on the podcast, Joel Werner, spoke with an Australian accent, so I asked the students to transcribe his speech. They began to understand: “Professor, do we still have to transcribe the entire word even though a letter from the word may not be pronounced due to an accent?” asked one student. Others noticed that the long vowels were shifted relative to American pronunciations. […]

This still left a problem: how much detail were the students expected to include, and how could I specify that for them in the instructions? Back in 2013, in a unit on language variation, I had used accent tag videos to replace the hierarchy implied in most discussions of accents with a more explicit, less judgmental contrast between “sounds like me” and “sounds different.” I realized that the accent tags were also good for transcription practice, because they contained multiple pronunciations of words that differed in socially meaningful ways – in fact, the very purpose that phonetic transcription was invented for. Phonetic transcription is a tool for talking about differences in pronunciation.

The following semester, Spring 2015, I created a “Comparing Accents” assignment, where I gave the students links to excerpts of two accent tag videos, containing the word list segment of the accent tag task. I then asked them to find pairs of words that the two speakers pronounced differently and transcribe them in ways that highlighted the differences.