When you get really close to someone, you develop a shared language. Sometimes that means using real words but in a non-standard way. Sometimes that means using made-up words as if they are real. And sometimes, you’re not entirely sure which it is. Over the years, my friend and I have collected these words and it’s still a joy when one of us randomly drops a word that gets promptly adopted into our shared language.
My friend recently went to the Netherlands and was telling me about his experience with the Dutch language over lunch. Being unfamiliar with it, I wanted to know all the details.
Could you tell what they were saying at all? (Sort of.) Do they primarily speak Dutch? (They speak predominantly English because apparently, the cool kids don’t speak Dutch.) Is it remotely similar to English? (Yes and no?)
My friend: It’s…interesting. It’s like German, with the very long words that feel odd to someone who doesn’t speak the language. Some words though, are like English. It’s just that…
Me: Just that?
And with the straightest face, he said:
Some words are like English but they pronunciate things weird.
I stared and waited for him to wiggle his eyebrows, a thing he does when he’s introducing a new word for our shared language.
My friend continues, “Like take ‘sea salt’ in Dutch. It’s ‘zeezout,’ which—
Oh, he was serious.
My friend: —just, sounds like English but pronunciated weird, you know? And the way they pronunciate—
My poker face was crumbling faster than the economy and my friend had to stop and ask why I was dying.
Me: Pronunciate—(wheezes)
My friend, looking at me in horror as it dawns on him: It’s not a word, is it?
We doubled over laughing, punctuated by one of us occasionally saying pronunciate before choking on laughter again like we were seven year olds who had just discovered a bad word. I could feel the strangers around us staring, puzzled by our hysterical giggling, but we couldn’t stop. After we recovered from laughing, my friend and I agreed though, that a portmanteau of ‘pronounce’ and ‘enunciate’ described exactly what he meant and should, indeed, be a real word.
While I have a unique shared language and set of mannerisms with each of my friends, I have a particularly rich shared language with one of my friends. We’ve built it over the years, and it’s wonderful when we find another word to add to it. But it didn’t start with that sort of tender intentionality.
Something you should know about my friend is that he’s extremely accepting and kind. This makes him a great friend but also the catalyst for a series of events.
Early in our friendship, we were sitting on the couch having long rambling conversations and at one point, he asked me about something and I said,
“I’m still percolating, I’ll get back to you.”
It’s my way of saying I’m mulling over my thoughts and distilling them, and he picked it up immediately. Over the next couple of months, I heard him use it in sentences too, saying,
“Are you still percolating?” and
“I think it’s time for me to percolate.”
And it would make me smile because he had inferred and adopted this random figure of speech I had made up. I was so happy, that I told him as much one day to express my appreciation.
My friend: Wait, pause.
I looked at him quizzically.
And my friend, with the most flabbergasted expression said,
“It’s a real word?”
“You didn’t know and you kept saying it for months?”
It turns out, he hadn’t just picked it up without question as a shared mannerism in our friendship. My dear friend was so accepting that he had without thinking twice, without judgement, adopted what he believed to be a complete nonsense word and taken to using it with equal amounts of enthusiasm. For months. As far as he knew, I had said unga bunga with a straight face and he had taken it in stride.
We laughed about it as I explained yes, it was a real word but no, that’s not what it means or how it’s used at all. “Percolate” ended up being the first word in our shared language, and we’ve had many additions since. But this first word and its origins will always be dear to me.
I learned to sew a little when I was a kid, and then went through cycles of learning and relearning to sew and adding to my sewing skill set. I remember when I first learned to sew, I looked at a thimble, shoved it onto my finger, test-poked the thimble with the pointy end of a needle, and concluded that thimbles were for babies.
If you’re poking yourself with the pointy end while you sew, I thought, clearly you were an amateur. I viewed thimbles as the training wheels of sewing and I (probably 7 or 8 at the time) was no child. And if I poked myself by accident? I was strong. I would not cry or make a big deal out of it. I felt no pain because I was Big Girl. Thus is the way of great sewers (sewists? sowweurs? sowwerds? what’s the right word for this anyway?).
I went years thinking this and given the sewing community’s mixed opinions on using thimbles, no one questioned my decision not to use one.
My friend recently tried his hand at sewing for the first time and I sent him a sewing tutorial that I had found useful. Seeing this, the Internet Algorithms started feeding me the occasional sewing video again, as they do. I stumbled across a video about this person’s essential sewing kit and I casually put it on in the background while I worked on other things. As she was going through her essential items, she brought up the thimble.
“I am a very, very stalwart proponent of wearing a thimble,” she starts.
My ears perked up immediately.
This person, a talented and experienced sewist, a “stalwart proponent” of the thimble? What was happening?
As I listened to her talk about thimbles, I started to get the sense that there was a noticeable gap between how I think a thimble works, and what this person was saying a thimble is for. Some seconds of furiously typing, as she gushed over her thimble, brought me to a series of videos showing people using thimbles.
Adult people using thimbles.
Adult people using thimbles, not as a safety measure, but to push the blunt end of the needle through thick fabric.
Dear reader, the number of times I have pushed a needle through thick fabric with my bare hands.
If you’ve never done this before, the short version is the needle can get a little stuck when going through thicker fabric. Really stuck. And if you try to push the needle through by pressing your finger against the blunt end of the needle, it hurts. Quite a bit. So for years, I’ve been gripping the needle by its sides as hard as I could and slowly inching it through thick fabric. This sounds fine and all, but what really happens is my fingers become less like dexterous appendages and more like duo pole dancers having a great time on the needle while I, the sewist, am not.
I had assumed that I was just a clumsy person, and sewists far more experienced than me just had extreme finger strength with which they gripped and pushed the needle with. Whenever I felt my fingers sliding down the needle, I’d think, “Ah, not enough points in sewing.” And then I’d endure the pain of the blunt end of the needle digging a hole into my finger when I eventually gave up and pushed the needle through. I’d push through the pain cuz I was Big Girl. Never did I consider that there was a Real Tool that people used to help them with this exact problem.
So today I learned that thimbles are not for babies.
(post outtake: I watched this sewist’s video to the end and learned she also keeps a pair of pliers handy for particularly thick fabrics and I just—
me, eyes blazing and fingers pole dancing: I WILL DO THIS WITH MY BARE HANDS CUZ THAT’S WHAT PROFESSIONALS DO
the professional: takes out a pair of pliers
there is no winning. there really isn’t.)
The sewist and the yt video that put me in my place
do you have any idea how much work it used to take before people accused you of being pro-shrimp torture? you had to do insane things to shrimp. you had to build tiny racks with tiny wheels and tiny gears. you had to put ten thousand shrimp on toothpicks in your front yard while calling yourself Vlad the Shrimpaler. you had to have a bumper sticker clearly stating you were in favor of shrimp torture and three additional ones clarifying that the first was completely unironic. now you just have to tell a Rationalist that their harry potter fanfic is the only thing worse than harry potter. kids these days will never appreciate the EFFORT it used to take. the SKILL. the CUSTOM BUMPER STICKER BUDGET. all for nought. fuck this. i dont even like shrimp torture anymore.
Hello everyone! It's time for a master post now I guess. I write short stories and fanfiction, and I try to share interesting and funny stories from my life on tumblr. I have a secondary blog drenamigmofridgemagnets that I reblog stuff to, and this blog is reserved mostly for my own posts. I am aterriblewriter on AO3.
No Wrong Answer
Based on the prompt below, finalist in the 2024 Next Generation Short Story Awards.
Impossible Causality
The smallest of decisions change the entire trajectories of our lives.
An original short story, deeply personal to me.
what's broken can be reforged
My long form League of Legends fanfic.
Years of war with Noxus has left Ionia broken, bitter, but victorious. A year after its conclusion, peace and balance have slowly returned to the land, but Irelia finds herself struggling to find her own balance as she tries to return to a normal life in a quiet village near the border.
Japan travel stories
the mori art museum
when you want to smell like soy sauce
what do you snip a turd with?
Misc Poetry
poetry for my partner
being an older sibling, my homage to @bookwyrminspiration's amazing sibling poem
My partner was in the middle of watching a cooking video when he got up to run an errand. As he was leaving, he pointed to the paused screen and declared,
This is me.
I squinted at the closed caption which read:
“There are also shrimp in it.”
Without questioning the possibilities of more profound interpretations, I said, Honey, do you have shrimp in you?
He nodded vigorously and wiggled his way out the door, taking the multitudes of his curious land-dwelling shrimp with him.
