Strong Like An Amazon

guciroxie on ao3. 29. Proudly and Angrily Jewish. Spoonie. Aromantic. She/Her Pronouns. Licensed Speech-Language Pathologist. PhD candidate. Used to be like-an-amazon.tumblr.com

[inadvertently-biblical]

Anthony Head (1954-2026) as Rupert Giles

Buffy the Vampire Slayer - 4x18

[kissed1996]

If you had to sing a child to sleep RIGHT NOW what would you sing and it CANT BE a lullaby it has to be a regular song

[wiisagi-maiingan]

I never saw the word slop used except to refer to gross food (usually food produced to feed a lot of people very cheaply with little regard for flavor or nutrition, like in schools and prisons) and now it's literally everywhere and frankly, I find that very suspicious considering the combination of rising antisemitism, the spread of alt-right and far right terms through social media, and the existence of the word "goy-slop." I think we could all do to be more critical about the language that we use and we should really be asking ourselves where popular slang is actually coming from, who started saying those words in the first place and why.

[wiisagi-maiingan]

And honestly, it would be considerably less suspicious if it was JUST the word slop but it's not. It's usually "[word]-slop" like het-slop or AI-slop and I cannot stress enough that that has very clear and blatant origins in antisemitic conspiracies about Jews poisoning the world. That may not be your intention when you use terms like that, but there is a reason why antisemites and other bigots try so hard to normalize their language and memes, because that helps them blend in and normalize their beliefs.

[maus-fischer-montgomery]

You’re asking me to look to Europe, a continent steeped in antisemitism with over a millennium’s worth of history of discrimination, persecution, forced conversion, pogroms, and mass slaughters of Jews (to say nothing of the Holocaust), as some sort of neutral moral arbiter of the Israel-Palestine conflict?

[indecisiveavocado]

If you're greedy, the French call you a Jew.

A cabal is from kabbalah. Judas -- traitor -- means just Jew. Armenians and Catalans agree. The Dutch call dishonest people Jews. If you steal in Danish, you Jew. In English, someone greedy is a Jew, swindling is jew ("The Jew was jewing him out of his hard-earned money")

The Finns agree.

In fact, I am inventing a rule of thumb.

If, in your language, a word for Jew, or a derived term, also means something along the lines of "someone greedy" (or another Jewish stereotype) you are not a neutral country. The one exception I will permit is the US, possibly, on the basis of our large Jewish community and (so far) lack of explicit, murderous, governmental antisemitism. This rules out, among others, French, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Romanian, Turkish, Greek, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, and Albanian, as well as others I'm too lazy to dig through on Wiktionary.

[shofarsogood]

No, let's add the US to this list. The US refused to accept Jewish refugees and in fact turned most of them away to return to Germany (the St Louis, for example. All its passengers were murdered). The US spent more money and effort saving paintings and art from the Nazis than Jews. Even after the war, the US barely increased their immigration quotas. There was a bill to increase the number of Jewish CHILDREN allowed as refugees after Kristallnacht; it never passed the Senate. The US government willingly and knowingly provided falsified documents to Nazis to smuggle them into the US to work for the US government (Operation Paperclip).

The US is just as bigoted as their forebears.

[modernmusess]

katniss: everyone’s so focused on protecting peeta because they too know how pure hearted he is and believe that he—a boy they’ve never even met before—deserves to survive over them and their friends of literal decades

finnick, to literally everyone else: okay if peeta dies she’s gonna kill all of us and then herself, so hands in, protect bread boy on three-

[doyouknowthisbook-poll]

Do you know which book this is from?

.

I’ve read this book before, and I like it!

I can tell which book this is from based on this excerpt, but I haven't read it

I started reading this, but didn’t finish it (or I am reading it currently)

I haven’t read this book, but I like this excerpt!

I’ve read this book before, and I don’t like it

I haven’t read this book and I don’t like this excerpt

Voting ended onApr 2

Please reblog the polls, but KEEP IT SPOILER-FREE to make people read the excerpt with an open mind 💖📚 Title and author will be revealed after the poll's conclusion.

Thank you @evelynrose33284 for the submission! 😄

[doyouknowthisbook-poll]

FINAL RESULT: The majority of voters haven’t read this book, but enjoyed this excerpt. 😊

The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles is a 1974 children's novel written by Julie Edwards, the married name of singer and actress Dame Julie Andrews. More recent editions credit the book to "Julie Andrews Edwards". From Wikipedia: “The novel follows three siblings, Ben, Tom, and Melinda Potter (better known as Lindy), who meet Professor Savant while visiting the zoo one rainy day. On Halloween, Lindy gets dared by her brother to knock on the spookiest house on the block for a quarter, which happens to belong to the Professor, and the three become more acquainted with him. After a second meeting, they begin spending time at the Professor's house, where he introduces them to games of concentration and observation. He reveals that there is a magic land called Whangdoodleland which can only be reached through the imagination, and he is training them to accompany him there.”

The book currently has a 4.25 rating on Goodreads and a 4.2 rating on StoryGraph.

[meangirlnurse]

?

[tokkibean]

i do not “delete sentences” when they start “hindering the plot” i COPY PASTE THEM into a SEPARATE DOC made just for keeping all my USELESS LINES that i will also NEVER USE so therefore i should JUST DELETE THEM but i DONT because id FEEL BAD if i did

[cannibalchicken]

[baejax-the-great]

Truly, deeply not into this need to diagnose anyone with academic interests as autistic

[trekkiedean]

“fem!dean would be super girly” “fem!dean would be butch” we already know exactly what fem!dean would be like because there was an entire seven-season show about her before dean winchester was a gleam in eric kripke’s eye

[trekkiedean]

frankly it would be more appropriate to say that dean is masc!buffy

[magnetothemagnificent]

You've heard of "there is no heterosexual explanation for this", get ready for "there is no goyische explanation for this" for characters who really only make sense if they're Jewish.

[starlightomatic]

whoa…

[starlight-shadowbanned]

today’s yiddish word of the day is

tshaynik - טשײַניק

pronounced TCHAI-nick (tchai rhyming with my)

it means tea kettle or teapot

for example, this tshaynik is grin:

and this tshaynik has images of ketz on it:

the expression hak a tshaynik translates to “bang a tea kettle” and means to annoy someone, talk nonsense, or babble.

thank you to @tshaynik-sideblog and @teakettle-cat for being tea-kettle-related-urls who by chance interacted with my blog around the same time and inspired this post!

~~~

all yiddish word of the day posts now contain tags of all the words they reference!

[starlight-shadowbanned]

These tags from @oak1985 prompted me to wonder if there was a connection between tshaynik and chai.

For a moment I thought it was a coincidence, because tea in Yiddish is tey. Therefore, I figured Yiddish was on the tea side of the tea/chai linguistic divide:

But then I wondered, what if tshaynik has a different origin?

And it turns out that yes, tshaynik is of Russian origin! As you can see, in Russian tea is chay. And tea kettle is chaynik.

By contrast, in German, tea is tee. Tea kettle is teekessel, just like in English.

Yiddish is a Germanic language, but it has a lot of Russian loanwords. This is a great example of that! And I find it interesting that two words for similar concepts came from different origins. This kind of thing is one reason I love Yiddish so much :)

[girl-of-ink]

Thinking this morning about the cultural legacy of buffyspeak and the whedonism/whedonesque quips as they have come to be culturally dominant in big budget films like marvel (even before whedon himself was actually working on marvel) and I think part of the issue is that so many people (read: men) in Hollywood see the appeal of whedonesque dialogue as ‘smart guy fast quips’ while ignoring the actually interesting and subversive aspect of buffyspeak, which is that it was rooted in a maligned & devalued dialect & subculture associated with vapid and shallow teenage girls. Whedon is absolutely not the first guy to write fast-paced witty dialogue, but he IS revolutionary for merging fast-paced quips with y2k valley girl slang in a way that created such a lively and unique artistic idiolect that really feels like an organically-derived dialect that arises amongst a group of friends. It’s not the pace that made buffyspeak iconic, it’s the vernacular! + the way the vernacular interacted with the pace. So modern whedonesque dialogue falls SO flat and is so boring bc it all uses the same dialect and diction, rather than having a unique dynamic of tension by engaging with/creating its own idiolect. And that’s why it’s buffyspeak not whedonspeak. A single quip can be a whedonism, but just quips alone cannot create the realistic and engaging artistic idiolect of btvs

[biandanxious18]

there’s something to the juxtaposition of 30/90 by Jonathan Larson who turned 30 in 1990 and 30 by Bo Burnham who was born in 1990 and both of them writing songs on the dread of aging and all that like i’m too tired to properly work out the entire thought but there’s something

[pamfieldsphotoshoppedinjail]

I probably did see you at Sinai but I’m terrible with faces sorry

[mirefireflies]

a series of unfortunate events is really the blueprint for characters doomed by the narrative like i think that series changed my brain chemistry forever… the title tells you how the story will end and the author repeatedly tries to warn you away but still you pick up the book. the first sentence is that it’s a tragedy and you keep reading anyway.. you read through the whole story and it’s terrible and tragic and unfortunate and then after you’ve stayed up late reading it under your covers with a flashlight, you go to your school library as soon as class is over and check out the next book in the series because you need to know what happens even though really, you already know. the end is right there in the title, it’s there in every page .. before the story even begins you know it’s a tragedy and you read it anyway and—

[hermthejewishwyrm]

THIS!!!!

[jewish-sideblog]

The ever-relevant People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn:

“Think about what we expect from the endings of stories. We expect the good guys to be “saved”. If that doesn’t happen, we at least expect the main character to have an “epiphany”. And if that doesn’t happen, then least the author ought to give us a “moment of grace”. All three are Christian terms. So many of our expectations of literature are based on Christianity— and not just Christianity, but the precise points at which Christianity and Judaism diverge. And then I noticed something else: the canonical works by authors in Jewish languages almost never give their readers any of those things. In fact, I saw that many of the canonical stories and novels in modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature actually didn’t have endings at all.”

[horse-on-a-porch]

^^^

Dara Horn goes on to say to contrast fiddler on the roof with the original Tevye the Dairyman which does not have a happy ending. Horn says and forgive me for not wanting to look up the quote right now that for Jews the act of persistence is the ending. We persist and sometimes we don't. Sometimes we die but we lived and we persist still.

And so A Series of Unfortunate Events is not happy. It's awful and traumatic and a story you never recover from but they lived and persisted and died and that (all of that) matters so deeply that you never recover from it. And unfortunately (ha) people often only care about the death and not about the life of persistence and that distancing allows them to make dead Jews into these perfect things to be ignored instead of deeply valuing the complexity of life so as to be changed by the persistence of it.