“The worst of all possible things that could happen would be to lose that language [that black people love so much]. There are certain things I cannot say without recourse to my language. It’s terrible to think that a child with five different present tenses comes to school to be faced with those books that are less than his own language. And then to be told things about his language, which is him, that are sometimes permanently damaging… This is a really cruel fallout of racism. I know the Standard English. I want to use it to help restore the other language, the lingua franca. 1. He ø runnin. Standard American English (SAE )= He is running. 2. He be runnin. SAE = He is usually running or He will/would be running. 3. He be steady runnin. SAE = He is usually running in an intensive, sustained manner, or He will/would be running in an intensive, sustained manner. 4. He(’s) been/bin runnin. SAE He has been running–at some earlier point, but probably not now. Other examples: I been knowing her. SAE = I have known her. About eleven o’clock he been eating. SAE = … he was eating. 5. He BEEN/BIN runnin’. SAE = He has been running for a long time, and still is. -This is a use of the African American English (AAE) stressed been/remote BIN.”
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My mother Toni Morrison on AAVE (via howtobeterrell)
this is for whoever was telling me that AAVE isn’t a real thing… UGH
“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride (via synaesthes–ia)
“I think of the desert. At high noon the desert radiates white. If any place holds silence, it is here. Silence—that is time you are hearing. I feel it as a vibration more than the absence of sound. Yet, as Cage suggests, “there is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. In fact, try as we may to make silence, we cannot.”
There is always something to see, something to hear. There are ambient sounds all around us, even in silence, especially in silence: wind, birdsong, insects. Perhaps the silence Cage is honoring is the stillness we seek in the natural world, born of solitude, where our capacity to listen is heightened by our ability to embrace quiet.”
— Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
Baader-Meinhof is the phenomenon where one happens upon some obscure piece of information — often an unfamiliar word or name — and soon afterwards encounters the same subject again, often repeatedly.
The phenomenon bears some similarity to synchronicity, which is the experience of having a highly meaningful coincidence. Both phenomena invoke a feeling of mild surprise, and cause one to ponder the odds of such an intersection.
When we hear a word or name which we just learned the previous day, it often feels like more than a mere coincidence. This is because Baader-Meinhoff is amplified by the recency effect, a cognitive bias that inflates the importance of recent stimuli or observations. This increases the chances of being more aware of the subject when we encounter it again in the near future.
Slurs are not oppressive because they are offensive, they are oppressive because slurs by nature of being slurs draw upon certain power dynamics to remind their target of his/her/their vulnerability in a certain relation to power and as an extension of that, to threaten violence and exploitation of that vulnerability.
wend
You rarely see a “wend” without a “way.” You can wend your way through a crowd or down a hill, but no one wends to bed or to school. However, there was a time when English speakers would wend to all kinds of places. “Wend” was just another word for “go” in Old English. The past tense of “wend” was “went” and the past tense of “go” was “gaed.” People used both until the 15th century, when “go” became the preferred verb, except in the past tense where “went” hung on, leaving us with an outrageously irregular verb.
deserts
The “desert” from the phrase “just deserts” is not the dry and sandy kind, nor the sweet post-dinner kind. It comes from an Old French word for “deserve,” and it was used in English from the 13th century to mean “that which is deserved.” When you get your just deserts, you get your due. In some cases, that may mean you also get dessert, a word that comes from a later French borrowing.
eke
If we see “eke” at all these days, it’s when we “eke out” a living, but it comes from an old verb meaning to add, supplement, or grow. It’s the same word that gave us “eke-name” for “additional name,” which later, through misanalysis of “an eke-name” became “nickname.”
sleight
“Sleight of hand” is one tricky phrase. “Sleight” is often miswritten as “slight” and for good reason. Not only does the expression convey an image of light, nimble fingers, which fits well with the smallness implied by “slight,” but an alternate expression for the concept is “legerdemain,” from the French léger de main,“ literally, “light of hand.” “Sleight” comes from a different source, a Middle English word meaning “cunning” or “trickery.” It’s a wily little word that lives up to its name.
roughshod
Nowadays we see this word in the expression “to run/ride roughshod” over somebody or something, meaning to tyrannize or treat harshly. It came about as a way to describe the 17th century version of snow tires. A “rough-shod” horse had its shoes attached with protruding nail heads in order to get a better grip on slippery roads. It was great for keeping the horse on its feet, but not so great for anyone the horse might step on.
fro
The “fro” in “to and fro” is a fossilized remnant of a Northern English or Scottish way of pronouncing “from.” It was also part of other expressions that didn’t stick around, like “fro and till,” “to do fro” (to remove), and “of or fro” (for or against).
hue
The “hue” of “hue and cry,” the expression for the noisy clamor of a crowd, is not the same “hue” as the term we use for color. The color one comes from the Old English word híew, for “appearance.” This hue comes from the Old French hu or heu, which was basically an onomatopoeia, like “hoot.”
lurch
When you leave someone “in the lurch,” you leave them in a jam, in a difficult position. But while getting left in the lurch may leave you staggering around and feeling off-balance, the “lurch” in this expression has a different origin than the staggery one. The balance-related lurch comes from nautical vocabulary, while the lurch you get left in comes from an old French backgammon-style game called lourche. Lurch became a general term for the situation of beating your opponent by a huge score. By extension it came to stand for the state of getting the better of someone or cheating them.
umbrage
“Umbrage” comes from the Old French ombrage (shade, shadow), and it was once used to talk about actual shade from the sun. It took on various figurative meanings having to do with doubt and suspicion or the giving and taking of offense. To give umbrage was to offend someone, to “throw shade.” However, these days when we see the term “umbrage” at all, it is more likely to be because someone is taking, rather than giving it.
shrift
We might not know what a shrift is anymore, but we know we don’t want to get a short one. “Shrift” was a word for a confession, something it seems we might want to keep short, or a penance imposed by a priest, something we would definitely want to keep short. But the phrase “short shrift” came from the practice of allowing a little time for the condemned to make a confession before being executed. So in that context, shorter was not better.
“Shrift” is the noun, “to shrive” is the verb, which has the principal parts of “shrove” and “shriven”, hence, “Shrove Tuesday,” when one is shriven before Lent begins.
“I remember working with a law school in which white men heavily dominated the faculty. They used lots of sports metaphors (doing an end run, Monday morning quarterbacking, and so on), with legal jargon thrown in for good measure. I suggested that this was not a particularly welcoming trait in their school, that in fact it was sexist, but they paid little attention. I made my point by speaking for about five minutes in dressmaking terms: putting a dart in here, a gusset there, cutting the budget on the bias so it would be more flexible, using a peplum to hide a course that might be controversial. The women in the room laughed; the men did not find it humorous….Language is power, make no mistake about it. It is used to include and exclude and to keep people and systems in their places.”
— Frances E. Kendall, Understanding White Privilege (via nadashannon)
“When I say I am opposed to war I mean ruling class war, for the ruling class is the only class that makes war. … Capitalists’ wars for capitalist conquest and capitalist plunder must be fought by the capitalists themselves so far as I am concerned, and upon that question, there can be no compromise and no misunderstanding as to my position. I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth; I am a citizen of the world. I would not violate my principles for God, much less for a crazy kaiser, a savage czar, a degenerate king, or a gang of pot-bellied parasites. I am opposed to every war but one; I am for the war with heart and soul, and that is the worldwide war of social revolution. In that war, I am prepared to fight in any way the ruling class may make necessary.”
— Eugene Debs, “When I Shall Fight“ in the Appeal to Reason newspaper, September 11, 1915. (via fortunenglory)
why are negative qualities given female names? debbie downer. negative nancy. chatty kathy. take your sayings with female-coded names and swap them. donnie downer. negative neil. chatty charlie.
It’s mad annoying seeing people use “kumbaya” when talking about white ppl’s hippie revisionism color blind fuckshit. it’s a Gullah word from a spiritual sung by my people in the Sea Islands and it means “come by here” in our language. It’s more of a transcendent prayer. It’s more like god, come by here and alleviate, touch, heal us our pain, deliever us, ease us, calm us. you know? not “we are all one ppl and let’s stop talking about #blacklivesmatter because race isn’t even real” type thing. lol. What happened is that back in the day a lot of camp groups, women’s groups, girl scouts co-opted it b/c of the melody but also it was one of those things that white ppl do, where all things indigenous or deemed as “folksy” or “exotic” they latch onto, de-center and co-op and this spiritual of the Gullah ppl was one of em. None of us use it outside of it’s spiritual/church context and you never here Gullah/Geechee people using it as an adjective.
