nearlyb @nearlyb - Tumblr Blog

marina abramović's dragon heads - 1990

The TV news loves a good victim; and while this attitude suggests a most enlightened, charitable impulse, it is not conducive to an activist response, because this love is fatally possessive of its broken object: 'Stay as you are!' it tells the oppressed. 'Your battered face has earned you our esteem!' Within this schema, the worst thing that can happen to the underdog is not to die or go on suffering, but to become unpitiable, to stand up strong. Because the news allows no categories between those of the noble weakling and the ugly victory, any group that does attempt to shed its lowly status zips straight fro subjugation into villainy. Whenever this occurs, the journalists turn indignant; yet the wouldn't have it otherwise, as long as the new configuration yields fresh victims for the sympathetic camera.

Mark Crispin Miller, Boxed In, p. 161

redlipstickresurrected

Angela Lane aka Subterranean Thunder (British, b. 1974, England, based Berlin, Germany) - Setting Sun, 2024, Paintings: Oil on Birch Plywood

seekingstars

Danez Smith

dontmeantobepoliticalbut

isuggesteatingtherich

i have a suggestion

psychotic-gerard

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kiragecko

[Image of text saying,

Some AAVE speakers pluralize 'child' as 'childrens'. People get racist about this ("It's already plural!"), but 'children' actually comes from Middle English speakers doing the same thing: slapping their plural marker on word already pluralized by an extinct plural marker.

To oversimplify: in Old English, 'childer' ('ċildra') was the plural of 'child' ('ċild'). Middle English developed an '-en' plural marker, which we see in 'oxen'. Instead of updating to 'childen', people slapped their preferred '-en' onto the end of 'childer' - so now we have 'child-er-en'. AAVE carries on this tradition with 'child-er-en-s'.

"Pure" language is just impurity obscured by the passage of time.

End ID.]