the monosyllable

she/her, queer librarian, linguistics, literature fandom things

[knightofleo]

the hauntings of Andrew Wyeth

[purplecactuscats123]

[moondustinfj]

[a-book-of-creatures]

The author must have been eating woodland salad, candied acorns, turnip pie, plum-cakes, bilberry tarts, arrowroot shortbread, and glazed maple shoots, and drinking flagons of October ale and raspberry cordial when they wrote this

[winglesselgniw]

[urie]

stop calling it a girl dinner and call it by its formal name: Fend For Yourself dinner in an ingredients household

[queer-reader-07]

[jenroses]

We call that "catch"

[vaspider]

We call it "scrounge."

[hedgehog-moss]

I didn’t know fondue was a thing outside USA—stupid but i thought it was like, fake cheese that we would melt to dip tiny weenies in. Looked it up and found out it’s Swiss—so probably more people than I realized enjoy it! I would love to try a fondue of local cheese, but that’s not easy to come by where i live. Enjoy yours!

I'm sorry but I am so morally disoriented by the concept of 'fake cheese' that I have trouble focusing on any other aspect of your message. What is fake cheese?? You say that like it's a perfectly understandable and emotionally neutral combination of words. I feel like I've just been handed a koan.

Then you add the phrase “tiny weenies" like it's the logical next step rather than a new psychological event. From my (very French) perspective the sentence "fake cheese to dip tiny weenies in" sounds like such a unique cultural artefact in itself, like a linguistic diorama to be displayed in a vitrine. This is not meant as a negative judgment of you or your country! just my earnest ethnographic confusion as I try to grapple with the concept of "tiny weenies" from a place of "fake cheese" trauma...

I had no idea fondue was seen this way in the US—I thought we (as a species) had a collective working definition of it, a sort of global consensus like the commutative property of addition, so the idea that in some corners of the world "fondue" means “fake cheese to dip tiny weenies in” has made me remember that you can just flay language off reality like skin. There's also a non-zero chance for this phrase to have activated a sleeper agent in Lausanne and authorised targeted elimination under the Académie Française’s emergency powers.

The concept of fondue now feels violently theoretical but I wish you many delicious ones in the future though :) You have politely disintegrated a couple of foundational concepts I'd never realised I relied on, which is always enriching. I won't recover, but thank you for sending this!

[love-ardour-anarchism]

“If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself—as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation—you may hate it, or deify it, but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.” Ursula K. Le Guin "American SF and The Other" in Science-Fiction Studies 7, 1975.

[whatkindofnameisella]

ursula k le guin affirmations for your day:

it is our differences which make us dearer to one another

it is never too late to start loving

the enemy is not the foreigner, but the ones who tell you to hate the foreigner

everyone should have food, shelter, and work

everything is a yin and yang metaphor if you try hard enough

sci-fi is important

[forestfullofberries]

[satorugojowidow]

Which of the three remaining european countries in the World Cup colonized your country?

Spain

France

England

Voting ended onJul 20

[byjove]

I love asking people how their parents met. You always get an interesting reply. My best friend’s parents met on the relatively new internet in 1999. My other friend’s parents met at Burger King when one was the manager and the other was a regular customer. My parents met at the beach because they were neighbors in their rental houses, mom was on a church trip and dad was getting blackout drunk every night with his friends next door.

Tell me how your parents met in the tags.

[feather-bone]

Keep 'em guessin'

[movementnudge]

Movement nudge, hand mobility! 🙌

X

[ruffboi-mags]

1) do this even if you're under 40. seriously. I definitely should have been doing something like this for years and I only turned 40 a month and a half ago

2) if you're like me just now trying this going "oh god i've only done 15 and i think my hands are cramping" start lower than 30 and increase by 5 once whatever number you're doing no longer makes your hand cramp up. I can manage about 15 per exercise at the moment.

[gaypeople]

I did it for Louis. I do everything for Louis.

[saintfelina]

women in GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums)

[miggylol]

Spin the wheel. That's who's trying to kill you.

Spin the wheel again. That’s who’s trying to protect you.

(If you have zero idea about a name you got, spin until you see someone you recognize.)

Are you safe?

Absolutely not. I'm dead. 100% dead.

I might stay alive, but it'll be a really close thing.

I'll take some hits, for certain, but I should be okay in the end.

A few attacks might get through, but nothing concerning.

The attacker might be able to get in one lucky hit. If that.

I am the opposite of worried. I'm 100% safe.

…Look. I've tried picturing this. But I honestly don't know how to answer.

Voting ended onJul 14

(I've run this poll twice before, expanding it significantly for the second run. With about a year passed since that second run, I thought it was time to add another couple hundred names to the list and have another go.)