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@secondrealitytotheright
when i look up a knitting term, the last thing I want is an ai overview. I want a 60+ year old woman with no understanding of lighting or helpful camera angles who still manages to give the most concise and clear explanation of how to execute purl 2tog through the backloop. ai summary fuck off, where is phyllis?
Happy Pride!
Every pride, you must reblog this. No exceptions
I love that four different people on my feed scheduled this joyous person to reblog by 8am on June 1. I look forward to seeing this a dozen more times today.
Imagine if you had a neighbour who keeps performing songs from Phantom of the Opera in his apartment every night, by himself but accompanied by a parrot, which he has taught to sing Christine's part. Admittedly it's kind of obnoxious but you are far too baffled to even be properly annoyed. And also you don't want to confront someone with that kind of power and determination. So every once in a while you just hear this guy dramatically bellow
"SING FOR ME!"
[ASTONISHINGLY HIGH-PITCHED PARROT SHRIEK]
I'm so sorry I had to it was haunting me
TMSOURCE's Episode of the Week âł WEEK 102 ⧠6x08 â "Red John"
"So I'm suppose to die, am I? After all these years, seems kind of unfair." "It's totally fair. Game's over and I won." "It's not a game." "There's a winner and a loser. That's a game." "It's not a game I asked to play." "No, but you played it very well nonetheless. You were fun, challenging. Thank you."
Sometimes knowing spoilers for shows is more fun cause u get to spend the show being like how the fuck does that even end up happening ..
unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!
(warning: loud chirping throughout)
source: hellgate osprey cam
Here is an article from NPR about it (May 22, 2026):
Carolina Milanesi, an independent technology analyst, said Google is trying to make its cash cow business â search â richer and more personalized, and it will make shopping easier. But there is a risk that users may have fewer choices about what to click. "Right now it's: I ask a question, I get a bunch of answers and I feel that I'm in control as to which answer I take, or if I'm looking for something, which product I'm going to end up buying. That is going to be less so going forward," she said. Milanesi envisions AI-enabled search and agents proposing products to consumers â perhaps even those they have requested â but with less clarity or choice around where it's coming from. "If you're going to say: 'I want a pair of Jordans, go find them,' you're not necessarily sure what steps have been taken and whether the AI has used a source or a store that was paid for and therefore came up in the search results," she said, "or if AI actually went and did their due diligence and picked the best for me as a customer."
And here's one from Time magazine (May 20, 2026):
While Google already has âAI Mode,â the company will now power the whole search bar through its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model. Instead of the classic list of blue links, Google Search will now also generate a custom page with an AI-generated summary of what youâre searching about, which will then trigger a conversation with AI Mode on the main page, allowing users to ask follow-up questionsâsimilar to the kind of layout you would see when opening ChatGPT.
And a little more from Time's article on how this may affect the websites that we are trying to search for:
When Google first started implementing AI-assisted results, news publishers warned of âcatastrophicâ impacts on the industry, much of which relies on Google search to drive users to their websites. Last year, news websites saw significant traffic declines as chatbots increasingly replaced Google search as the primary way to find sites and ask questions. Small businesses also noted drops in traffic to their sites from Google, which has traditionally delivered customers.  Lily Ray, vice president of SEO strategy & research at Amsive, a digital marketing agency, warned as early as last year that Googleâs planned changes to search are âgoing to have a devastating impact on the Internet.â âIt will severely cut into the main source of revenue for most publishers and it will disincentivize content creators who rely on organic search traffic, which is millions of websites, maybe more,â she told Technology Magazine. Â
THIS, writers. Unless your characters are very wealthy (can pay people to be very industrious in growing, spinning, weaving, sewing on their behalf) or live in a post-textile-industrial-revolution world (aka modern/futuristic), they're not going to have that many clothes.
What they will have is protective outerwear. Aprons are a very real necessity for a lot of jobs, from cooking to blacksmithing and beyond.
Women wore aprons and housecoats into the 1940s and 1950s when doing cooking & cleaning because it was still a bit expensive to own a lot of clothes...so this is within 100 years. Within living memory for many folks.
Coveralls were created to protect clothing, and were handed out as uniforms by factories because the workers complained that their own clothes were getting damaged by their workplace. (Unions helped with this, strongly encouraging the companies doing the damage to their regular clothes to step up with replacement garments that could get damaged and then replaced by the company whose work was damaging them.)
Businesses started having their employees wear uniforms to make them look good and as a signature of their company (UPS brown, for example), but unless the design teams are idiots, those outfits are going to be stitched in ways that you can move easily & comfortably while doing your assigned tasks.
In corporate culture in Japan, the salarywomen are often given a uniform dress to wear, and I know of one business that held a work-slowdown because the way the sleeves of those dresses were cut and stitched, they literally couldn't bring their arms forward to type on their computers in a comfortable way. The company balked at replacing the uniforms, until a section manager agreed to let his female workers wear their own "office-dressy" clothes for a day...and productivity leaped forward by over 200%, literally because they could move their arms and position them comfortably.
Another example of those who effed it up are the officers' uniforms for the Germans during WWII, which were focused on looking fashionable--and they were!--but were horrible to don quickly, awkward wear in actual combat, etc, and it took them far too long to "drop trousers" to use the bushes in a swift, efficient, and safe manner. (Not saying they didn't deserve to be shot for supporting such an evil regime, but you should be able to go to the bathroom without worrying that it'll take you over a minute to put your clothes back together enough to run for cover in summer.)
Prior to the 1700s, servants in manor houses & noble estates often did not wear a uniform; they just wore whatever they had, and depended on aprons and watchcoats and whatever to protect their clothes. Then it became a status symbol to put one's servants into uniforms, also known as livery. If you could afford to do that then, by gum-golly, you were wealthy, and people could literally see that you were wealthy!
As for those famous black maid's dresses with white aprons that every manga loves to draw? Black dye was still a bit expensive, but black hid most stains. White aprons were protective, and were to be changed out frequently...and it was far easier to bleach cloth than it was to dye it black, plus the stark contrast was very eye-catching, and since the aprons could be swapped out frequently (very small amount of cloth compared to a whole dress), the fact that your maidstaff were wearing clean aprons was another sign of how wealthy you were, rather than just making the maid wear the apron all day long, progressively getting dirtier and dirtier.
With all this said, how valuable clothing was also affected how armies moved. Throughout most of recorded history, armies were composed primarily of men...but there were almost always 2 categories of women who followed them on the campaign trail. One, of course, was sex workers (for obvious reasons), but the other was Laundresses...and the laundresses would be ransomed first, ahead of the sex workers, if captured by enemy forces. (Not all were women by any means, btw, but the majority were, so I stuck with that gender.)
They worked hard to get the clothing clean, helped with getting leather armor clean, and provided other grooming services such as lice-combing. "But Jean, why would getting the soldiers' clothing clean be that important?" Dudes, dudes, my dudes...if you need to take a piss or a shit, combat will not stop for you. Peristalsis will happen mid-sword-swing. This was one of the sources of "deadly infections killed many of the fighters who went to war," and laundresses literally cleaned that shit up.
When you're a warrior in an army, marching off through the forests of Gaul, you can only carry so many spare sets of clothes because you're also carrying your armor, your weapons, and your rations, etc, etc. You will want to take care of your clothes, because you don't have many replacements, and you won't get many replacements.
So, writers, when you're writing about pre-industrialized cultures...go easy on how many clothes people own. Also realize that accessorizing can make an old outfit look new, which includes small parts of the clothing that can be swapped out for other pieces in a mix-and-match style.
...One last note:
The most expensive, time-consuming part of building a Norse ship to go a-viking on wasn't the actual ship, which took many men 2+ years to craft. It was the sails, which took many people, males and females, 3+ years to spin and weave and stitch together. There are literal stories of brash sailors robbing other norsemen of their sails because thieving it was faster & easier. (It also explains a lot of the fury of certain blood feuds between clans & holdings, if you think about it.)
Bringing this back to writers again, your period fantasy or historic characters are also going to know how to do upkeep and basic repairs on their own clothing. Laundries and tailors might be a thing in their world, but spot-cleaning and being able to mend small tears before they become big ones is crucial when off doing quests or campaigns or world-saving missions or what have you. Garments are expensive to replace. It may be sexy to have your hero discard their bloody, torn, and ruined shirt after a fight, but even if the garment is ruined beyond repair or wearability, woven cloth is still so valuable that it's worth keeping and cleaning to be turned into something else (legwraps, bandages, resewn into a hat, or used as patches to repair other garments, etc.).
We live in an unprecedented era of wastefulness, where our clothing is often so cheap (and cheaply made) that it's barely worth the efgort of repairing once it begins to wear out, and so easy to replace that we end up amassing more than we need of it. Even less than a hundred years ago, this kind of frivolity was reserved for the EXCEPTIONALLY wealthy. Even fairly well off people would continually recycle their old garments again and again. (Think of Cinderella's mice making that old pink dress into something new with just bits and pieces of the sisters' discarded accessories.... taking ribbons or lace or whole sections of an old dress to use in a new one was very common until quite recently!)
And never underestimate the usefulness of rags. If the clothing is beyond all repair or salvage, it has a new life as rags. You can wrap food in them, stuff them in your shoes for warmth and fit, pad your pillow with them, use them for cleaning, for bandages, for tying and belting your drawers, for patches.... rags are invaluable in a world where paper towels and disposable hygiene products do not exist.
This, and I'll add, vast secondhand market in clothing. That one simple tunic would cost the equivalent-in-labor of a new car today, and it would change hands as many times as one.
People in Ye Olden Times--the earliest garments we have evidence of, up through the middle ages (and well beyond, for all but the wealthiest people)--didn't wear simple, box-shaped garments because they didn't know how to sew anything fancier.
They did so because a Big Rectangle had the most resale/re-use value, since it could be tied, laced, belted, or otherwise fastened to fit a wide range of bodies. The same garment could be worn throughout pregnancy, as well as before and after. If it was no longer needed, it could be passed down or sold to virtually anyone. And when it became worn at the seams or hems, it could be re-sewn as a slightly smaller rectangle, and still fit a lot of people.
In Renaissance Europe, clothing got a lot more structured--and to a significant degree, this was as a status symbol. If you wore a fitted, short jacket over tights and those silly-looking puffy shorts (or a doublet, nether-hose and trunk hose), everybody who saw you would know that you could afford to buy all that fabric and then waste a bunch of it by cutting it into very specific shapes.
And if it fit well, then they'd also know that you were (probably) the first owner of said garments. Because the clothes were still expensive, they'd still be passed down, but there was a lot more need for clothing resellers, where secondhand clothes could wait for a buyer whose body they would fit. (Used clothing was a common gift or tip for servants, and if it was something they couldn't wear, they'd sell it.) In this way, clothing styles would percolate their way down the class ladder, both in the form of actual garments that had once belonged to a very rich person, and dupes made with simpler/cheaper materials and techniques, and perhaps modified for practicality.
And that's how you get fashion cycles: once something starts showing up on too many of the common people, the rich would move on, either exaggerating the trend to a point that, outside of that fashion context, looks ridiculous--
Like these silly, silly shoes:
(Note: these are probably exaggerated; the name of this picture is "Young Man Meeting Death," and we're presumably supposed to see him as a frivolous type of person who is about to find out why he should have lived a more serious and pious life.)
--or going in a different direction entirely.
So yeah, if you're writing secondary-world fantasy, give some thought to where the clothes are coming from, and how that's going to affect the styles and choices the characters make. If your working-class character in a Vaguely Medieval Fantasy Land is wearing fitted clothing, either that society has magic spinning and weaving technology, or your character is a serious fashionista/o, who is putting in a lot of time and effort into the project.
Similarly, if that type of setting has courtiers in a dazzling variety of impractical and elaborate garments--and several different outfits of it apiece--that implies a significant degree of urbanization and upward mobility, driving a secondhand market for those items, as well as providing the skilled labor to make and maintain those types of clothes. (You know these?
There was an entire trade centered on washing & ironing these things. Separate from actually making them, I mean. It involved tiny, specially shaped irons, and buckets of starch. Royalty or major nobility might have a servant dedicated to this highly specialized labor, and people a little lower on the ladder would send them out to be done. Ideally, you'd have each of your ruffs washed and re-set every time you wore it; people did re-wear them to save money, but they got droopy fast--hence the emphasis, in paintings featuring this trend, of crisp stiffness.)
How would this all compare to leather and hide based clothing? As the material doesn't need spinning and weaving, only tanning, cutting and sewing would it be cheaper and more common?
So. Not a tanner or a cloth maker here but - tanning can be very chemically specific. For those curious my perspective is of an animal pathologist's assistant. I have cut up several cows.
You do have the opportunity to amass a lot of leather if you hunt large animals, but post the adoption of farming and herding, most people are not feeding themselves that way. And there is just more small game overall. Leather is not necessarily easier, quicker, or less expensive to make than cloth, it just depends on what resources you have that are most abundant.
So the steps to making leather are as follows:
(Under the cut because, uh. I know this stuff from my job, which is âopen a dead animal and let the doctor see whatâs wrong with itâ and most of it is messy.)
Addendum to the leather reblog above, but salt is also historically very expensive, and pretty crucial to most of the older European methods of hide treatment I was able to find when reading up on tanning a few months ago. I can't remember if you still need it if you're using alum, but alum is still something you're going to have to buy in order to process your skins. (From what I read, tanning with brains was an Indigenous American technique, which was rapidly adopted by the colonisers bc of its efficient use of resources that are easy to hand, but modern American sources tend to drown out everything else when looking at historical stuff online without institution access, so I wouldn't state that categorically.)
The original thread is why I cringe every time I read a fic in my home fandom â which is roughly Fantasy Medieval/Renaissance in technology â that has main characters tear each other's clothing to show how excited they are for boning down.
In a premodern context, if someone tore my clothing carelessly, let alone deliberately, we're not fucking. We're no longer on speaking terms. They're dead to me. A shirt is bad enough; at least those were comparatively disposable, and could probably be repaired in a way that's unnoticeable when you wear it (shirts in most premodern European societies are underwear, not outerwear), but a doublet? Fuck right off into the sun.
âOoh, you can tell how ~horny~ I am for you because I crashed your car in order to get into your pants.â That's what you sound like. Tear your own fucking shirt if you're that keen.
It's such an incredibly modern trope to me. I could MAYBE understand it if it's supposed to be a flex on how wealthy someone is, but my poor as shit blorbo with his hand-to-mouth existence who owns three shirts MAXIMUM should not be doing this. Would not be doing this.
The earliest I could see that trope as plausible in my mind is the Victorian period. There was still a healthy second-hand market for clothing, but clothing production had become far more mechanised than it ever had been before, and tearing a shirt probably wouldn't send you to the poor house. (But please still don't tear a suit jacket or a woman's bodice. That's hours of sewing work alone, even after the advent of treadle sewing machines. What's wrong with you.)
Don't forget dyeing, which had to be re-done and was itself a whole fucking profession.
Indigo is one of the hardest natural dyes to start a pot of, especially without a thermometer or indigo white, so once you got that pot started you kept it going. Indigo also has to be processed into a water-soluble form by treating it with ammonia. How do you source ammonia in a pre-industrial world? Well, the local piss barrel at the tavern is full of something that will certainly turn into ammonia if you let it sit. There were almost wars over the argument of whether the dyers should have to pay money to take the piss from the tavern or whether the publican should pay THEM for the SERVICE of taking away the piss, which after all is garbage.
Dark or vivid colours are expensive, and natural dyes are not fast--that is, they fade with washing and sunlight and wear, so you have to keep re-dying them every so often. Black in particular was VERY expensive, moreso than ANY other colour. Certain fibers dye very well and certain ones do not.
Yellow and green were favourite colours of the common folk--bright yellows in particular were very easy to get with cheap dyestuffs, and you see bright sunshine yellow very often in medieval art of ordinary folks. Denim blue was middling expensive. Purple, pink, and orange did not exist as perceived colours--remember, colour is a function of language. Meaning if you don't have a word for the colour, you don't perceive it. Red was difficult and the only thing more expensive than red was, as I said, black.
Dyers and fullers had smelly jobs and worked with piss--their workshops were, like the tanner's, on the edge of town, and downwind if possible.
Oh yes, what's a fuller. Well, wool is full of oils and stuff from the ship, and you need to eliminate those if you want the fabric to be thick and warm and insulating. So you need to soak it in urine and use your feet to rub it over a special textured surface to get all the oils out and shrink and felt the fabric. Loden, felt, and duffel are all fabrics that require fulling in order to become.
Spinning was done by most everybody all the time every day; that's why you see pictures of women with long distaffs leaning on their shoulders as they go about, in some art of ordinary life in the middle ages. You could spin all day while doing everything else. Weaving, however, was a profession, usually male, and weavers were very respected people in all societies that had them.
Pulling the fleece was an activity that you had to do before the wool could be spun. The process for turning a sheep's wool into a garment consisted of many more steps than shear, spin, weave, sew.
Shear
Pull the fleece: this involved sitting around with everyone and pulling the long guard hairs away from the undercoat. A lot of stories, songs, and gossip happened during this process. It also leaves you with very nice soft hands from all the lanolin.
Comb the undercoat hairs with a brush or comb to line up all the fibres in the same direction. This leaves you with rolags or roving.
Spin using a distaff and drop spindle. This takes forever. But there was a very important, revolutionary machine that came up the silk road to Europe and changed--and I cannot emphasise this enough--EVERYTHING.
This machine eliminated the drudgery of spinning, spreading from the East to Europe starting in the late 1200s. It freed up women's time to do more, and made spinning itself a job you could make money doing--the word "spinster" is the term for that profession, and elderly women suddenly could have money of their own, support themselves. This was very important!! This was a labour-saving machine that gave more power to women in Europe and made the making of fabric and fiber faster and easier than ever before!
5. Dye the threads. It's much easier to dye skeins of yarn than it is to dye fabric or garments in pre-industrial ages, so dyeing would be done at the yarn stage. Dyeing the yarn also means you can do things like have the weft be one colour and the warp another. This results in some of the most exciting and beautiful fabric in existence:
6. Weave the fabric. The loom was another piece of technology that was constantly being improved upon, because society was built on looms. In fact, the predecessor to the computer was the loom! Look up a video of a jaquard loom sometime, you'll see it uses punchcards to "program" in the different patterns of the fabric it produces. The song "four loom weaver" is actually "power loom weaver". Power looms were another improvement that made weaving faster. The luddites were the first labour strike and organization, and it was about? That's right, WEAVING.
7. Fulling, polishing, and other finishing techniques. Moire is made by calendaring. Felt is made by fulling. Polishing, waxing, and all kinds of other techniques are used to make all the different varieties of fabric that exist. The way we live now is sad and pathetic, we don't come into contact with much in the way of variety of fabric anymore. Everything is disposable, paperthin and made of plastic or cotton or bamboo, knits mostly. When you get into historical costuming, you meet all kinds of fabrics--lush brocades, velvets, and coutils, and silk. But it's NOTHING compared to the hand-woven fabrics of times past.
Machines can make fabric fast, but it's looser than when a human is doing it. The density of some hand-woven fabrics is so great that you don't need to hem them! Likewise, the translucency of some ancient linens made in Egypt is still a mystery we're trying to figure out how to reproduce, because machine-spinning and machine-weaving meant we LOST these techniques. People who spin and weave and hand-make fiber their whole lives can make it as thin as a spider's gossamer, and not even machines can do that today. Machines are wonderful and humans should not have to labour so much if a machine can do it, but it's worth noting that just because it's made by machine doesn't mean that it's better quality, just that its cheaper and faster to make. I'm sure if we tried, we'd find ways of machines being able to do it, especially with the "sort things and detect things" algorithmic programs software engineers have come up with, the ones that detect cancer and so on.
8. Sewing the garment. I'm putting a note here for sewing bc sewing by hand is a lot easier and faster and better than by machine sometimes. I hand-sewed an entire pair of pants and the hems were utterly invisible when I was finished, it was astonishing. I also used a running stitch for most of it and that's. That's the normal stitch to use, you just backstitch every ten stitches or so and then keep going. It wastes far less thread than a sewing machine. To make those pants I only needed three stitches: running, backstitch, and whipstitch. And I learned by watching Nicole Rudolph when she's sewing, she does the same stitches for the most part! There's speciality stitches for locking in the ends of corset bones (flossing) and so on, but the majority of the long seams are just the running stitch! Needles and pins were precious commodities in pre-industrial times, and there are letters between John Adams and his wife Abigail that illustrate this, which were famously made into the latter half of the song "Piddle, Twiddle and Resolve" in the 1969 musical 1776.
Needles were at first made of bone, hand-carved, in very ancient times; but needles and pines of steel and brass were also produced later on as metalworking tech started being able to do so. These were very precious, and the little tiny strawberry that hangs off a traditional tomato pincushion, the one full of what feels like sand? That was for cleaning the rust and tarnish off your needle, so it would go through the fabric easier. You can still buy bone and brass needles in the traditional style from historical merchants, and try for yourself sewing the historical way!
Many people in fact already practise an ancient form of fabric and garment-making: Knitting and crochet! There's a much older predecessor to these, called nalbinding, that is very interesting and practised with roving rather than spun and plied yarn, and uses a flat wooden or bone needle. It creates very dense, not very stretchy things, and was used by the Norse. Nalbound things are VERY cold-proof, and eventually felt--and that's a good thing, felt is very warm stuff! My mom made me a nalbound hat once and I miss it every winter.
Now, garments were not just fabric of course. People have liked decorating everything since time immemorial, and embroidery, buttons, beads, and other things were used. Another type of decoration, one very popular in the SCA, is TRIM! Trim is made by weaving on an inkle loom, which looks like this:
This one doesn't have the cards visble, but the pattern can be produced with cards that can be turned:
This produces a brocade, and yes, you can weave letters or all kinds of patterns into the "tape" that is produced. Depending on what fiber you use, and how fine the threads, these can be trims or hair-ribbons or shoulder-straps or all kinds of things!
Lace was also a very precious and complex form of decoration, and pieces of lace were so incredibly expensive and treasured that they were passed down as heirlooms. We're used to lace being white or maybe cream, but at certain points in France, blue lace could be found. And nothing is really stopping you from dyeing your lace, or using dyed threads to make it, other than fashion and convention.
Of course, places outside Europe (which is my speciality and has been my whole life) have their own fabric and decoration techniques, from the wax resist of batik to the special tie-dye from Japan called Shibori, to ikat, to the quilling of many North American Indigenous people (not to mention wampum beads, hand-carved of shells!). Everyone likes to decorate themselves and their clothing!
@elodieunderglass, this seems right up your alley, at least in the latter parts.
Thank you so much!
I'm tired of hearing about Young Kirk and Young Spock. I want a (good) show about young shithead Science Lieutenant Janeway falling in BFF love with Tuvok while on adventures together and there's ZERO ROMANCE. I MEAN IT. NO ENTERPRISE LOVE BOAT ALLOWED.
I'm talking ZERO love interests for Janeway as far as the eye can see. People of all genders keep flinging themselves at her but she refuses to let herself do anything more than have a pathetic wank because of her angst about Tau Ceti Prime. She channels everything into raw chaos bisexual energy with Tuvok just enabling her at all times.
T'Pel asking with pure Vulcan sarcasm if they had fun and in the middle of Tuvok replying that Vulcans only do their duty not have Fun, Janeway (still slightly hungover and wearing sunglasses) slings an arm around his shoulders and says, "SO MUCH fun. You should've been there, T'Pel. You should've seen the way your man risked it all to save my sorry ass from a sentient liquid people. We almost died again."
T'Pel: "Again?"
Tuvok: "....we meditated after."
Janeway: "AND we meditated after!"
like this.
there's a 2-part season finale with time travel hijinks and fanservice cameos by both Kate Mulgrew and Tim Russ alongside their younger counterparts, showing that even 40+ years in the future these two are still BFFs and getting into Some Bullshit together
Something that I first applied to working with children, and have applied in a limited form to working with adults: you don't need to tell someone when they read your instructions wrong. Sometimes it's enough to point out what they did right and then whatever they didn't do? You ask them to do it in more precise words, and you make it sound like it's a new request. Remarkable how fast things get done this way.
This is also a habit I built up from emergency response training. If I say "I need you to bring me a first aid kit and an accident report" and you bring me just a first aid kit, it's so much more efficient to say "thanks now can you bring me an accident report" than "I asked you to bring an accident report why didn't you bring me one".
Once you've internalized "a person bleeding out is one of the worst times to start an argument" you start to wonder what other tasks could get accomplished without arguing
The Odyssey but retold as a low-stakes modern adventure of one guy out with his girlfriend leaving the bar with his buddies to do just one (1) simple thing real quick, it'll take like 15 minutes tops, he'll be right back, but then some bullshit happens and the trip keeps getting more complicated as more bullshit keeps happening while he just tries to get back to the bar because he promised his girlfriend that he'd get back and he knows that she's still there because she told him she'd wait there.
And by the time he finally gets back it's almost 3 am and the bar is about to close while she's sitting there stone cold sober, surrounded by 5 drunk guys unsuccessfully trying to convince her to give up on waiting for him and go home with one of them instead. And the guy shows up to proceed to beat the shit out of them before explaining himself to her like hey sorry bullshit kept happening, my phone fell into a storm drain and my wallet got stolen when I was trying to find someone who'd borrow me a phone so I could call and
His girlfriend had been fending off the 5 drunk guys for most of the evening by explaining that even if she was going to ditch her boyfriend, she can't possibly leave without finishing her beer, which she is keeping perpetually full via careful sleight of hand where she's just pouring it back and forth into and out of the pitcher.
However the drunk guys are also drinking, and eventually she can't afford to buy another pitcher for the table so she can't keep up the ever-full beer glass trick. At this point she has to resort to setting up the pool trick shot that she's never seen anyone but her boyfriend pull off, and says she'll leave with whoever manages the shot first.
That buys her another hour or so and then, finally, her boyfriend makes it back. He looks like shit, hair down and just a mess, he's wearing an entirely different jacket that he got from an alley, and barely recognizableâespecially to 5 guys who've been drunk for hours now. He lurks for a minute, finds out what's going on, and proceeds to pull off the trick shot first try. Throws the jacket off, fixes his hair with a hair tie his girlfriend lends him, finally looks like himself again, and THEN beats the shit out of them with the pool cue.
yuh i was there, that's how it happened
PLEASE explain the Latin fuck words. for science
Okay so. The Romans think that sex doesn't count as real sex unless Someone Is Getting Penetrated By A Dick Or Dick-Adjacent Object. Very sort of dick-centric system.
So Latin has six words for "to fuck", divided into three pairs: one pair for each of the possible Holes (ass, mouth, pussy). In each pair there is a word for topping and a word for bottoming.
Most people who know a little about Latin fuck verbs know 'pedicare' and 'irrumare' from the first line of Catullus 16 (PÄdÄ«cÄbĆ ego vĆs et irrumÄbĆ), which is a poem about saying "absolutely shut the fuck up and piss all the way off" to fandom antis and purity police who are making repulsive accusations about you personally, based on things they're reading into your work from a bad-faith perspective. Catullus was so real for that and it's incredibly endearing to me that he was dealing with the same thing we are still dealing with. I got a hater in my askbox doing this about The Wisdom of Emperors just the other day, but I took the high road and, unlike Catullus, did not tell them "I will assfuck you and I will facefuck you" So here sort of a chart about the verbs: Topping | Bottoming Mouth: irrumare | fellare Ass: pedicare | cevere Cunt: futuere | crisare
Another fun fact related to the fuck verbs was that the Romans didn't think about sexual orientation in terms of who you're attracted to, they thought about it in terms of "which is your favorite hole and what do you like to do with it." So you'll get graffiti (ancient roman subtweeting) about things like "Marcus is a fututor [cunt-fucker] and a pedico [ass-fucker] but omg girlies I also heard he's a fellator [cock-sucker] đđđđ" In the modern day we'd just call him bisexual, but in Ancient Rome it is not enough to know if someone is bisexual (they think it's kind of perverted if a man only fucks women, like do you have some kind of freaky pussy fetish???? you've never once even fucked a twink??? dat's gay, bro. gay to not be bi), you also have to know if he's being bisexual in a respectable sort of way
You will notice that pussy-eating is not on this list, because those words do not mean "to fuck", they translate more directly to just "pussy-licking" (cunnilingus), and because the Romans are sexist as all hell and think that's gross and filthy anyway. This is not ONLY because of pussy terror, it's also that the mouth is the most sacred part of the body -- so eating pussy or sucking a dick is actually considered slightly more "shameful" than getting fucked in the ass. (Please note as well that the fuck verbs are gender neutral -- if you're a roman man and your girlfriend owns a strap-on, she can [pedicare] you. but be careful because your sworn enemy in the forum will have a fucking FIELD DAY if he hears about that and will write a Mean Poem about you or subtweet you on a public wall)
The moral of this story is that the Ancient Romans were absolutely *GAGGING* for social media (see Martial's Epigrams, aka My Best Tweets), and the second moral of this story is that if this was a fun post for you, you should look at my kickstarter for alllllll of this kind of nonsense in the form of A Fantasy Novel That's Pretending To Be An Academic Paper With A Fake Bibliography And Foonotes aka The Wisdom of Emperors. And please signal boost this so everyone can know about Latin Fuck Verbs and Roman Subtweeting, we've really learned so much here together
(Only 10 days left to back the kickstarter, u should go look at it, i am very cool and funny and good at books)
i'm not normally one to make jokes about dialect or accent. but the way that British people pronounce "lieutenant" feels like an in-joke i'm not privy to
Aww, you're feeling lieut out?
Once upon a time there was the Latin word "locus", meaning "place", which had various different declensions, but somewhere along the line in the vernacular in the areas conquered by Rome it had a strong tendency to shift towards something that dropped the last syllable (so "loc" instead of "locus") and then fucked around with the vowel in all kinds of directions.
But then the speakers of Gallo-Romanic dialects went even further and they got rid of the "k" sound entirely and started just saying the l and the vowel, which eventually got us to the Old French "leu".
Now the thing is, right, that in the old languages the spelling is very much a sort of consensus thing. It's not perfectly phonetic, because it can't be: all of the languages in question had phonemes that weren't exactly the same as the Latin that existed when and where the Latin alphabet was formalized, right? So as people wrote down the Old French vernacular, they basically took the letters they were taught and they used them to represent the sounds they were making.
This happens with all the languages; there's a really neat thing where if you look at Visigothic manuscripts, writing in the area that would become Spain and the vernacular form that would eventually be Spanish, you can see the difference between the sound of "v" and the sound of "b" disappearing, so that there are manuscripts where "Ave Maria" is written "Abe Maria", because to the people reading it, b and v made the same sound.
This is relevant to the question because of a fun little fact about mediaeval orthography! Which is that the characters that we now feel are absolutely separate, different letters - that is u and v - were both used for both sounds. It's not that "u" and "v" were the same letter exactly - they weren't - but that the character you used was the same and which you used depended more (properly) on where in the word the letter came, than which one it was.
So the word "hut" would indeed be written with "u", but the word "university" might well be written "vniuersity".
But it gets worse from here, because the sound of the letter we now call "v" and the letter we call "f" were also often used interchangeably. So it might actually be written "vnifersity".
If your eyes are crossing, remember that we still randomly stick "qu" in places to be "kw" and there's quite complicated rules about when the character "c" says a hard back of throat sound the same as the letter "k" and when it says a soft sibilant like "s" and also sometimes when it does something completely different.
Now as it happens the point of writing is to be able to take words from your head, put them on paper (or parchment, in this case), and then send them much farther away in both time and space to someone who absolutely cannot hear you say these words, and then put those thoughts in their head.
Which meant that you have this sort of weird liminal thing where "leu" could be spelled "lev", because u and v were interchangeable, and then also this thing where v and f were interchangeable, and both were being sent around to various places and read to others who may, or may not, do a lot of reading as opposed to a little, or may be reading in a different dialect than they speak (because remember, we're talking about mediaeval France, which means we're actually talking about a country with two major language divisions - Langue D'oc and Langue D'oĂŻl - which then inside of them have a reasonable fuckload of languages that are mostly mutually intelligible most of the time), and so on, which means that the noise for u and the noise for f meet in the middle and may both be represented by "v" and while we're at it they may all just be pronouncing the word differently, and as you saw in the whole move from "locus" to "leu" in the first place, that can involve ending up in quite a different place through a totally logical means.
We don't know for absolute certain if this is why the word "leu", ported over to English with the Normans and added to our language, changed its pronunciation and spelling to "lief" or "liev". You will note that along the way both to Middle English and to Middle French, it grew an "i" in before the "e" sound, because words do that.
We do have some records of Old French that are spelled "leuf" or "lef"; we also got our Frenchishness from the Norman Conquest, which is to say the brand of French very specifically spoken by a bunch of Francicized Scandinavians who spoke a very specific one of those Langues D'oĂŻl. So we do know that the idea that this word ended in the sound we might associate with the letter "f" had already took up in a bunch of different places.
The original idea of "lieutenant" is quite literally a "placeholder" - it was someone you left in your place. So if you were your overlord's "lieutenant" you were the person who gave other people orders in his place, the person he delegated to. Much like "captain", when these words were first used they did not designate a specific rank in a highly developed system with rigid relationships, but rather were the names for roles that people occupied in relationship to the enterprise/activity/whatever.
This is why in the books, the Witch King of Angmar is referred to frequently as Sauron's "lieutenant" - Tolkien knew this shit preeeeetty well and liked using words in those contexts.
So in French, they moved along the path of saying "lieu" as the word is said in French today, with no consonant at the end. Their "lieutenant", their "placeholder", maintained that pronunciation. Americans then actively wanted to distance themselves from the British and were at the time buddy-buddy with the French, so they took that pronunciation on.
Meanwhile at some point Middle English - arising from Old English and Norman French - had shifted to the "liev", the one that had a fricative on the end, which was one of the pronunciations attested in the spelling shift to "leuf".
Et voila.
My emotional support intergalactic explorers. âš
âbits to use in everyday conversationsâ
One of my biggest literary pet peeves is when historical or history-inspired fiction pretends that "courting" is a synonym for "dating". Usually it's just a one-to-one word swap--in a modern context, these characters would be dating, but this is olden times, so they call it courting instead. Sometimes they'll pretend there's a shade of difference, and that courting is a more serious exploration of marriage or something. But I read a lot of fiction that was actually written during these historical eras, and the word "courting" is never used like that.
Two people do not decide that they are "courting". One person decides to "court" someone else. It's an action, not a stage in the relationship. A man decides to court a woman because he wants to encourage her to have romantic interest in him. He's trying to win her favor. It's not an exclusive relationship--a woman could be courted by multiple men at once. She'll spend time getting to know the guy who's interested in her, but they won't officially define their relationship as one where they only show romantic interest in each other. If they reach a point where they want it to be exclusive, that's when you propose.
There's no middle ground--either you're getting to know each other, or you're committed to marrying each other. This idea of a period where you kind of commit to each other until you decide you definitely want to get married is a modern one, and it occurs in eras where they use the word "dating" to describe it. The closest equivalent I can think of are times and places where they'd talk about a couple "stepping out together", but they're still not calling it "courting". Words have meaning, and the word "courting" has never meant that, so stop using it that way!
the other mild historical disjoint i run into is when people talk about dating in the fifties like it automatically meant exclusivity. the whole reason we have the expression "going steady" is because the default was to or "go around with" or "go out with" multiple people. not in the sense of being in a stable polyamorous vee, but in the sense that archie is actively "seeing" both betty and veronica during the entire time the two girls are competing for his attention and they're both seeing other guys to make him jealous, and nobody involved considers this "cheating."
bizarrely, America has in many ways gotten more conservative about dating since World War II.
I ran into a truly wild cultural misunderstanding with my father some years ago, when I had to explain to him what âhookup cultureâ actually was, and that the thing he assumed it was was actually what we call âcruising cultureâ. His response was âhow is that different from dating?â and when I explained how it was different, he said, and please note that this a direct quote: âThatâs ridiculous! You canât expect a woman to stop fooling around with other guys for anything less than a marriage proposal. I mean, sheâs not a prostitute, you canât buy her.â Now obviously thereâs like⊠a lot to unpack there, but I think itâs pretty darn illustrative of a substantive cultural shift around the assumption of monogamy!
Also, following this, I asked my mom what her thoughts were on the matter, and she said that while she âwouldnât put it in those termsâ she broadly agreed, and thought that anyone expecting any sort of exclusivity when a marriage proposal wasnât at least on the very immanent horizon was ânuts, honestly.â I hesitantly asked if she was including relationships with premarital sexual activity in that, and her response was âOf course. I mean, gosh, you know your Aunt Terri used to have a guy for every day of the week before she finally settled down.â
And this was when I learned, to my shock, that the oft-repeated story of how âAunt Terri used to have a guy for every day of the weekâ didnât just mean âAunt Terri had a full dance cardâ but rather meant that Aunt Terri had a period of her life where she literally dated exactly seven guys at once, all of whom she was sleeping with (or, my mom was quick to disclaim, âwell, fooling around with, I donât know how far she actually went with any of them, but they were definitely all fooling around behind closed doorsâ), on a literal weekly rotation. Like, they had a schedule. A schedule that all seven of the guys knew.
America has gotten a lot more conservative about dating, actually.
Wait, I thought hookup culture WAS cruising. It's not?? Well... okay, I guess đ€·đŒ
Wait! Wikipedia DOES mention cruising/bathhouses as an example of gay hookup culture, citing this source. Like the way these terms are discussed, it sounds like straight people participate in hookup culture less anonymously bc they're the overwhelming majority of the population and can just go to any nearby party/event/venue to flirt and hookup with someone they vibe with and who likely lives in the same area and could be a recurring encounter, whereas gay men eliminate the "flirt" and "vibe with" part to make things easier when showing up to a place that may not be conveniently located and where the only commonality is wanting to have sex with other men.
Cruising might be a specific kind of hookup culture, defined by expectation of anonymity, but are they really entirely separate?
I answered this here. They are not the same at all. While cruising is very predominantly gay and hookup culture is somewhat predominantly straight (although, less so) there are straight cruisers and there are a lot of gay people who partake in hookup culture.
If you think the two are the same, youâre badly confused about what at least one of them is. College teens who are involved in hookup culture are absolutely not generally having semi-anonymous sex in pay-by-the-hour hotel rooms. And cruisers are not generally making casual chit chat over text about non-sex for weeks between hookups.
