as a writer you will have a specific deck of vocab words you like using a lot and when you read other peoples' work you will see a very clear spread of different vocab words on their end. this is why you need to read, to collect other writers' words like it's a card game
#we dont use honorifics in my first language so whenever i have to select options (usually for flights) im always so confused#like what is actually the difference between miss and ms#i like miss bc it sounds more historical and im a historian so
"Miss" means an unmarried woman. "Mrs." means a married woman. (both of these have origins in the word "mistress" as in "mistress of the house".)
"Ms." - prounounced MIZ, btw - is a third option popularized by gloria steinem in the 70s - mainly through her feminist magazine Ms. - which is meant to be a neutral term, usable for any and all women regardless of marital status (hence the soul destroying irony of the tags above). it gained wider general acceptance when geraldine ferraro, the first woman to be nominated as VP on a national major party ticket, started using it widely to avoid confusion, since she was married but used her maiden name professionally. eventually over the years it came into common use though i do think the brits are a little more critical of it than americans (as far as i'm aware lol)
"obscure facts only a tumblr user would know" and it's one of the most influential institutions of second wave american feminism. PLEASE open the schools
Hi. I'm an unmarried woman in her forties. I use Ms. and pronounce it "miz", though I don't correct people who accidentally use a soft S. I use Ms. because it's no one's business but my own whether I'm married, to a man or anyone else, and that's what Ms. means. It means fuck off, my marital status is irrelevant, just as it is for every man who uses Mr.
I've had people (usually children) ask me at work if I'm a missus or a miss. I have replied that I am a miz, full stop. And when they pressed for which one I was REALLY, I have replied, "Why? Are you going to treat me differently depending on whether there's a ring somewhere?"
That's what Ms. is for. That is its linguistic function. It says, "This is an adult woman," and nothing else. Nothing else is necessary, and in my case, nothing else is desired.
I also use miz for other women unless and until they express a preference for something else because I don't magically know everyone else's marital status when I meet them. That's a courtesy—I'm declining to assume marital status and allowing them to decide whether they wish to declare it.
Also, I've taught English and worked as an editor for twenty years. I am quite literally the grammar police. This use of Ms. is a standard construction. If you didn't learn it in school, someone failed you.
Finished Annihilation's sequel Authority, book 2 of the Southern Reach series, and it's very important to me that in a book about colonization that happens through you and inside you the most pivotal characters are mixed race, all 3(?) being half-white. Not just for representation samesies reasons, but because of how thematically relevant it is. A "purity" that wants to override— or overwrite— you, pushing you always to properly assimilate. From the first book, "Desolation tries to colonize you".
John Rodriguez, "Control", has a latino father and a white mother. One he loved dearly and lost to cancer, and another who he resents while relentlessly trying to make himself into. And failing.
I saw someone say that the reason there's so much reference to race and ethnicity in Control's narration (quite unlike the biologist's in Annihilation) is because he works as an anti-terrorism agent for the ambiguously named Central. But I saw the reason quite a bit differently, at least meta-textually. Control's anti-terrorism work was, at least of what we see in the text, always around right-wing white nationalist groups.
Rather, there are multiple times he recalls being discriminated against for being latino. Being called a slur, noting places that were dangerous to visit if you "couldn't pass as white", the contempt he faced from white peers and white strangers. He uses "the good old boys" as a term of derision. He isn't profiling people, at least not in the Special Agent way. John Rodriguez is constantly, ambiently noting power dynamics around race and gender.
He notes the former director and the assistant director are both women of color to acknowledge how much more difficult it would have been for them to have reached their positions. He enters Ghost Bird's room/cell and immediately realizes the power he holds over her, what a powerful man might do to a vulnerable woman. He helps a velvet ant off a woman's neck in response to her distress, and notes that she probably left so quickly because a strange man had touched her neck.
Control is a hispanic man constantly aware of how others might perceive him as a threat, a predator. He is the one who is constantly getting stuck on the semantics of calling the space where reality and Area X meet a "border".
His memories with his dad's side of the family are all of connection and vivid color, whereas those of his mom and grandfather are cold and disconnected. His maternal grandfather tried to lure him to a lingerie show(?) as an excuse to give his preteen grandson a gun(???) to bring him closer to the family career, whereas his abuelo and abuela are lovingly rendered as carved chess pieces that he keeps as bastions of comfort.
Area X colonizes you from the inside out. Area X is desolate, pure.
Area X infects not through language, but as if "the message were a knife and it created its meaning by cutting into meat and your head is the receiver and the tip of that knife is being shoved into your ear over and over again". Meaning created not from the words but what they contained inside of them, like the hate packed into a slur that on its own is "just a word". Like the advice of adults who claim to know more about the world, but lie to you about it "for your own good" so all you're left with is maxims you repeat by rote.
It is the dynamics of power that through the messages hidden in words shove you where they believe you should be. Power dynamics enforced and reinforced. Hierarchies maintained through obfuscation and reprimand. Control, through hypnosis.
John Rodriguez is renting a house in a town he used to visit with his friends on the weekends as a teenager. The town has been gentrified. What once was gravel is now paved roads. What once he knew like the back of his hand is now a stranger. The same town or one entirely new, depending on how you land with the Ship of Theseus.
Control is latino. The biologist is asian. The director is indigenous. All three are colonized by Area X, inside and through them. They are changed by a force that wishes to purify them by eradicating their history and subsuming their identity.
When John Rodriguez is in Whitby's crawlspace, turning away from the man hiding on a shelf, looking back at the mural where he is a hare with a leviathan behind him, the hand that reaches out to pet the back of his head is white. The Voice that has been controlling him without his knowledge is that of Lowry, a white man.
The dopplegangers spat out by Area X refer to it, longingly, as pristine. Untouched by humanity. The land Area X eradicated upon its creation is called the Lost Coast. It's no coincidence that the indigenous former director had lived there as a child, that she goes back on her own. It's no coincidence either when Rodriguez mentions that the town he lives in, the town he once knew, was built atop the remains of an indigenous settlement.
Also, I keep coming back to this one quote that really messes me up about this. It's when Whitby and Cheney are taking Control to see the "border" of Area X, and they spot the white rabbits.
Whitby, a few moments later, the most he said in one gulp during the whole trip: "The few white-and-brown ones are the offspring of white rabbits mating with the native marsh rabbits. We call them Border Specials, and the soldiers shoot and eat them. But not the pure white ones, which I don't think makes sense. Why shoot any of them?"
Why not shoot all of them? Why eat any of them?
Soldiers kill and eat the rabbits that are both white and brown, but not the pure white rabbits. Border Specials. Really cannot get more blatant, thank you for this Jeff VanderMeer.
This is what convinced me that the themes about colonization and race were intentional, especially after the reveal that Whitby depicted Control specifically as a hare— not a rabbit.
i know no one needs to hear this but I am haunted by the concept that Karrde has zero body shame and the only thing that Tapper and Aves have ever commiserated on is how difficult it is to keep that from becoming a diplomatic incident
A beautiful piece I got from the talented @toonybrin in a recent art trade. My Canon Rook Renatta de Riva and her love Lucanis in support of the trans community.
i know no one needs to hear this but I am haunted by the concept that Karrde has zero body shame and the only thing that Tapper and Aves have ever commiserated on is how difficult it is to keep that from becoming a diplomatic incident
jbbartram-illu
dededos
tangentwithtanner
germansingergirl
areudirty
jacobvanloon
2087
