Me me me meeeeemeage!
I asked heliotrope689 to tag me for this meme.
1) Comment and ask to be tagged!
2) I will pick THREE of your interests and/or user pics I find odd or nifty!
3) You post, explaining in detail about the three I chose!
4) People comment on your post!
She chose pernicious false etymologies, urban planning, and the Miranda icon.
Pernicious False Etymologies
I coined the phrase pernicious false etymologies for the sort of linguistic folk-myths that spring up around certain terms and words purporting to explain their origins, and play on people's political, racial, or social sensibilities-stuff like the rule of the husband's stick, which is not the etymology for the phrase rule of thumb.
Folk etymologies abound in English, and while I find some of them tiresome, they're understandable: People like stories of origins, and many of these stories appeal to a certain type of logic. Many of these folk etymologies are, at worst, kind of trite and silly: The story that marmalade was coined after Mary Queen of Scots ate it and got a headache, from her maid's whispers "Marie est malade" does nobody any particular harm, and doesn't cause us any qualms about the word. In fact, such stories may serve as handy spelling mnemonics. Certain folk etymologes, though, (such as the aforementioned husband's stick) point at dark origins for relatively harmless terms. These connotations make their way into the discourse, and all of the sudden one finds oneself in trouble for using a phrase that really has no hidden racial or sexual slurs. It's like political correctness (with which I generally have no problem) gone witch-hunting.
So, for example, the word niggardly, meaning mean, close-fisted, ungenerous, is not descended from the n-word. But some dude nearly lost his job, because he described a budget as "niggardly," and someone took offense.
The word picnic also lacks racist antecedents, notwithstanding a myth that is propagated at racial sensitivity seminars.
Part of an editor's role is to look out for infelicitous language: phrases that with hidden double entendres, words that don't mean what the author thinks they mean, and bits of language that may be insensitive or jarring to some readers. Acceptable usage changes, and words can be tricky, slippery things: When I was wee little, my mom told me that my brother was her and my dad's "natural" child, while I was their "adopted" child. These days, people tend to use "biological" rather than "natural," to avoid connoting anything unnatural about adoption. Increasingly, writers and communicators are asked to examine the biases that their language choices may reveal, and avoid language that different groups of people find offensive. So we don't use "Indian" to discuss members of Canada's First Nations (unless we're talking about the Indian Act, which received its name before we attained our current levels of political enlightenment*); we refer to the particular band, nation, or group to which the people belong. We don't say the n-word. We no longer use "he" or "him" as the third-person singular gender neutral. We try very hard to avoid offending readers by using language that has racist, sexist, ablist, classist, heterocentric, or homophobic biases.
I'm a pretty big proponent of respectful language, and I love watching the way language changes in response to use, so this intersection of respectful language with the need to explain antecedents of English to create a sort of linguist witch hunt piqued my interest.
Urban Planning
It seems appropriate to write about this following Jane Jacobs Day, since it was reading Dark Age Ahead that really crystallized and helped me to articulate many of my scattered, haphazard observations about what makes cities work, and what makes them not work.
See, I grew up in an inner suburb of Toronto, but didn’t think much about it. Throughout my adolescence I took public transit or rode my bike everywhere-to school, to choir practice, to my boyfriend’s house, to friends’ houses, to voice lessons, to my summer jobs-it never occurred to me that I needed to learn to drive, even as my friends were doing so. When I went away to university, I adored the way everything was squooshed close together-our off-campus house was deemed to be in the Outer-Hebrides of student housing, at a 20-minute walk from the edge of campus.
It wasn’t until I got married to someone from Pittsburgh that I realized that not all cities were as easy-to-manage as Toronto.** I spent a lot of time hating on Pittsburgh, where the public transit didn’t get me where I wanted to go, where it was impossible to walk anywhere without having to cross a major overpass, where the downtown was dead, dead, dead, and where there were neighbourhoods in which I really felt unsafe, including my ex-husband’s.
I didn’t start thinking critically about how planning and lack of planning, and about how fundamental assumptions about the nature and function of cities affected how live-able I found a city until much later, after I spent a year traveling in Europe, and returned home. I spent a miserable month living in my mom’s house in a true suburb of Toronto, unable to walk anywhere (it was an unpleasant 20-minute walk to the nearest place to buy milk). This was a more affluent neighbourhood than my ex’s in Pittsburgh, but it was dull, unbearably dull, and pretty unmanageable if you didn’t have a car.
Eventually I started reading Jane Jacobs, who articulated a lot of the things I’d been noticing about the cities I’d visited and those in which I could live, and adding a lot of context and views I hadn’t noticed. I’d already noticed that I could live happily in older neighbourhoods that had been built before the culture of the car had taken over everyone’s ideas of scale-you can walk places downtown, where in the ‘burbs, everything’s set up for convenient driving, with shops way back behind acres of parking lot that the footsore pedestrian has to traverse. I realized that these neighbourhoods also featured a nice mix of boring, everyday, necessary commercial enterprises and chichi lifestyle ones-banks, hardware stores, and grocery stores, as well as boutiques, bookstores, and cafés.‡ Neighbourhoods need to be place in which people work, as well as living, so that you can have street culture, and people who interact with each other.
So looking at which cities and which parts of which cities work, in terms of being pleasant to live in, interesting places, in which residents are invested, rather than simply dormitories of dullness has become something I do for fun, and something that I’ve mixed in with my politics.
Miranda, or “Yay Shipwrecks!”
Back in first-year university, I joined the SCA. My first attempt at garb was a green tunic and green-and-purple plaid overtunic. The fomer fell apart within two wearings; the latter required many safety pins in order to stay on my shoulders.
My second attempt involved the use of a sewing machine, three metres of blue cotton damask, and some very helpful advice from another SCA member. The resulting blue side-laced gown featured less problematic, but still rather dangerous, neckline, a full skirt, long sleeves, and side lacing, and was generally flattering, even if I needed to wear a chemise under it (and did not possess a chemise).
My second-ever boyfriend, an emotional sucking chest wound who, despite his rather sucking, bloody nature nonetheless served as a springboard out of my very broken relationship with my first-ever boyfriend, joined the SCA with me, for a bit. He espied a poster of Waterhouse’s Miranda at one of those university poster sales, and bought it for me, saying that I looked like Miranda. Oh, he was a very flattering emotional sucking chest wound, and I did have long, unruly brown hair, and a blue gown.
The blue gown is in a storage box, with a lot of the garb I made, and I suspect it would not fit, these many years and several pounds, and three cup sizes later. But I still have the poster, and I still love it, unreasonably. I still cherish the thought that once, someone thought I looked like that (I don’t. I never did. But it’s nice that someone thought I did.) And some days, that painting resonates for me, bringing back the feelings that went with being that young, still believing that I was a romantic at heart (I’m not), and all the confusion, heartache, and growth that filled my undergrad years.
I now use the image for all the “shipwrecks” in my life-for the times I’m wistful, or sad, or when learning and growth bloody well hurt, partly because it’s a good image for that, and partly to remind myself that, yes, growth does hurt, but coming out the other side of the learning experience, one is wiser, stronger, and less confused. Eventually. I think.
*
** I’m not saying that Toronto is a paradigm of great urban planning. Large parts of my poor city were sadly influenced by the same type of open-space, culture-of-the-car, single-use-zoning, nonsense that blights many North American cities, as well as a lack of foresight and planning for public transit infrastructure. But it does some things quite well.
‡ You really can’t have a good neighbourhood if it’s all apartments or condos and “lifestyle” establishments, like, say Gastown in Vancouver. While there are lots of places to sip overpriced lattes, where are residents supposed to buy tofu? Or milk? Or toilet paper?
1) Comment and ask to be tagged!
2) I will pick THREE of your interests and/or user pics I find odd or nifty!
3) You post, explaining in detail about the three I chose!
4) People comment on your post!
She chose pernicious false etymologies, urban planning, and the Miranda icon.
Pernicious False Etymologies
I coined the phrase pernicious false etymologies for the sort of linguistic folk-myths that spring up around certain terms and words purporting to explain their origins, and play on people's political, racial, or social sensibilities-stuff like the rule of the husband's stick, which is not the etymology for the phrase rule of thumb.
Folk etymologies abound in English, and while I find some of them tiresome, they're understandable: People like stories of origins, and many of these stories appeal to a certain type of logic. Many of these folk etymologies are, at worst, kind of trite and silly: The story that marmalade was coined after Mary Queen of Scots ate it and got a headache, from her maid's whispers "Marie est malade" does nobody any particular harm, and doesn't cause us any qualms about the word. In fact, such stories may serve as handy spelling mnemonics. Certain folk etymologes, though, (such as the aforementioned husband's stick) point at dark origins for relatively harmless terms. These connotations make their way into the discourse, and all of the sudden one finds oneself in trouble for using a phrase that really has no hidden racial or sexual slurs. It's like political correctness (with which I generally have no problem) gone witch-hunting.
So, for example, the word niggardly, meaning mean, close-fisted, ungenerous, is not descended from the n-word. But some dude nearly lost his job, because he described a budget as "niggardly," and someone took offense.
The word picnic also lacks racist antecedents, notwithstanding a myth that is propagated at racial sensitivity seminars.
Part of an editor's role is to look out for infelicitous language: phrases that with hidden double entendres, words that don't mean what the author thinks they mean, and bits of language that may be insensitive or jarring to some readers. Acceptable usage changes, and words can be tricky, slippery things: When I was wee little, my mom told me that my brother was her and my dad's "natural" child, while I was their "adopted" child. These days, people tend to use "biological" rather than "natural," to avoid connoting anything unnatural about adoption. Increasingly, writers and communicators are asked to examine the biases that their language choices may reveal, and avoid language that different groups of people find offensive. So we don't use "Indian" to discuss members of Canada's First Nations (unless we're talking about the Indian Act, which received its name before we attained our current levels of political enlightenment*); we refer to the particular band, nation, or group to which the people belong. We don't say the n-word. We no longer use "he" or "him" as the third-person singular gender neutral. We try very hard to avoid offending readers by using language that has racist, sexist, ablist, classist, heterocentric, or homophobic biases.
I'm a pretty big proponent of respectful language, and I love watching the way language changes in response to use, so this intersection of respectful language with the need to explain antecedents of English to create a sort of linguist witch hunt piqued my interest.
Urban Planning
It seems appropriate to write about this following Jane Jacobs Day, since it was reading Dark Age Ahead that really crystallized and helped me to articulate many of my scattered, haphazard observations about what makes cities work, and what makes them not work.
See, I grew up in an inner suburb of Toronto, but didn’t think much about it. Throughout my adolescence I took public transit or rode my bike everywhere-to school, to choir practice, to my boyfriend’s house, to friends’ houses, to voice lessons, to my summer jobs-it never occurred to me that I needed to learn to drive, even as my friends were doing so. When I went away to university, I adored the way everything was squooshed close together-our off-campus house was deemed to be in the Outer-Hebrides of student housing, at a 20-minute walk from the edge of campus.
It wasn’t until I got married to someone from Pittsburgh that I realized that not all cities were as easy-to-manage as Toronto.** I spent a lot of time hating on Pittsburgh, where the public transit didn’t get me where I wanted to go, where it was impossible to walk anywhere without having to cross a major overpass, where the downtown was dead, dead, dead, and where there were neighbourhoods in which I really felt unsafe, including my ex-husband’s.
I didn’t start thinking critically about how planning and lack of planning, and about how fundamental assumptions about the nature and function of cities affected how live-able I found a city until much later, after I spent a year traveling in Europe, and returned home. I spent a miserable month living in my mom’s house in a true suburb of Toronto, unable to walk anywhere (it was an unpleasant 20-minute walk to the nearest place to buy milk). This was a more affluent neighbourhood than my ex’s in Pittsburgh, but it was dull, unbearably dull, and pretty unmanageable if you didn’t have a car.
Eventually I started reading Jane Jacobs, who articulated a lot of the things I’d been noticing about the cities I’d visited and those in which I could live, and adding a lot of context and views I hadn’t noticed. I’d already noticed that I could live happily in older neighbourhoods that had been built before the culture of the car had taken over everyone’s ideas of scale-you can walk places downtown, where in the ‘burbs, everything’s set up for convenient driving, with shops way back behind acres of parking lot that the footsore pedestrian has to traverse. I realized that these neighbourhoods also featured a nice mix of boring, everyday, necessary commercial enterprises and chichi lifestyle ones-banks, hardware stores, and grocery stores, as well as boutiques, bookstores, and cafés.‡ Neighbourhoods need to be place in which people work, as well as living, so that you can have street culture, and people who interact with each other.
So looking at which cities and which parts of which cities work, in terms of being pleasant to live in, interesting places, in which residents are invested, rather than simply dormitories of dullness has become something I do for fun, and something that I’ve mixed in with my politics.
Miranda, or “Yay Shipwrecks!”
Back in first-year university, I joined the SCA. My first attempt at garb was a green tunic and green-and-purple plaid overtunic. The fomer fell apart within two wearings; the latter required many safety pins in order to stay on my shoulders.
My second attempt involved the use of a sewing machine, three metres of blue cotton damask, and some very helpful advice from another SCA member. The resulting blue side-laced gown featured less problematic, but still rather dangerous, neckline, a full skirt, long sleeves, and side lacing, and was generally flattering, even if I needed to wear a chemise under it (and did not possess a chemise).
My second-ever boyfriend, an emotional sucking chest wound who, despite his rather sucking, bloody nature nonetheless served as a springboard out of my very broken relationship with my first-ever boyfriend, joined the SCA with me, for a bit. He espied a poster of Waterhouse’s Miranda at one of those university poster sales, and bought it for me, saying that I looked like Miranda. Oh, he was a very flattering emotional sucking chest wound, and I did have long, unruly brown hair, and a blue gown.
The blue gown is in a storage box, with a lot of the garb I made, and I suspect it would not fit, these many years and several pounds, and three cup sizes later. But I still have the poster, and I still love it, unreasonably. I still cherish the thought that once, someone thought I looked like that (I don’t. I never did. But it’s nice that someone thought I did.) And some days, that painting resonates for me, bringing back the feelings that went with being that young, still believing that I was a romantic at heart (I’m not), and all the confusion, heartache, and growth that filled my undergrad years.
I now use the image for all the “shipwrecks” in my life-for the times I’m wistful, or sad, or when learning and growth bloody well hurt, partly because it’s a good image for that, and partly to remind myself that, yes, growth does hurt, but coming out the other side of the learning experience, one is wiser, stronger, and less confused. Eventually. I think.
*
** I’m not saying that Toronto is a paradigm of great urban planning. Large parts of my poor city were sadly influenced by the same type of open-space, culture-of-the-car, single-use-zoning, nonsense that blights many North American cities, as well as a lack of foresight and planning for public transit infrastructure. But it does some things quite well.
‡ You really can’t have a good neighbourhood if it’s all apartments or condos and “lifestyle” establishments, like, say Gastown in Vancouver. While there are lots of places to sip overpriced lattes, where are residents supposed to buy tofu? Or milk? Or toilet paper?