Ylfa’s bottleneck

Princess: an effeminate and relatively youthful male homosexual or lesbian (1931-4)

Daffodil: effeminate young man (1925)

To throw a fuck into: to have sex with (1919)

Top sergeant: a masculine lesbian (1939) [‘she takes command of the girls’ privates’]

Lily: penis (1919)

Wolf: sexually aggressive man (1847); a homosexual top (1918)

Soul kiss: a deep kiss, involving putting one’s tongue into one’s partner’s mouth (1907)

Tom: a lesbian (1909); [in 'old tom'] prostitute catering to lesbians (1966)

Church mouse: a male homosexual who frequents crowded churches in order to fondle any potential sex partners. (1941)

Discover one's gender: to accept or acknowledge one’s homosexuality (1941) / Lose one's gender: To return to living as a heterosexual

Minty: a masculine lesbian (1941)

Also a lot of early 20th century vulgarity is recorded in Letter from My Father, which is a collection of letters published by a man who's dad was, in short, a major slut and human disaster who wrote about his sex life for his son. It's insane. You can find copies of it online & it's a wild fucking read (literally!) and I think a really interesting look at the life of a person who goes against our stereotypes of what people in the past were "supposed" to be like.

note for writers: these are dated to the first time they were recorded, not necessarily to their first use. I imagine for many of these, they came about naturally through spoken language before they were written down anywhere. This is especially true of more underground slang because it's probably being recorded (in ways we still have) the least. So if you wanna use a term but it's a little off date-wise, give yourself some wiggle room.

also gonna take this moment to highlight two more i found recently:

Best boy: a sweetheart, a boyfriend, a husband. (1893) [w the obvious equivalent term 'best girl']

Honeydripper or honeydrips: a sexual partner (1917)

second favorite activity writing fic

Ava points out that you were truly omnipotent, omniscient, all-powerful, WHATEVER, you wouldn’t have to build anything, you’d just reach for it. Krok has to build something to return to the early moments of the universe to show Ava. You know who didn’t? Chuck. When Chuck was still masquerading as the Big Malevolent Thing, before he figured out how to speak to everyone, he moves Ava through time and space to observe the beginning of The Diner Fam’s stories. Caspar, Leif, Gloria, and even her own final moments before being whisked away on a time traveling dimension spanning diner. Chuck places her at a point in time and space that allows her to talk to Effie and Zebulon’s granddaughter. The real physical earth Effie and Zebulon’s granddaughter. Effie and Zebulon, the radio pastors, who were made anew as waves by Chuck.

Krok can’t do that. He has to make things to help him do that. So either he’s a complete liar, which I doubt, or he’s a half-liar out of pride/fear. I think… Krok lost something when he came into being. Because he existed before the universe, he can break its laws, but that also means he has very little ownership over what he can make it do for him. He tried to make a star, but he made a rock. The universe is not his sandbox. The sandbox came after him, and is someone else’s. And I think that someone else is Chuck, his little brother.

I’ve already talked about how the diner fits into this before as a possible creation of Chuck’s if we’re treating Chuck like God and Effie and Zebulon like a pseudo Adam and Eve (separate beings with their own identity that sprung forth from the same… matter for lack of a better word, even though Effie and Zeb are waves. You get me). I’m more interested in Krok’s creation: Clementine.

Pulling that god metaphor down to this paragraph with me, but like, if God (Chuck) made man in his image, and that gave us Effie and Zeb — two people who can manipulate the world around them, but with the same limited and almost childlike (in innocence) knowledge of universal laws as Chuck. Effie and Zebulon never “just say that” when they perform their miracles — they don’t talk about wrapping a ship in oxygen, or triggering safety locks, they just do it — because it’s intrinsic. The same way when you know a language and speak it long enough, it gets hard to define certain words because you just know. It’s intrinsic. The same way Chuck doesn’t have words and understanding of the universe despite observing it and existing at all moments in all spaces throughout time. So what does that say about Clementine and Krok? Like, really.

If Krok yearns for pure existence, he could just have that. Ava finally points that out, out loud. If he was truly all powerful, he could just do it. He could return everything to nothing. Except he can’t. He has to build something to even observe the beginning. He can go everywhere, do anything, except return home to fix it all. And gee, doesn’t that sound like fucking Clementine? A walking wound, personified damage to the fabric of time and space. Time and space that Chuck wants fixed because, hello, this is his house. His body. His everything. You fuck with Chuck’s sandbox and you fuck with him. It IS him. He’s universally extent. All time. All space. Clementine fucked with that, broke that, trying to get back home and creating a paradox while doing it because she’s Krok’s creation, the guy from before time and space. The guy who can’t seem to manipulate the universe correctly because he came before it and lacks power in the way he seems to wish he had it.

Krok mentions underestimating his little brother, which suggests a blind spot. And here’s what I’m curious about. There’s a bi-directionality here. Libuza couldn’t anticipate Krok because she could only ever observe the few fractions of fractions of seconds at the very very beginning of the universe. Krok existed before, therefore the numbers can’t account for him. But, as we’ve already established, Krok can’t seem to manipulate the universe in a truly omnipotent way. Why is up for debate, but I am curious about how his fear is involved. So this is my question… was Krok stripped of his power or did he never have it because he was not created when the universe was created, he simply came into observable being when it was created? Which leads to the question Ava is fixated on. Why is there something instead of nothing? It suggests a third party. Someone other than Krok (the before) and Chuck (the after), someone or something THEN. That very moment that everything changed. Because like, as much as it’s neat to wrap all these disparate pieces of information up together with a bow the fact still remains that Krok is afraid of something. Something that needs to be flung across time and space. Something that can’t be killed — but with the underlying suggestion that this thing can’t easily cross time and space either. Because if it could, the guns still wouldn’t matter. It could just zap itself right back. So there’s this secret third thing that’s equally as powerful as Krok and Chuck, but limited in some way.

Also, as an aside, also kind of stuck on Ava helping Clementine recreate a universe from scratch when shit got super ultra mega broken. It means something that Ava is the one that FOUND the diner, the shape of it made by the math surrounding it. It means something that Ava is the one Chuck speaks to. It means something that he takes her back to her final speech as a professor being shoved into emeritus status where she says, “As we struggle to understand the universe, we may need to consider the idea that the universe is struggling to understand us, that our curiosity about the cosmos may be reciprocated.” (Which Chuck all but confirms. He sees a lonely Caspar and makes Effie and Zebulon for him. He agrees that he needs them just as much as they need him. A hunter and a dog, each better at something than the other).

Basically I just need to know if Ava is the mother of the universe lmao. Like, it is very important to me that observation is central to the discussion. Krok emphasizes there was nothing to observe because the universe came into being because nothing was. There was no time, no space, no ideal of observation. But the moment the universe is created, when matter overpowers antimatter, in a way, observation is integral to its existence because that’s a concept that sprung into being alongside it. And so I come back to Ava, fixing the paradoxical woman and the universe she’s broken by making her start over. Were Ava’s eyes open when she was doing her guided meditation? Because Clementine’s were closed and she was picturing it all in her mind to fix it, but Ava was still outside of that, existing in a space where there was nothing. Not even space until she taught Clementine how to make it. No time until Clementine began to move the space.

So my theory that whatever is at both the beginning and end of any universe has to be what Krok is afraid of stands even now. Spent all that time repeating myself when I already made the point with less information.

Separately though, I do wonder if Libuza will end up being the key to all of this. Not because she can see the future. Ex can technically do that too. No, I wonder about Libuza because she touched what I’m now guessing is the same exact kind of orb filled with “new energy” that Krok juuuuuuust ate to become powerful again.

And I’m focused on this because of the Effie and Zebulon piece. They are instruments of God (Chuck) in a way, knowledge and immortality combined even if they don’t always have the words for said knowledge because it’s filtered through their existences… Effie is the one who was called to the orb before giving it to Libuza, immediately altering her and… giving her the ability to predict Krok’s movements.

I think whatever Krok is stealing from is a well connected to the very thing he’s afraid of. How else would Libuza have suddenly gained enough mathematical knowledge — any knowledge AT ALL regarding a time before time in a space before space — from new energy if that wasn’t somehow connected to The Thing That Birthed It All.