Feral corner of the world.

b) I found the paper they’re citing and it’s actually really sweet and a really cool study to read! not at all too dense

some highlights:

this is VERY sweet

(this paper came about bc they were having trouble identifying participants by ‘traditional’ recruitment methods like posting flyers and contacting LGBT networks/support groups, and also didn’t want to skew the data toward people who would frequent these)

they also tried making profiles on dating sites but….. 

anyway here’s a link

"One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead."

So, for example, Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory of Christian salvation. It's sort of a novel? There are characters who do stuff? but also they are very one-dimensional. The main character is a guy named Christian--yes, really!--who is journeying from his hometown ("the city of destruction") to the Celestial City (heaven). There is not much subtlety to it. It is pretty much what it is. There is no slippage, no playing around with the theme, no places where the symbolism is ambiguous. John Bunyan, the author, is hitting you over the head every step of the way with the Meaning That You Are Supposed To Be Getting From The Story.

Not all allegories are that crude or simplistic; the Narnia books are also allegory for Christianity. They have a lot more subtlety to them and a lot more nuance, and there's a lot of stuff in there that isn't allegorical, but on the crucial matters there is still a 1:1 correspondence. Aslan is Jesus. He's not like Jesus, he's not a character that has some similarities to Jesus or takes themes from the stories of Jesus, he is Jesus.

Tolkien is not doing allegory. Tolkien is taking the material of his life--his faith, his experiences in WWI, his linguistic and historical knowledge, his favorite books--and using them as the building blocks of his story. The themes and imagery and symbols draw heavily from all of that, the characters and settings draw heavily from all of that, but they are too complex to be allegorical. There's a lot of symbolism! It's not allegory.

So, for example, let's take the Dead Marshes referenced above. Does the experience of walking through this muddy wasteland with corpses all around that are rotting but still look like people draw from Tolkien's WWI battlefield experience of dead bodies in the trenches? Of course it does! but there are also a lot of differences. These dead are not from the current war, they are from a previous one--they are a reminder of old conflicts, of the ways the systems and powers of the current war have not come out of nowhere, there is history here. There is meaning that is not drawn from the Somme. And they are also drawing from literary references Tolkien was familiar with--primarily William Morris. Modern readers don't get the references because we have generally not read The House of the Wolflings, but that doesn't mean that the references aren't there.

Not all allegories are that crude or simplistic; the Narnia books are also allegory for Christianity. They have a lot more subtlety to them and a lot more nuance, and there's a lot of stuff in there that isn't allegorical, but on the crucial matters there is still a 1:1 correspondence. Aslan is Jesus. He's not like Jesus, he's not a character that has some similarities to Jesus or takes themes from the stories of Jesus, he is Jesus.

As insistent as Tolkien was that The Lord of the Rings was not an allegory, C. S. Lewis was equally insistent that Narnia was not an allegory. And I mean, he wrote an entire scholarly book on mediaeval allegory (The Allegory of Love), and his first work of prose fiction very clearly was an allegory: it was called The Pilgrim's Regress and it's even more of a fever-dream than most of his other fiction. So he would probably know.

The way he used to explain it was: Narnia was written to answer the question "Suppose there were a world of talking animals and mythical creatures, and suppose that like our world it was Fallen and needed the salvation of Christ, how would that happen?"

Aslan is a fictional portrait of Christ, doing what Lewis imagined Christ would do if he were incarnated as a talking lion, but he is not an allegorical portrait.

To give you an idea of what Lewis considered an actual allegory to be, The Pilgrim's Regress has the allegorical meaning written out as a superscript line above each page, like "Greed to recover Desire hides the real offer of its return. | He tries to force himself to feel it, but finds (and accepts) Lust instead. | The deception does not last; but it leaves a habit of sin behind it."

Those superscripts were added in the second edition and Lewis felt that the fact that they were needed at all, indicated that his allegory was a failure. Because allegory is supposed to be clear; it's supposed to explain, not mystify, the thing it allegorizes.

My second favourite thing is how much it annoys certain people. Some outright detest any sort of joy, and talk the team’s performance down, or moan about fans having some fun.

we went in pairs so i was hiking through the woods with this guy who’d been in my class all semester but we didn’t talk much but now ofc we got to chatting, being in the woods and all.

and he told me he’d just moved from a city on the other side of the state and i was like “oh that’s funny i just moved from there too!” we talked a little more and within two minutes determined we didn’t just move from the same city, but had in fact been working at the same petsmart for over a year, at the same time, but he worked in the dog hotel and i worked in the grooming salon so we never met. months, 40 yards from each other, separated by two walls, and we never had a conversation.

Trans activist Jamison Green's passport photos before and after HRT. Left he's age 32 (1980) Right age 41 (1989) after being on testosterone for one year (x)

Everyone say thank you to trans mascs for showing us a version of masculinity born from joy and desire instead of just through coercion

Everyone say thank you to all people outside of the cis gender binary for showing us a version of gender born from joy and desire instead of just through a simple frame work in which our oppressor have used to kill, erase, and censor us.

I explained very clearly to the manager my issue with the meat section not having the price tags listed, and they claimed it was only going to be for the meat, since meat is by weight, and the price of each item is printed on the packs of each item.

Sure. That’s how they get their foot in the door. Fast forward not even two weeks, and here we are:

Bar codes. No prices, no item descriptions. No price stickers on the individual items. Heck, not even the name of the item that is SUPPOSED to be there.

No. The only way to see the price is to scan it on your phone app, which is also recording what you looked at recently, as a way of gauging what you might be looking for in the future.

So here’s what we’re gonna do gang:

Every time you go into a store that has implemented these price-less tags:

Take 1-3 items up to the cash register. Ask the cashier for the price, or hit the price check item on the self checkout, which will likely call over the attendant.

Express that you didn’t actually want it, you just couldn’t see on the shelf how much it was.

POLITELY, AND WITH A THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE CONFIRMATION, Give the items to the cashier or attendant to put back.

When they inevitably try to push the app, politely decline. If pressed for why not, say you don’t want to have to carry your phone in-hand the whole time you are shopping in order to see how much things cost. (Not having cell service or data to use the app is NOT a valid excuse, as stores already often have complimentary WiFi AND more stores will provide WiFi rather than give up on this push for surveillance pricing)

If it’s a shelf-stable item, the cashier will have to set it aside, taking up room in their limited operating space, and eventually pass it off to someone to put in a holding area to put back later. If it’s a fridge/freezer item, it might have to get tossed due to food product sale regulations.

In either case, you are making it a pain in the ass for them to have these digital bar codes. Tie up the checkouts. Give the employees more busywork that the company has to pay them to do. Hurt their bottom line having to toss the pint of ice cream you carried around in your cart for 20 minutes before giving it back to the cashier.

you can read it, tenlittlebullets translated it into English :)

I’m so glad somebody asked this, because the answer is: when they finally ran out of ammunition, Charles Jeanne rounded up everyone who was still standing, went, “look, if we’re going to die, we might as well die fighting,” and led a suicidal ten-man charge against an entire flippin’ infantry column, armed with nothing but bayonets. The first few ranks of soldiers were so unprepared for such a spectacularly insane attack that they were too surprised to shoot. They crossed bayonets and tried to hold the insurgents off in hand-to-hand combat, but Jeanne’s swordsmanship was apparently aces, because he held off a bunch of them at once and covered his friends as they tried to breach the ranks. And once they were in, nobody could shoot them for fear of taking out their own guys.

So the last stand that the insurgents had intended as a noble suicide ended in them breaking through the ranks entirely and winding up in the next street over, outside the combat zone, going “well shit, what do we do now?” (I’m guessing the infantry column wasn’t very deep; central Paris at that point was a rabbit warren of narrow twisty streets, and assembling troops en masse for an organized attack was a logistical nightmare.) Unlike the National Guard, the army weren’t total chumps and got themselves turned around to give chase and start shooting once they weren’t at risk of friendly fire any longer… and that’s when all the civilians holed up in their houses went “no way, you’re not getting your hands on these crazy bastards” and started hurling furniture and crockery down on the soldiers’ heads. Jeanne was understandably distracted at the time, but afterwards somebody informed him that the barrage of unlikely projectiles included a piano. A piano. That is some straight-up Looney Tunes slapstick right there. No wonder Hugo went for the heroic death scene instead; if he’d stuck to real life, he probably would’ve gotten complaints that he’d wrecked his readers’ suspension of disbelief.

Anyway, someone opened an alley gate for them to shelter in and take stock of the casualties–most of them survived(!!!), but a few were pretty nastily wounded. Their host then had to lock Charles Jeanne in to keep him from charging right back out and taking on the whole goddamn army singlehanded. He probably would’ve broken down the door if the poor man hadn’t pointed out that going back out would give away his wounded comrades’ hiding place and the identities of the people sheltering them. They sat there listening to the gunfire gradually slow and go silent, and then in the middle of the night the ones who could still walk were allowed to slip away one by one at long intervals from each other. Charles Jeanne went straight home, slept like the dead for a few hours, was woken up at five in the morning with a warning that he’d been denounced and the building was surrounded, and then slipped out in disguise and managed to evade the police for four months before a former comrade ratted him out and he was arrested.

On the left page you see the original ancient text and on the right page you see the rendition (I don’t like the term “translation” in this case) in Modern Greek.

This is a perfect example of how dense in meaning a speech in Ancient Greek could be and how much Greek evolved into a simplified version that has to rely a lot on circumlocution in order to provide the same amount of information. This is not the case just with Greek of course. All languages have been evolving into a more simple, if not simplistic, form that requires a lot more words to successfully communicate the same message.

The interesting thing that I would invite modern Greek speakers to check for themselves is that this difference has not resulted from a critical change in the vocabulary. These here aren’t words which encompassed such a dense meaning and at some point fell out of use, making later stages of Greek having to compensate for its poorer vocabulary with an approximation achieved with long paraphrasing. As a matter of fact, if you check however much you can read from the left page in this photo, you will find that there are hardly any words that are not actively used in the modern Greek vocabulary. The two such examples I find are the words ἡδὺς (=sweet, pleasant) and δύσερις (= contentious), which are truly not used anymore in this form. Yet even when it comes to those, there are derivative words in modern Greek like ηδύποτα (sweet drinks), ηδυπάθεια (passion / desire for sweetness / pleasures). And δύσερις can be easily understood if you realise it comes from the negative δυσ- and ερις (fighting, argument), provided that the lingual education of the average Greek nowadays was not piss poor of course, which it unfortunately is.

So, this means that the reason the modern rendition has to add so many words and so much descriptive context is not a change or degradation of the vocabulary but rather the extreme oversimplification of the grammar and the syntax, which are the main reasons that you see a text full of perfectly understandable words and yet still need a full page of babytalk long explanations to help you understand what you just read.

Someone may argue that this was the natural way languages evolved towards simpler forms and we cannot change the way people communicated and keep communicating. That’s fair. However, I have spoken before about how I see modern linguists in Greece actually STRIVING to further speed up and intensify such changes of oversimplification, sometimes even enforcing them to the speakers! I am in a few greek language groups in social media and I have witnessed this time and again. Linguists and language teachers scolding someone for their text, telling them; "We don't use this type anymore, drop it. This word sounds pretentious, drop it. Stop using this case, just say it with more words. There are simpler ways to say this, what are you trying to prove?" Excuse me now, if the whole philosophy in linguistics is that linguists must only observe and document the changes occuring in the language without intervening in any way, then aren't they violating their own philosophy? It seems to me they understand it in an one-directional way; we don't intervene in the way the language keeps deteriorating becoming simpler but we're absolutely intervening if someone dares use an older, more demanding, more advanced grammatical type or a rare word that is in danger of becoming obsolete. No, let it become obsolete. I am also afraid there are certain ideological beliefs tightly associated with these tactics and they have permeated linguistics so thoroughly that linguists do not even consider questioning or re-examining their fixed stance on the matter, even if this excludes people occuring naturally in the population, who still use more archaic types, whether out of an aesthetic or cultural preference or memory or old age or some local idiomatic footing.

Furthermore, I have written about this before but I still can't help but wonder at the way "translators" (?) modernize the ancient text. Their clear philosophy is "let's try to write this text as differently from the original as possible", which is something I don't even understand when it comes to translating a different language, let alone when it's just writing in Greek but of a different chronological stage. It is not always the case but it is more often than not.

Some examples from the same page: The word ευτράπελος is changed with the word χαριτολόγος (=the pleasant speaker) in the modern rendition which is a good and necessary change because the first word has shifted from having positive to having negative connotations, as it means riduculous rather than "pleasantly funny" nowadays. That's fine.

The next example is about the word βωμολόχος which was also correctly changed in the modern version because the word has now a more narrow meaning. In ancient Greek, it meant someone acting and speaking in a vulgar, dishonourable and obscene way, however in modern it strictly means someone using a lot of foul language. Here the change is not a problem but how the change is applied is. The translator uses the word καραγκιόζης, which comes from the turkish word Karagöz (=black eyes) and is the name of the most famous shadow puppet theater character in Turkey, Greece and the rest of the Balkans, and yeah perhaps he has the type of personality Aristotle would call "βωμολόχος" a good two thousand years back. The problem is that it seems quite surreal and completely out of place to interpret Aristotle from Greek to Greek by using turkish cultural slang of all things, like, hold on a bit, mate! I mean, he could easily use Greek words like γελοίος or φαιδρός (=ludicrous) or χυδαίος (= vulgar) and many more.

Then for some reason the "translator" changes the word αγροίκος (=boorish) with the word χωριάτης, even though the word αγροίκος is also used in modern Greek in the exact same way and almost just as often and as such it is a closer translation of its own self (!) than χωριάτης (=peasant, crude) is lol But no, I really have this feeling that linguists and translators try to create gaps even when there's not any. I really don't get it. Same with the word αηδής (disgusting, very unpleasant) which could be used just like that or at least turned into αηδιαστικός in modern, however the translator went for a kind of distant synonym (αντιπαθητικός / unlikeable) just so he could change the root word. Then he obligatorily changes the word αιδώς (=shame) with the synonym ντροπή, even though αιδώς totally survives and is used in the modern speech as well. I don't understand why there is this need to cut ties even in the smallest of ways, for there definitely is such a need amongst some people, but I haven't figured out yet the ultimate root of this phenomenon.