Cleverly Disguised

Encounter: skategoons

has anybody else noticed that the classic sci fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus features a Torment Nexus? that’s pretty problematic of the author

used to think it terribly silly (and kinda funny) when fantasy or sci-fi stories would have people refer to major recent historical events as The Flood or The Incident or The Revolution, and im sure historians fucking hate that because it's not helpful or descriptive, but we sure do be calling it The Pandemic

Pat Ningewance, a first language Ojibwe speaker, once commented that it was awfully hard to effectively translate a lot of English poetry into Ojibwe because there is no way to say things like “her slim arms” bc the only word in Ojibwe for anything like that basically sounds like “her arms were just skin and bones” while meanwhile there is a whole word that means “beautifully fat” (minogaamo) bc that was way more valued in Ojibwe culture than being skinny, which probably meant you were malnourished

For those expressing interest in Pat's work, I recommend her introduction and translation of Anishinaabe writer George Kenny's poems and short stories, Gaawiin Mawisiiwag Anishinaabeg / Indians Don't Cry, and the book she wrote of her mother's storytelling, Gii-nitaa-aadisooke. The second link goes to the publishing company she owns, which also has one of the best available textbooks for learning Ojibwe, titled Gookom's Language.

i don't really want to weight in on the "using big words in your writing is ableist" discourse happening on tiktok because i'm like 90% certain it's an anti-intellectual psyop to stir up drama in online circles to promote the use of ai to summarize literally everything and thus feeding the LLMs and lowering the populace's mistrust of such tools but i also have to say: dictionaries and thesauruses are the most accessible they've ever been. if you use an e-reader of any kind you can look up a word without leaving the page. there's a plethora of online dictionaries and if you just type a word + "meaning" into google it'll usually give you a definition. we used to have pocket dictionaries we used when reading in class. i have two on my shelf right now that i used in high school. stop letting the fascists purposefully misuse anti-ableism rhetoric to trick you into never thinking again.