#language tricks

How i remember Danish numbers...! hope it can be helpful for someone struggling with this. ig: @chiara.klara.claire

Apparently there's bullshit about the word "twink" (particularly regarding trans men) on tumblr and possibly other places that I only know about because of OTNF (but since I do tumblr like a grandpa I miss a lot of tumblr things honestly).

So a couple of little stories.

Scene: it is August 2024, at the Glasgow Worldcon's queer gathering, and there is a crowd there including Roz Kaveney (!!), a miscellaneous assortment of mostly transmasc-spec nonbinary people, the editorial staff of the recent anthology I Want That Twink Obliterated!, and me.

I am at that point ... substantially more insecure in my state of being than I am now (when I am only moderately insecure). I have an appointment to start therapy after I get back from Scotland, to, among other things, work through whether my resistance to medical transition is autistic inertia or what. My general social anxiety is just waiting for an excuse to kick in.

And said editorial staff commented that they were wondering if their subs to their book were a little thin because people had a problem with twinks. I replied something to the effect of, "Actually the problem I had was I don't know how to write pulp! I write twinks aspirationally."

Needless to say "I write twinks aspirationally" went over beautifully with that crowd.

(I will note that both of my current tabletop characters are at least a bit twinky, though Danny the catboy bard is, after his second transition*, not only too middle-aged for it but definitely too furry so he's now clearly an otter disaster bisexual instead of a whatever-a-twink-turns-into-in-middle-age disaster bisexual.)

(* first transition was to male; second transition was to nekomimi.)

So, a number of years ago, I don't remember how many but I'm guessing on the order of magnitude of fifteen, someone (who knew me reasonably well) said to me something like, "You're not butch because of anything you do in particular, you're just butch because you are."

This genuinely gave me years of gender anxiety. Because the closest I am to having any butch vibe at all is owning some plaid flannel because I'm IN MY MID FORTIES that is THE CLOTHING OF MY GENERATION.

But I would occasionally remember it and hyperanalyze it, all, "Is this me? What about me led someone to come to this conclusion? What is the actual real thing happening there? I don't understand what she's seeing, what is she seeing?

It's funny how sorting through being trans provides useful answers to questions like that, huh?

Because I'm not butch. That is not my structure of gender, that is not the way I hack "masculinity" and "femininity" together.

I'm whatever a twink becomes in middle age.

I never got to be a twink when I was twink-aged. (I'm not sure entirely that I got to be a human when I was twink-aged. Those were some messy years.) I have feelings about that occasionally. And I have feelings about the fact that "twink" is as much an age category as it is a type of body. I have a lot of feelings.

I want words, also. As a writer, I want words a lot, I articulate and come to understand myself and my feelings better when I have words. And my queerness is a specific shape of a thing, something that was concealed from myself and others for much of my life, except for things that rubbed oddly here and there, and left me staring into the void wondering what about me made someone think I was obviously butch.

I write twinks aspirationally.

But also, I'm forty-something. I can't, won't, aspire to being twenty again, that is an utter fucking nightmare to imagine, even if it were possible, which it is distinctly not.

I feel, often, that the sort of thing I am is a thing for which there were words, once, and we lost them or had them taken and they are gone and now I have to figure out how to scrape up enough meaning to be again, both Pygmalion and Galatea to myself.

Anyway also once upon a time I got shown this tumblr post:

Said post talks about the older gay slang term "gunsel" - meaning "twink" - and its place in the noir genre, its origins in the Yiddish for "gosling".

I have long identified with Popeye.  Let me review that notion by re-posting a bit of an old post in which I explain while talking like Popeye; I am Popeye, I sez, because I just am…  Yeah, that’s right, I yam what I yam. First of all, I looks like Popeye.  I has that cleft in me chin, very little hair left on me ol’ head, and I gots the same squinky eye (what squinky eye?).  I has had that same…

I have long identified with Popeye.  Let me review that notion by re-posting a bit of an old post in which I explain while talking like Popeye; I am Popeye, I sez, because I just am…  Yeah, that’s right, I yam what I yam. First of all, I looks like Popeye.  I has that cleft in me chin, very little hair left on me ol’ head, and I gots the same squinky eye (what squinky eye?).  I has had that same…

Language Note: A Game Changer

I can’t remember the last time I read an article that had such an immediate impact on my daily life. Last week, though, I read this piece in The Atlantic about memory superstars, and their tricks. The piece that stuck out to me was making strange mental images as a pneumonic device that helps you remember. I’d been just keeping my head above water on the flood of new vocab coming every day. I thought drawing pictures instead of putting the English word (or often in addition would help my brain rewire around the English word to the thing itself. I think in large part it worked, but I still had a huge amount of trouble just remembering the words. Picturing the Arabic script didn’t really help. I can read it now, but for long term recall my brain still isn’t used to recognizing the characters. But after this tip from the memory pros? It takes a while for each word, and my teachers laugh at the thinking faces I make, but my recall has jumped up 150% improvement, easy. It’s wild. Here are a few examples of the weird brain pictures I make for all the new words:

·         مـِتجـَوّ ِز (mitgawwiz, married) Well, my friends Allister and Michael are married. Michael is German, and “mit” sounds like a German word. Allister’s family is from Taiwan, and “Ga”is a sound in Mandarin. Also, they are both really smart, aka whizzes. So, “mit-ga-wwiz”!