say jinkies

The last mammoth died on in island off the northeast coast of Siberia in ~1650BCE.

But the second time it came past I saw 

That “genomic meltdown” is one of the reasons feminism is so potentially lethal

That “genomic meltdown” is one of the reasons feminism is so potentially lethal, because they keep pushing for asexual reproduction, or trying to combine ovaries, when the most likely outcome is a population running about - unable to reproduce sexually since the whole “male genocide” bit - with incredibly damaged chromosomes.

I teach genetics, I don’t deserve to have to explain why this is so wrong and yet. Oh my god. 

Mueller’s Ratchet–which is what this chucklefuck is talking about, the reason that purely asexual lineages don’t last well in evolutionary time–does not apply to feminism. The hypothetical scenario of merging two eggs to create a baby? Yeah, uh, that’s fucking sex in this context, whether or not it involves a male. 

There are zero feminists pushing for parthenogenesis for humans, mostly because the whole thing is basically impossible for mammals as a result of mammalian investment in genomic imprinting. Among other things. It’s the sort of thing that only works okay in species that don’t control their embryonic development anywhere near as closely as your basic placental mammal does, because it relies on a certain amount of flexibility about sex determination and placental mammals are kind of weird about that.

Even if there were, Mueller’s Ratchet only applies if you never ever sexually reproduce and reshuffle alleles, like the parthenogenetic whiptail lizards mentioned upthread. If we have the technology to induce parthenogenesis in a human woman, we have the technology to reshuffle some alleles now and again. Mueller’s Ratchet kind of presupposes that going in and manually editing a genome isn’t a fucking option, shitwad! 

Furthermore, Mueller’s Ratchet is specifically a population genetics phenomenon that refers to the accumulation of deleterious mutations within an asexually/clonally reproducing lineage. It has dick fuck all to do with chromosomes.

Mueller’s Ratchet exists in order to explain why asexually reproducing lineages haven’t overrun the world, because frankly in the short term these lineages usually do way better than their conspecific, obligate sexually reproducing partners do. Furthermore, it’s really fucking common to see species that reproduce sexually at some times and asexually at other times, depending on context and who’s available, and that’s in and of itself a complex fucking phenotype you species-centric cortically starved ignorant dillweed

all of this is completely fucking irrelevant to the mammoth example that @brett-caton there chose to bring up, by the way, because mammoths don’t fucking reproduce asexually either 

as you would know if you’d bothered to read the paper, you self-satisfied jellyfish fellator

or even the pop science article you cited yourself 

which clearly and cogently explains that the fucking mammoths died of being inbred as all shit, much like yourself

the laziness inherent in jumbling all this pig-ignorant, overconfident and understudied bullshit together and claiming it’s a solidly built house rather than a crumbling, confused pile of enraged starfish is the final straw

you can’t even be arsed to read an article that you dug up and cited yourself, you shithugger

how are feminists supposed to be the lazy ones? 

“genomic meltdown” is one of the reasons feminism is so potentially lethal, because they keep pushing for asexual reproduction, or trying to combine ovaries

I work at a school with 700+ students, so buying bookmarks is simply not an option; I'd spend my whole budget on bookmarks alone in no time.

So what to do?

I make bookmarks out of the books that are too damaged to be fixed. And the kids love it.

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.

 Window to Literature in Paris -   Marco Barberio , 2023.

 Italian , b. 1971 - 

like, the concept being, people are familiar with the phrase and what people use it to mean metaphorically, but it’s not common knowledge anymore what the metaphor was in literal reference to. people still say “toe the line” but don’t necessarily conjure up the image of people standing at the starting line of a race, forbidden from crossing over it. people still say “the cat is out of the bag” without necessarily knowing it’s a sailors’ expression referring to a whip being brought out for punishment. some metaphors are so dead we don’t even know where they come from; like, there are ideas about what “by hook or by crook” references, but no one is entirely sure. nobody knows what the whole nine yards are.

and then you throw in a malaprop or a mondegreen or two, where because people don’t know what the actual words of the expression refer to, they’re liable to replace them with similar sounding words (see “lack toast and tolerant”). so we can literally go from a phrase referencing a common, everyday part of life to a set of unfixed, contextless sounds with a completely different meaning. that’s fascinating. what an interesting piece of the way language and culture are living, changing, coevolving things.

maybe part of the reason we can’t figure out where some phrases come from is that over time the words themselves have changed! one of the theories about “the whole nine yards” is that it’s a variant of “the whole ball of wax,” which some people further theorize was originally “the whole bailiwick,” meaning just “the whole area”! the addition of “nine yards” might be related to “dressed to the nines,” which might reference the fucking Greek muses! language is so weird and cool! (and I only know any idioms in two languages!)

a hare’s breath is small in a completely different way than a hair’s breadth and works very differently as a unit of distance.

according to that author, “whole nine yards” is hotly debated with a few more-modern popular origins; such as the length of ammunition within a WWII gun (but it most likely is more modern than ancient greece - the first use i can find of the term is in 1855).

however, the author favored a more simple, textile explanation (which i in turn also favor): when you go to a clothing store, they measure out your purchase in yards in front of you. i am not a seamstress, but google says that an everyday dress can take between 5-7 yards, whereas a fancy ballgown can take 8-10. asking for the “whole nine yards” is twofold: it both assumes you’re going to be making something big and fancy, and it is making sure you don’t get shortchanged by the fabric merchant (literally receiving the entire nine yards you are asking for). and although unsubstantiated, i wonder if it might be part of where we get the term “dressing to the nines” from as well - you are so fancy-dressed, you need nine yards of fabric.

i feel strongly this is backed up by the “ball of wax” connection as well; since (like you said!!!) there’s historical precedent that “ball of wax” as an idiom “most likely [is] a mondegreen of the idiom the whole bailiwick, meaning the whole territory.” (It also connects with a 17th century practice of dividing territory amongst heirs). but if whole ball of wax means the entire territory, doesn’t it make sense that whole nine yards would also mean a legitimate and tactile nine whole yards of fabric? doesn’t it make sense that we would smoosh together the meaning of “whole territory” with “whole piece of cloth”? i don’t know, i like that idea :)

additionally - just in the evidence? one of the first uses of the term “the whole nine yards” is the following line from a woman complaining in a 1855 news article: “[…] I told her to get just enough to make three shirts; instead of making three, she has put the whole nine yards into one shirt!" 

i have loved doing this research with y'all, thank you for listening. but i do just want to say - sometimes, the practice of linguistics shows us places where people have been silenced or devalued. there’s something here about the silent history of working-class people and of women’s work specifically - that it usually takes some digging before people consider that women and (worse! alas! a working woman!) seamstresses might be the ones who coined a very-popular term. in a lot of the articles i read for this essay, the first assumptions were that men (men in war, men on boats) had to have coined the term, even when it didn’t make any real sense. there is a very normal and even very likely reason for this term - and still, people are baffled by it, just because men don’t know where it could have come from.

and i think, to your point beforehand - how interesting, when idioms show us the places that we have been able to cover up and forget about. what makes something dead? i have no idea where the word podcast comes from, but the boomers were horrified when kids didn’t know why the save button is a floppy disc. that word i used up there, mondegreen? it was coined by Sylvia Wright. i have no idea who coined your guess is as good as mine and i have used it within the last 2 hours.

and, like, on a less serious note - do you know how long it took before i learned it’s actually spelled bury the lede? and like, i have always been honest about this, but when i was younger i thought a ”garden-variety longhair cat“ meant literally a variety of cat related to the garden.

so, yeah!!! a little bit of joy. i love so many things about this, about this discussion - across all of time and space and the internet, we get so freakin’ excited about words. and sometimes it makes us think about a bolt of cloth passing over someone’s hands. and then sometimes, there’s this really beautiful moment where something is just-as-true-now as it was back in 1855. we still measure out our fabric in yards in front of the customer. the person on the other side of the counter still has to prove it’s all nine yards.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

~ James Baldwin

October is about trees revealing colours they've hidden all year.

People have an October as well.

okay! the hazardous and expensive contraband mule strategy was only for the really hot titles that were considered to promote outright treason or blasphemy. most banned literature at the time was actually sold under the counter by mainstream publishing houses, and was incredibly popular and profitable.

publishers around europe would trade inventories of the books they produced to maintain varied inventories they could sell to clients. e.g. publisher A prints thousands of copies of a hundred french titles, publisher B prints thousands of copies of a hundred german titles, they do swapsies, now they both have a range of 200 titles to trade. this applied to banned books too, and the banned books had higher market values due to the additional complications involved in production and shipping — one proscribed book might be worth 2-4 legal books, depending on the heat and the relationship between the publishers.

this trade was kind of an open secret, mostly conducted using code words and tricks like stuffing a crate with safe books on top and illegal works on the bottom or hidden in the packing materials. clients who ordered banned books from their local booksellers would often include that part of the order as a separate, unsigned slip of paper that could be disposed of after reading. sometimes they would make special requests for discreet packaging — one surviving letter asks for a fake receipt to be made out for legal books, so that the customer could get them past the finance department at work. another fun trick was 'larding', where loose leaf pages of the illegal books would be tucked between pages of respectable volumes. one client asked their bookseller to send a quantity of banned pornography larded inside religious texts.

being such a profitable trade, of course there were corrupt inspectors involved too. certain publishers and booksellers had networks of friendly agents who would let their shipments pass through inspection for a cut of the take. this would sometimes mean sending books by weird circuitous routes around europe to make sure they passed through friendly hands and got their stamp of approval before finally making their way back to the client.