ME IN EVERYTHING U SAY

statehate:

Oxford Comma Dropped

dagseoul:

Nobody uses whom anymore, people willfully split infinitives, sentences purposefully ended with prepositions, and now the serial comma is to be avoided as a general rule. Prescriptivists are likely going to be really pissed a new edition of an Oxford University guide suggests a comma can be used, however, if it assists meaning or resolves ambiguity. OMG! A style guide suggesting usage based in motivation!

I’m pleased. Prescriptivism must die. I love it when editors admit writers do have choices.

Is there any leftist cause for which dagseoul isn’t a keyboard warrior? Prescriptivism is for landed, bourgeoisie, white, elitist, racist, homophobic, misogynist, ableist aristocrats, OBVIOUSLY.

Linguistic prescriptivism has no basis in reality. If anybody who whines and bitches about grammar actually bothered to read anything remotely scientific on language, they’d find this out easily enough. Pondering “who” vs “whom” and correcting split infinitives only shows that you bought into some stylistic guidelines taught to you in school.

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dez-ray:

““I just wanna be brutally honest about language, about words. I really do, at this point in time. I don’t think language is really good. I don’t think that language has really caught up with the rest of the human evolutionary process. It seems like every time we try to express a deep thing, a heavenly thing, a godlike thing, a poetic thing, it seems like we come up short - duhnt it?”

—

Huey P. Newton

__

This makes me think a lot, about what it means to have the words, the mental infrastructure, language? infrastructure in place to accurately and adequately convey an emotion, a feeling, etc. Perhaps this is why I’m in my head so much, read so much, write so much because I’m constantly trying to figure this out… how to say things, the best -most accurate way to say things… language has not caught up with articulated positionalities or to feelings … so we continue to create language and words and narratives that could have long described where we are right now

(via larepublicadedet)

So, this is entirely true. I love language and don’t mean to slight it, so in that vein I won’t blame it for not having caught up with our inner thoughts. But it is entirely true that our internal monologues can never by fully felt by another person the way we feel them. As perfect a communication system as language could potentially be, for you to feel what I am feeling to a T would mean us having the same brain, from the neurons it’s made of to the experiences & memories that shape it.

But as far as communication systems go, language is pretty god damn amazing. I mean, we can philosophize about meandering statements like, “I think, therefore I am.” What in the world does that actually mean? What does it mean to you, what did it mean to Descartes? What common ground exists between us all when we interpret a phrase like that? That there is any at all is, I think, a testament to the communicative power of human language. It astounds me that something which evolved for very practical purposes has reached the heights of expressiveness we see now.

And yet, it’s true that you can never feel what I feel regardless of the words I choose. And this is pretty maddening. Like Levin in Anna Karenina, I often know what I mean and what I want to say, but I can’t make people understand me. It’s a mild annoyance at best, but at worst and in so many of us it can be terrible and frightening.

A masculist question: what are the pressures on men, and are they harmful? By men’s own admissions, here are a few. I particularly like how much these pressures resonate with commenters.

Don’t let anyone tell you feminists don’t care about this. A critique of gender that results in the elimination of harmful expectations requires masculist discourse, and no one says otherwise. If you find yourself on a feminist blog and notice no one’s talking about men’s problems, this is a GOOD thing. How insulting would it be for a woman to act as if she knows what it’s like to grow up as a man? Feminist discourse is about women’s problems, and masculist discourse about men’s. There is obviously overlap, and furthermore everyone may and in fact should discuss gender as a whole. So for example, I can talk about the pressure I see for women to be pretty (a gender issue), and how this affects me in the dating world (a masculist issue), but I’d be an asshole to pretend I know what it’s like to feel those pressures (a feminist issue).