the HELL?

All the blogs on my reading list have been deleted? how could this happen? Grrr.
I am following nobody. In most scenarios that sentence would be a good thing. Not now, though.

Ich bin ein Berliner?

My head is still stuck in a 'I wonder what that is in German' place at the moment. It's actually good from a wordgeekiness point of view because it makes me analyse what I say in English more.

While in Germany I had a conversation with a lovely woman called Kate from Australia about the benefits of being 'adjectivised' (I let this blatant example of verbing pass, because she made a good point.) being adjectivised is a good thing. It means to be described with, you know, describing words. As I have mentioned previously, we do not talk about 'queers(n)', but we can talk about 'the queer(adj) community'. Similarly, Kate prefers to be called lesbian, not A lesbian. atheist, not AN atheist.
It's fair enough, especially if one's identity is tied up with words that have been - or are - used in a derogatory fashion. Using nouns to describe someone, apart from breaking pretty basic, primary school literacy rules, is less that one step away from name-calling.
With this in mind, I started feeling uncomfortable listening to the German spoken around me. Germans (oops, German people! Is that a WW2 leftover? We don't talk about Frenches, 'Spaniard' rather than 'Spanish person' is derogatory, but The Germans is... fine?) talk about 'Schwulen and Lesben', literally 'gays and lesbians'. They refer to the Turkish community as 'die Turken' - the Turks. It just makes my skin crawl a little bit. Even though it was clear that this did not carry the dodgy connotations this would have in England.

But then something else occurred to me.
You would talk about lesbians, for example, but you would never say 'sie ist eine Lesbe' - 'she is a lesbian'. You would say 'sie ist Lesbe' - 'she is lesbian'. The word taking on a sort of 'nounjective' quality (think 'I am woman, hear me roar'). You could say 'sie ist lesbisch', making the adjectivisation complete. But this, I think, would be less, not more respectful.

This of course (wild tangent alert!) is where JFK went wrong in Berlin.

By saying 'Ich bin EIN Berliner' he removed his humanity. The indefinite article made it clear to the Germans that an inanimate object was being discussed. unfortunately for Kennedy, the inanimate object which is a synonym for 'citizen of Berlin' is 'iced doughnut'. Hence much sniggering ever after.

But you can see why he did it.

Because in the USA, if you think about it, the opposite is true. In England too, for that matter.

If you say 'I'm American' or 'I'm English'. It's a statement of fact. Whatever.
But 'I'm AN American', 'I'm AN Englishwoman'. Aha! Suddenly we're talking nationalism, civic pride; indeed, faintly racist territory. But in Kennedy's case, he was just trying to show his own pride at being associated with Berlin, and tried to apply an American nuance to the German language.

Which is a warning to us all: Try to be nationalistic in an unfamiliar language, and you might end up a doughnut.

Ich bin ein Word Geek.

Bilingual Brainmelt

I've spent the last week in Berlin, which has been toll. Toll actually means crazy and the German word for rabies is 'Tollwut' which means 'crazyfury' - but in this case it's a good thing, because it also roughly translates as 'ace'.
Now, review that sentence in your head, and then consider that EVERY SENTENCE going through my head currently sounds like that and you'll understand why I have a headache. My brain starts off in English and then....then I realise I've forgotten large chunks of my native language and relpaced them with German. Then I'll get distracted on a little linguistic detour on the etymology of the word which, being German, is pretty easy to map. Last night I was sitting in a bar drinking Pilsener Urquell (which it turns out I say SO BADLY in German that no bartender has a clue what I'm asking for and I'm reduced to flailing over the bar like some unfortunate and desperate drunk mumbling 'da, da, Bier. OOOOrkvell!' until they twig and start speaking in English to me to save embarrassment.) ANYWAY (y'see?) I'm looking at the Urquell label, and at a bottled water someone's drinking called Spreequell. (The Spree is the river in Berlin. you say it 'shpray', well, I do.) and I realise...huh... 'Quell' means source, or spring. Urquell, is like "the original source" - which is also the name of a brand of bubblebath. so if you drank an Urquell in an Original Source bath, you could potentially get confused. What everyone else sees is that weird English girl who understands a surprising amount of German for an Engländerin, but can't talk for shit, giggling at her beer bottle. I'm gonna kvell, already. Which is where THAT Yiddish gem comes from. See? You see? Siehst du? And this is why I haven't updated the blog much. Mein gehirn ist ganz kaputt.
WortGeek

Man Crisps?

Just a little thought on an adcampaign I noticed last night. McCoy's crisps new slogan is 'Man crisps'. The implication being that these crisps - which are thickly cut and strongly flavoured and really rather nice - are more rugged and masculine and therefore intended for men. They are possibly the diametric opposite of 'Snack-a-Jacks' - tasty,low fat rice treats which are apparently only ever consumed by women in offices. Look at the two pictures above. Both are basically for prawn cocktail crisps, except that McCoy's have steered away from the slightly camp sounding 'prawn cocktail and gone for a rugged 'Sizzling King Prawn'. Alan Carr would order a prawn cocktail in an overly chintzy bistro run by Felicity Kendal in some thus far thankfully unimagined Carry On Film resurgence. Sizzling King Prawns are something Ray Mears might rustle up on an improvised beach barbecue. The idea of 'prawn' is also less of a threat to anyone's heteromasculinity if it's got the word 'King' next to it.
Then there's the colour. In the language of crisp packets, we all know pink = prawn, but McCoy's have gone for that trademark 'faded salmon' shade that guys can wear to the office without getting queerbashed, where as the packaging on the Snack-a-Jacks is more reminiscent of a mid-range bubblebath than anything edible. Then again, ladies don't EAT, do they? No, they simply float around on a cloud of perfume, flicking their hair and giggling, and clutching pink accessories that may or may not contain 'lo-cal' snacks.
All this is par for the course. I can only assume that, marketing wise, targetting a specific market (and excluding other potential customers) is as lucrative as - or more lucrative than - making your product accessible to everyone. Especially when the market has been effectively aimed at only one gender in the past. Rather than convince the potential male chocolate market, for example, that contrary to what the ad media have been telling you for years, chocolate is not just for the womenfolk and kids, and they are more than welcome to buy Galaxy bars and Maltesers, you concentrate all the masculinity on one brand and hope the guys'll go for that. Hence the aforementioned and reviled Nestle ad : Yorkie, it's not for girls. How's that for retrograde and offensive?
My initial reaction to this campaign was 'it's not for girls? Well I'm a WOMAN and I can have a Yorkie if I like. No hang on, they're Nestle, whom I boycott, and anyway their chocolate is substandard. And even if I DIDN'T boycott Nestle, I certainly would NOW. They don't want my business, I'll take it elsewhere.' OK, they were my initial, secondary and tertiary reactions, if we're splitting hairs.
And I kind of feel the same way about McCoy's. 'Man crisps'? Obviously too thick and rugged for my pretty little mouth. Fine. Keep 'em. But I don't like the sense of manipulation that gives me. If I buy them, an overtly sexist company gets my money. If I boycott, their marketing becomes a self fulfilling prophecy and I look like I think they really are 'man crisps'. Similarly with snack-a-jacks, If I choose a pack of those, having boycotted the 'sizzling testosterone' or whatever it is, I'm merely fulfilling the gender stereotypes set up for me by a room full of corporate cocks. It's a real dilemma of the modern world. Sort of. Unless I just stick to Kettle Chips.
WG

Just wanted to share.

While looking at the poetry of Shel Silverstein in search of inspiration for a bit of nonsense verse I'm working on, I came across this. It actually made me cry. Given the aptness of the title, I thought I'd share it here.

Forgotten Language

Once I spoke the language of the flowers,
Once I understood each word the caterpillar said,
Once I smiled in secret at the gossip of the starlings,
And shared a conversation with the housefly in my bed.
Once I heard and answered all the questions of the crickets,
And joined the crying of each falling dying flake of snow,
Once I spoke the language of the flowers. . . .
How did it go?
How did it go?

Shel Silverstein

Yay.

Word Geek's guide to homosexual gay vocabulary and usage.

In my new job, we have to talk about sex and sexuality, and we have to be politically correct. It's a real balancing act at the best of times, but when it comes to talking about .... well ... what I want to talk about, it's a minefield.

This was brought to my attention when a colleague was trying to write a report on homophobia in schools. He wanted to say 'homosexuality' but had been told that 'homosexual' and therefore 'homosexuality' is considered offensive because it is the medical term for the 'condition' of being gay and our employers wanted it removed, newspeak style, from all documents. "What am I going to put then?" ranted my colleague (who is himself gay) "'gayness'? That's less offensive, is it?"

Now, as with most political correctness, the intention here is honourable. Someone somewhere has caught on to the fact that it's generally homophobic groups who use words like homosexual, and wanted to distance themselves from that. But they haven't thought about the practical implications. It's difficult though, for people who are not part of a persecuted minority, to navigate how to best indicate that they are not prejudiced against this group. So, as a public service, I'd like to provide a guide.

Homosexual (noun): Try to avoid calling gay people 'homosexuals'. It's not a BAD word as such, but when it's used as a label it just feels a bit... off.

Homosexual (adjective): This is slightly better, but where possible, use gay as the preferred adjective. If you must use it, use it to refer to the physical, not cultural, aspects of homosexuality. So 'homosexual feelings' is ok. 'homosexual poetry' is not.

Homosexuality: As seen above, homosexuality is causing problems. (The word, not the phenomenon!)Yes, it's a medical word. Yes, it's obviously link to homosexual, which can be offensive, but there is no other word in the language doing the same job and, as such, it . cannot be removed. Which in turn makes removing 'homosexual' problematic.

Heterosexual/ity: This is fine, apparently. This is the same double standard which has led to students in UK schools referring to 'chalkboards' instead of blackboards, but not calling whiteboards 'penboards'. The implication ends up being that 'black' and 'homosexual' have shame attached to them but 'heterosexual' and 'white' do not.

Queer (noun): No.

Queer (adjective): This is a fantastic, all inclusive word, reclaimed from being a horribly offensive homophobic slur, and widely used in America to describe all things unstraight. In the UK, however, it has more of a history of just meaning peculiar/eccentric, and has not been embraced in the same way. Americans in the UK should use it with caution as they may be misinterpreted. I think it's fab, though.


Gay (noun): This, like homosexual, is frowned upon. 'Gays' has homophobic connotations.

Gay (adjective): This is fine (as long, obviously, as you're not using it to mean crap) but can be misleading, as some people use it to refer to men, and some use it to refer to men and women.

Lesbian (noun): Unlike 'gay', this is fine. Who the hell knows why. Maybe because 'Lesbian Woman' sounds redundant. Some people prefer to say 'gay woman', which suits me too.


Lesbian (adjective): Also fine.

Bisexual/ity (adjective and noun): Again, fine, making a bit of a mockery of the fact that homosexual isn't. The abbreviation 'Bi' is often preferred.

LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans): It's clunky, it's irritating, and it keeps picking up a random Q (for 'questioning'). But it's inclusive and a safe bet for official documents. Roughly equivalent to the American 'queer'.

I'll probably think of some more later, but that's all for now.

x WG

nonce up at liberty.

what the hell? Apparently, a french language website called vipublog has nicked my blog post about sexuality. Fair enough. It would have been NICE if you had asked. I would probably have given permission, and been quite flattered. But no. It's been half-inched, and, bafflingly, been put through some sort of babelfish device, from English to....english. I don't know whether this was to make it harder to search (in which case CALLING it 'The Cunning Linguaphile' was a bit of an own goal), or a side effect of having at some point translated it into french. Have a read. It's really quite odd. My favourite part is that 'come out' translates as 'nonce up at liberty'.
So, thanks for the compliment, you thieving scoundrels. Or should that read 'entering beget of the remove scurrilously'?




once again, a assignment in go uphill to the esteemed Dr S.(’the Sloz’ doesn’t pr?cis it, apparently) over and above at Excretera who, predictably, has called me on a high handed throwaway note I made in my at assignment, stating that the coming at liberty activity was ‘far more complex’ than most people contrive. It would beget been so temperately to equitable agreement sagely when you be familiar with that, Michael, but Ohhhh no.”What did you beget in attention?” he says. Damn’ university professors making me THINK hither a hog of oneself clog. Jeez. Here goes then.

In the LGBT community, the received erudition is that scoop is encouraged/indoctrinated into a heterosexual/heterosexist lifestyle and that it takes a fixed amount of willpower to deficiency of confidence this assumptions and the nonce up at liberty. Don’t the nonce up crying to me someone is concerned footnotes or a bibliography, all the same. The channel uncontrollable with this representation someone is concerned me is that it tends to negate/belittle the bi community, as in this paradigm, bisexuals are viewed as people who beget unsuccessfully shaken away the “shackles” of heterosexuality, in the future the pre-eminence be known of those people someone is concerned being ‘confused’ or ‘undecided’ which, in my impression is a anxiety of shit.

Here is the uncontrollable. When Stonewall happened, ‘Gay’ referred to what is age referred to as the LGBT or Queer community. anyone not ’straight’. i.e. Over the years, all the same the core of gay changed to refer merely to gay men or to gay men ad lesbians depending on partiality. The Bi and Trans communities were shouldered at liberty.

I reckon it’s easier to gain loam acceptance if you repute an ‘other’ to odium. Now the LGB community is good-looking transphobic, and those fully on transsexuals who beget been accepted ‘into the fold’ can be good-looking non-objective hither genderqueer people. I beget witnessed the gay (male) community be lesbophobic, and the lesbian community fence in it and drub it (to some extent), then the lesbian and gay community was biphobic and the androgynous community challenged and partly overcame THAT.

So the verified writings hither being gay and coming at liberty were in actuality more incorporating than common writings using the at any rate phraseology are. Also, coming at liberty as ‘not straight’ note leaving the in assemble, the class, the mainstream. Doing so to self-identify as having a pallid sexuality (that sounds ignoble.) is dire because there is no cohesive assemble to peter out d scratch ‘to’. Because that’s what they are. Therefore, if you are questioning your sexualtiy it is much easier to classify as gay/lesbian and hinder your opposite-sex launch and beget the inclusivity of the gay community, less than be hand to flail on all sides being hated aside both extremes. They are not the two choices you beget, they are the safety-in-numbers ends of the continuum. in persnickety Personally speaking, I self classify as lesbian, not androgynous.

But I like the iDEA of heterosexuality. This leads me to another complicating agent, which is that, in our brotherhood, a a stash of our feel of value is based on the approbation of the vis-?-vis shagging. It’s equitable that the technic doesn’t do much someone is concerned me. As a lesbian I don’t requisite men to frame an scratch on on me but as a ball in this brotherhood, there’s a generally of me that’s offended when they don’t. Many, MANY gay men I beget known derive payment ‘joke’ flirting with lesbians and ‘fag hags’. They like the female on because they beget been socialised to sine qua non that on to acquaint someone with something them that they are successful/’real men’.

“I’m mask-like! No, I’m gay! No, bi! cool one’s heels. Those people I identify who beget the nonce up at liberty into nontraditional sexuality/gender roles beget above all done so something like this. am I at one pro tempore masculine? Please refer to me as she.some of the pro tempore.

(headfuck commences).you identify what? I odium labels.” It takes guts to the nonce up at liberty as gay. It takes awesome self assuredness and assertiveness which I can merely equitable round-the-clock DREAM of to the nonce up at liberty as something that doesn’t beget a dependable clarification in our brotherhood.