You Found Out Today That A Phrase You Have Used Before Was Coined By An Abusive Man. This Felt Like Getting

Welcome to the Dungeons of Fear and Hunger.

dead metaphors are really interesting honestly and specifically i’m interested in when they become malapropisms

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!)

the point is. I just came across the words “nip it in the butt” in a piece of published, professional fiction, and now I can’t stop giggling.

Another worldbuilding application of the "two layer rule": To create a culture while avoiding The Planet Of Hats (the thing where a people only have one thing going for them, like "everyone wears a silly hat"): You only need two hats.

Try picking two random flat culture ideas and combine them, see how they interact. Let's say taking the Proud Warrior Race - people who are all about glory in battle and feats of strength, whose songs and ballads are about heroes in battle and whose education consists of combat and military tactics. Throw in another element: Living in diaspora. Suddenly you've got a whole more interesting dynamic going on - how did a people like this end up cast out of their old native land? How do they feel about it? How do they make a living now - as guards, mercenaries? How do their non-combatants live? Were they always warrior people, or did they become fighters out of necessity to fend for themselves in the lands of strangers? How do the peoples of these lands regard them?

Like I'm not shitting, it's literally that easy. You can avoid writing an one-dimensional culture just by adding another equally flat element, and the third dimension appears on its own just like that. And while one of the features can be location/climate, you can also combine two of those with each other.

Let's take a pretty standard Fantasy Race Biome: The forest people. Their job is the forest. They live there, hunt there, forage there, they have an obnoxious amount of sayings that somehow refer to trees, woods, or forests. Very high chance of being elves. And then a second common stock Fantasy Biome People: The Grim Cold North. Everything is bleak and grim up there. People are hardy and harsh, "frostbite because the climate hates you" and "being stabbed because your neighbour hates you" are the most common causes of death. People are either completely humourless or have a horrifyingly dark, morbid sense of humour. They might find it funny that you genuinely can't tell which one.

Now combine them: Grim Cold Bleak Forest People. The summer lasts about 15 minutes and these people know every single type of berry, mushroom and herb that's edible in any fathomable way. You're not sure if they're joking about occasionally resorting to eating tree bark to survive the long dark winter. Not a warrior people, but very skilled in disappearing into the forest and picking off would-be invaders one by one. Once they fuck off into the woods you won't find them unless they want to be found.

You know, Finland.

✦ 🗡️

the boys™

I was part of the staff of an anime convention all the way through college. We held our meetings on monday nights, and every monday after the meeting, most of us went to taco bell. We would get our terrible garbage food and sit at the tables and hang out until the wee hours of the morning, and sometimes Pat Rothfuss (who lived nearby) would drop by and blow our little nerdy brains. It was a beloved tradition. 

One of our staffers was referred to as the Dapper Man, because he could frequently be found wearing a three-piece suit as he went about his daily business. A button-down and waistcoat was his casual attire, and on truly formal occasions, he would produce a tailcoat, tophat, and monocle. Somehow this worked incredibly well for him. Dapper Man was much lauded for his sartorial choices.

When Halloween rolled around, we held our meeting as usual, but with the addition of a bit of ridiculous cosplay holiday-garb. Since Halloween was not actually on a monday, only a few people were in costume. Dapper Man was.

These were the days before the rubber horse mask phenomenon went mainstream. They had just started to be available. Until Dapper Man arrived as a Formal Thoroughbred, I had never seen one. 

He was quite dashing, though, with white gloves, a black tailcoat, and a monocle on his wide, staring, rubber horse-eyes. There was a strange but alarming dignity to the look. 

We made it through the meeting with the usual chaos expected of ninety nerds left unsupervised with a twenty-thousand dollar budget, and progressed posthaste to TBell.

The local taco bell had a real problem with keeping staff on–for some reason, drug use was prolific among their employees, and they struggled to find consistent workers. But they knew we would be there every monday, and even though we were a big group we were patent and polite, and they generally liked us. So we rolled into taco bell with our usual aplomb. 

We straggled into line and started placing orders, and I watched idly as the employee in back began assembling “tacos.” He was visibly blitzed; if he’d been any higher he might have floated off entirely. 

He stuck his gloved hand into the tub of shredded lettuce, drew out a handful, looked up and caught sight of Dapper Man: the Equine Gentleman. 

He did a double-take and then froze entirely. 

You could see the whites of his eyes all the way around. It was very clear that he had absolutely no ability to comprehend what he was seeing; probably he assumed some sort of genteel victorian old god had come to wreak hoofed vengeance upon his taco-y demesne. Possibly he was just grappling with the possibility of reverse centaurs. 

Either way, he had become a lettuce-bearing statue. 

Taco production ground to a halt.  He stood, trapped by the medusan gaze of Dapper Man’s rubber horse mask, until his manager came to yell at him. 

At that point he dropped the lettuce and fled the taco bell. 

I can only assume he could hear the sound of dress-shoe shod hoofbeats thundering behind him. 

For all I know, he may still be fleeing Dapper Man’s dread fursona. We never saw him at the taco bell again. 

This meme is dead but I couldn’t get it out of my head

Anyway, Fresh is amazing and I love him

Fresh by loverofpiggies (not sure if they have a tumblr lol)

Undertale Fandom and Crediting Creators

Why is the Undertale Fandom so obscenely bad at crediting people when they use their characters? I'm not saying you have to tag the creator everytime a sketch of their character makes it into their post, but general Fandom etiqette says: 'if you want to draw my character, at least credit back to me', and this Fandom just decided nope, never going to happen. I've seen AUs based on other people's AUs that do not once, anywhere on the blog, credit the original AU. I've seen alternate characters of AU characters not breathe a single word of the original creator.

'It's because theyre popular' so? I talk with people constantly who don't know the original creators of aus. Who don't know their blog names. Who have never laid eyes on the original material. And the fact 90% of art I see of these characters is completely uncredited, not only contributes to that, but is just such a basic disregard for other creators in a Fandom space that it's upsetting to think you couldn't take the 2 extra seconds to put 'character by ___ 'at the end of a post

I've never been in a fandom that thinks using other people's stuff should be done without credit. It's just common place. It's common knowledge. Here's an indie creator online, in the same fan base as me, when I use their chatacter, I credit back to them, because I as another indie creator in this fandom would want the same. But nope.

I did a little test, a little experiment, I scrolled through the undertale au tag and counted how many people credited while using a character that didnt belong to them

3/20 had credit.

Absolutely abysmal.

Now again, Im not saying to @ the creators every time a character is used, but simple acknolwedgement of their blog or other social media is all you need, so that if anyone wants to find that character off of your post, they can do so, without having to spend 20 minutes trying to find the 1 post that took the 2 seconds to credit another fandom creator with their own character.

This isn't even mentioning the countless times AUs have been purposefully targeted to be stripped of ownership by people that think they should either own the au, or that the au should not belong to the original creators. Ie x au belongs to the community (when it doesn't). A thing that was/is actively defended by a lot of people. Also abysmal.

There are some creators exempt from this criticism, but for the most part, I think just about everyone still actively posting content does it. And its a terrible habit the au fandom got itself into, and one of by biggest pet peeves about the content made for it.

If you want to use someone else's character, in the fandom, it's the most basic courtesy to say who made that character no matter how popular you think they are, because I know for a fact you'd want them to do the same for you.

So maybe we could start doing that again?

-Gegg

My elderly father started talking about how frustrating he finds “the pronouns thing” and I was like. Oh no. He had such a good stand on this, he’s been they/them-ing his cishet siblings for god’s sake! Is he regressing?? And he was talking about how difficult it is to remember, and how onerous it feels to expect strangers to keep track of it, and I’m like oh no oh no.

Then he says, “I mean, the problem isn’t the gender thing. The problem is four words: she, her, he, and him. We got rid of stewardess and turned it into flight attendant. It doesn’t matter if the flight attendant is a man or woman, so we got rid of it. We just need to get rid of those. I don’t need to know.”

“You don’t need to know… people’s gender?”

“No. I don’t care, I don’t need to know, and I don’t want to remember it.”

So we can relax. It’s just a continuation of his crusade to they/them the world. He doesn’t want to remember anyone’s gender. He’s abolishing the genders.