Once upon a time, queer simply meant strange*.
Then it came to be used as a derogatory term for homosexual (adjective or noun).
Later it came to be worn as a badge of honor by the Lesbian/gay community, as an umbrella term. My gay and Lesbian friends proudly included themselves under the "queer...
Yeah, which means having a queer tag would be at least somewhat ambiguous.
Or maybe even incomprehensible.
I don't know if it's even possible to come up with a classification of "minority sexuality" that would pass muster in any reasonable way with the people it's supposed to represent.
And as the downvotes on my question and its answers show, even speaking about this issue show that people bear a lot of animosity toward anyone who brings up the subject at all. I wish it weren't so, but it is.
The Internet is all there is, pretty much, these days.
This is what bothers me about linguistics. They say it's all about spoken language, but how much spoken language are we using right now? I would venture to say that most of the language I have used in my life has been written, in one form or another.
If you talk with people at an office during the day, then go home and read a book at night, you're mostly using written language.
And during the day while at work, think of all the reading and writing you might do.
@Robusto It's incredibly common to do that, rather more so this in this new century in America than in earlier ones even. They also like "racial" groupings, which while hardly so new as those ones, are still more than just slightly problematic but actually incomprehensible to much of the rest of the world even today. Pretty sure all that is invented, not "real". Tell Bill Clinton that "is" abbreviates "i(dentifies a)s" and means nothing more than that. Sports jerseys aren't real.
And yes, identity politification creeps me out too, whether from the left, right, or centrist.
I'm unabashedly on the progressive end politically, but I don't "identify" as an anything politically. I vote my mind and my conscience. I am not an instrument of any party.
People don't walk down the street sporting badges saying Treehugger or Union Organizer or Skinhead or Klansman Fascist or Anarchist or whatnot. Well, mostly they don't. And even if they do, we shouldn't confuse those monikers with objective reality rather than constructed.
It's like a pianist I heard talking about why he didn't like digital music. He said "You have 256 levels of volume. I have 257 or more. End of story."
I agree with him, but I still like digital reproductions. Every form of musical reproduction is, as John Ciardi said of literature translation, a failure.
We can't be nailed up in those neat little boxes for others' ease of use.
Those people (and people on our side as well) have this falling-all-over-themselves panic to have what the Chinese communists used to call "the correct line": the attitudes and behavior that conform to what their masters want them to.
The correct line for Republicans is whatever makes liberals cry.
There are always those words of condemnation. And eventually, hearing them, you adopt them for and about yourself out of spite. "Yeah, I'm a liberal. What's wrong with that?"
@Cerberus Now and then I use to think that I should buy a couple. And also some strong rope for climbing down the balcony, and also a set of 30-minute breathing apparatuses for saving oneself during a fire.
My friend have such breathing apparatuses at his balcony.
The absolute majority of people who die during a fire, die of smoke poisoning. Wearing a mask with some reagents you could safely get down the stairway to the exit from the building.
Without such mask, just one or two breaths will render you unconscious.
There are horrible stories in the news of people dying just a meter away from the door that led to clean, smokeless air.
And a horrible video of a man who accidentally started a small fire in an elevator in Russia. He fully lost consciousness before the elevator reached the destination. Luckily he fell and leaned on the door, and that saved his life.
THe door opened, and he fell partly outside, precluding it from fully closing again. In a while, the fresh air returned him to consciousness, and he ran away from the elevator, but with severe burns.
Without that door opening, he would have burned to death, although the area of the fire was tiny.
@CowperKettle I was in a skyscraper several decades ago, on the 35th floor, when there was a fire in the restaurant on the 2nd floor. We were told to go down the stairwell, but the smoke from the fire went up the stairwell. It was thick, acrid smoke, like you would get from burning plastic. We made it out onto the street eventually, but I coughed for days.
@Robusto We already have a couple of 50-storey buildings, and it will be a horror if a fire happens. There was a fire that burned communication and power cables in a 10-storey chute inside a 25-storey building recently, and a couple of persons are still in the ICU
The authorities take bribes to close eyes at cheap materials being used for cladding and for internal installations, and this makes many buildings dangerous. An old lady who lives at my landing is a former building engineer, and she says that modern buildings in Yekaterinburg are substandard.
Note that the Indian govt is quite intrusive at the best of times. And this isn't the best of times.
I remember when I wanted to take some British exams, many years ago, when I was trying to get admission into a British university, I had to get permission from some Govt ministry in Delhi.
Why it was any of their business, I have no idea. The Govt was not connected to the matter in any way.
For anyone who can't be bothered to read the article, here is the gist:
> In a set of revised guidelines issued on January 15, seen by Scroll.in, the Ministry of Education said that any virtual conference organised by a government department or a publicly-funded university will require approval from their administrative secretary.
These days virtual conferences are the only kind there are. That's especially true for conferences involving international participants.
Well, if BillJ and J. Lawler can't agree... I feel absolutely liberated. I don't need to study nuthin' now. I'm all good. My answer to everything from now on--"it depends." Okay, moving on to math...until the answers start varying.
That, believe it or not, is how Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, sees it. On February 1st police stormed the campus and detained dozens of students who were protesting about his appointment of a government loyalist as their rector. The protests have taken place regularly for over a month. They escalated after the arrest of four students who had organised an art show that included a rainbow flag alongside an image of the Kaaba, the black cube at the heart of Mecca.
Turkey’s interior minister called the students “ʟɢʙᴛ perverts”. Mr Erdogan compared the protesters (at least 600 of wh…
That was under a subheading of "Turkey: Lesbian, gay, bisexual and terrorist" in this weekend's Economist.
Well, in their table of contents. The article proper is headed "Turkey’s president scapegoats gay-friendly students".
It's hard to copypasta from the Economist because of their tasteful text-transforms.
that doesn't seem the same. Janet Hardy and Gaby Dunn seem to be saying that people within the LGBT+ culture are getting caught up in infighting and self policing, and that this will calm down once the general public have become more accepting. Erdogan is clamping down on people who are LGBT+ because he doesn't think they exist, so this is how he handles cognitive dissonance
Text like that loses some of its charm when copypasta’d. Well, that or its formatting. Same thing.
> Once upon a time, an ambitious young Tory mp could write columns mocking bien-pensant pieties about the health service—dinner-party attendees who thought “how maahvellous it was that the duke and dustman were treated alike in our glorious New Jerusalem, watching the same tv, eating the same spotted dick, attended by the same starch-bosomed nurses.” When that was written, in 2004, Tories liked to flirt with the idea of adopting the social-insurance systems seen in much of Europe.
"columns mocking bien-pensant pieties" :)
And we wonder why we keep getting questions from Asians on language from that newspaper that has perplexed them. :)
It's actually a well-studied ploy.
Their Leaders are especially opaque to non-native speakers.
So it's something of a badge of honor in the more distant corners of the world if you can manage to read them.
> The peculiar resentment for the rich or well-off in Mexico is expressed in the sarcasm of popular speech: fresas (strawberries) are wealthy conceited people, and their overdressed, obscenely privileged children are niños bien (rich kids). These beautiful people exist in an atmosphere thick with suspicion, often accompanied by intimidating muscled bodyguards.
Reminds me of a crime family that recently held sway in the US.
I used to read The Economist cover to cover every week, but now I just concentrate on the openers, a few of the editorials, and the occasional article that looks interesting.
> Ultimately, if this latest spasm in the greatest-ever threat to democracy doesn’t ease the hate, it will not be because we who loathe Mr. Trump are exhausted or traumatized or healing. It may be because even if 17 Republican senators were now to shock the world, there’s really nothing they can do to Donald Trump that we would feel would suffice. The only thing we actually want to watch is the criminal trials. In which case, the worldwide popcorn shortage might be an extinction-level event.
The Senate is conducting a political trial, not a criminal trial. So the sucker-fish parasites will not vote against him lest he raise up his mighty mob of neonazis against them. They are fearful.
But as with Virginia and possibly Texas, there's a large hidden group of people (mostly black and immigrant) who are slowly gaining in numbers at the polls, so becoming purple or even blue.
But that's a long explanation... Georgia was the place where Trump called the governor to encourage him to flip Georgia back to Trump by 'find some votes somewhere' (= true election tampering)
@Mitch Too early to tell if he's get into any trouble, but it's interesting that he potentially precipitated his own downfall, just like the idiots storming the Capitol building
TCh would say "therein lies the danger of apathy." and quote Dante and stuff
It would never have gotten this bad if dems were a bit firmer
Apparently even Pence and Mitchell were an officer away from execution by mob
@M.A.R. It's all so weird. the trump years led to messing up a lot of US government institutions which will take years (and multiple different presidents' leadership to fix). But the real mess is how it made stupidity so popular and those stupid people may end up voting for more con men. Those idiots (not politicians) but a lot of voters will be voting frivolously. They get their news from half read FB opinions redigested by their drunk uncle.
@M.A.R. It's weird. Acting principled can sometimes look like doing nothing or like you're overreacting or you're doing exactly what the ling conmen said you would do so it looks like -you're- lying.
@M.A.R. Wait... what for?
I can imagine reasons, but I've forgotten anything particular.
@M.A.R. Re: idiots... T's defense team for the impeachment is laughably incompetent, but they don't -have- to be competent because there are not enough senate republicans to vote to indict because the senators are doing what they think their idiotic republic voters want.
> The Framers are, to the 45th president, mere rumors. They, however, knew him, as a type — a practitioner of what Alexander Hamilton (in Federalist 68) disdainfully called “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity.” Post-1/6 America has a quickened appreciation of how those “little arts,” when magnified by modern modes of mass communication as wielded by occupants of the swollen modern presidency, make civilization’s brittle crust crumble.
@CowperKettle Sounds like a good idea. I bought an A-B-F (against liquid, solid, grease fires) extinguisher containing 2 litres of spray foam. Foam is safe around electronics (powder may kill all your electronic devices in the room or beyond). It cost €30.
I also have one of those flexible escape ladders that you can dangle from a window sill.
@Cerberus I don't know. I'd have to check. But they're really only big enough for things like a grease fire on the stove. Not equipped to put out a fire that's taken hold of a room.
> "What's concerning about this is that the 1.1.7. variant that we have had circulating for some weeks and months is beginning to mutate again and get new mutations which could affect the way that we handle the virus in terms of immunity and effectiveness of vaccines," Peacock told the BBC.
Once upon a time, queer simply meant strange*.
Then it came to be used as a derogatory term for homosexual (adjective or noun).
Later it came to be worn as a badge of honor by the Lesbian/gay community, as an umbrella term. My gay and Lesbian friends proudly included themselves under the "queer...
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…