Mallory is gone this week, but I’m here to protect you from the whims of Jaya and Matt in her absence. Please do not make them feel sad by saying “I miss Maaaaallory” too much, but also do not bother emailing her to tell her, because she has set up a bounce-back message that says “nope, try again in a week if you think it’s important.”
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Okay, the MOST important link today, although they are all important in their own way, is Saeed Jones’ interview with Laverne Cox for Buzzfeed:
When Laverne Cox talks about trans women of color, she calls them her “sisters.” “I want to say their names because they’re my sisters and I love them,” she tells me. The dissonance between her personal success and what she calls “a state of emergency for trans people” is something Cox is still figuring out. In what she considers one of the best professional years of her life, Cox has seen two of her sisters die. She laughs a bit to herself as she shares stories about them. It’s a hard-earned kind of laughter, the sound of a woman who knows that breaking through is the only option.
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Guys, you all realize that the guy who wrote The Horse Whisperer nearly killed himself and his family with deadly mushrooms, right? Do not ever eat foraged mushrooms on someone else’s say-so. Like, I’m sure they taste amazing, but our official Toast Stance is “farm to supermarket to table” when it comes to fungi.
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Where is the plane?
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The Hairpin had a GREAT conversation with the perfect Jamelle Bouie!
Do you get exhausted by playing a role in this dialogue?
I do, certainly. This happens in two ways, two reasons. Someone will say or do something stupid, and you could write about it but you don’t—it’s not worth your time.
The other way is Twitter-centered. Sometimes things go apeshit on Twitter, like you’ll be deluged with really angry tweets from right-wing racist Twitter, people who think you’re history’s greatest monster—a couple of months ago, one dude created a bunch of accounts just to tweet racist things at me. That stuff is too ridiculous to annoy me.
But other times—last summer, in an incident that I think is now vaguely infamous, a writer I won’t name sort of opened up a salvo of anger at me after I said something to her about something she tweeted, and much of it was based on explicit misrepresentation of what I’d said, and she was accusing me of being a racist and a misogynist and that I’d be getting my black card revoked for having a white girlfriend. That was a weird day in Twitter.
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Go see if any of these events from Women of Letters are coming to your town.
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“I, too, am Oxford.”
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Star Trek: TNG…the haikus.
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Uh, again, here’s My Wonderful Drag Prom.
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Our own John Leavitt sent me this, saying “IT’S A MEGACUT OF WITCHES SET TO EARTHA KITT”:
Tags: feminism, laverne cox, link roundup, saeed jones, the internet
WHERE THE FUCK IS THAT PLANE, discuss here
I’ve been hearing a lot of people making exhausted Lost jokes, as in, “This is a terrible and extremely sad situation but seriously what even polar bears donkey wheel WHERE IS WALT”
I have been deeply, seriously unsettled by this all week. Where is the goddamn plane? I don’t think I’ll sleep well until they find it.
And now that they’ve announced it was an intentional diversion, I can’t decide which is worse: terrorist plot that all U.S. intelligence missed, or isolated deranged pilot/crew/passenger.
Seriously. How awful it must be for the families of the people on the plane. There’s really no good ending here (although obviously it would be best if the plane had just been spirited away somewhere and everyone on board is okay)
BTW, here’s the “latest” (who knows what the latest is, really?) via NPR:
“Malaysian authorities say the jet carrying 239 people was purposely diverted from its flight path during an overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, and suspicions has fallen on anyone aboard the plane with aviation experience, particularly the pilot and co-pilot.”
I agree – it is ENORMOUSLY frustrating that they keep changing their “facts” day after day. They just don’t know what happened or where to look.
Seriously, where is the plane.
If it was diverted, why? If it was pilot suicide, why fly the plane 7+ hours in a random direction? If terrorism, what was the point? It’s a really weird way to commit terrorism, unless they stashed the plane somewhere for later purposes … but wouldn’t it be a lot easier just to buy a plane?
A friend of mine has this theory that China really wanted to get rid of someone on that plane.. but if that’s the case, why not wait until the plane is in Beijing and take out the individual (or individuals) in a more discreet manner?
If pirates want the plane, then yeah, wouldn’t it be easier to buy a plane?
At this point, I’m starting to wonder if someone on the plane has this desire to start a fascist/”utopian” society and they thought that kidnapping a plane of people and going to their hideaway in the Indian Ocean was the way to do it…
I’ve heard two conspiracy theories from friends in China: first, that one of the passengers was the girlfriend of a Chinese spy and the U.S. diverted the plane to get her, because they believe the spy told her lots of secrets. This is terrifying because if it’s true, they would have to dispose of the rest of passengers somehow.
The second is that a “suspicious cargo” that originated from an American ship was on the plane, and China found out about this and told the plane to land in China. Then it went off course and landed on a US aircraft carrier. This information supposedly came from the Kremlin’s intelligence service. The argument for this being true is that the US military monitors the area where the plane disappeared so they should have radar evidence of its course.
It seems like it would totally be easier just to buy a plane. Everybody on the planet is now looking for that plane and those people.
my love/hate relationship with (UGGGH CANT BELIEVE IM MENTIONING IT AT TOAST) reddit led me on the giant thread there where someone posited this idea of a new form of terrorism where the point is to do things like this, instill fear, commit acts beyond reason and completely throw people off because if you can do something like this once, you have torn out people’s belief in common sense and reason.
so :\
Ugghhh this is somehow more unsettling than 75% of the other theories I’ve heard
I don’t think terrorists are that smart, tbh.
Terrorists no, psychopathic masterminds yes. (I just rewatched some Sherlock recently and am inclined to blame everything on Moriarty and his ilk.)
I don’t think it would be easier to just buy a plane, though. Aren’t there trade embargos on that sort of thing? Not to mention finding skilled mechanics. Obviously it would depend on who the theoretical hijackers were.
My favorite (least favorite) conspiracy theory is that it was stolen to be loaded with nukes and turned into a giant world-ending missile.
That’s a fun/not fun theory!
I don’t know a ton about buying airplanes, obviously, but I think there is an underworld for that sort of thing. This Slate piece mentions the resale market for planes, and I’d think it’d be easier for a terrorist group to launder the sale through something that looks legit versus hijacking and kidnapping 200+ people – but who the hell knows.
My favorite (least favorite) conspiracy theory is that it was stolen to be loaded with nukes and turned into a giant world-ending missile.
OH MY GOD WHAT 🙁
It fell in the sea and they all got eaten by sharks. I had a book on shark attacks when i was a kid and it was pretty clear that if your plane crashes into a tropical ocean, lifejackets will not save you from that fate.
We’re way past “it crashed” though– even if it has, something else definitely happened first, because there would have been debris somewhere close to where it was last seen, and there’s radar evidence it was flying 7 hours after the transmitter systems were manually disabled.
I am both fascinated and appalled by this. You don’t realise just how big the world is until a plane just disappears in it. Awful. I can’t even bring myself to make some kind of sarcastic comment.
WHERE IS THE PLANE.
I hope it’s found soon. Ideally, with everyone on board alive and safe. I can hope, at least.
I’m pasting the text of an email I sent to Nicole on Friday because I know that at least one other of you will want to come sit by us and hold hands really tightly.
“I know, deep in my heart, that you’re also mildly obsessing over the missing plane because you secretly believe The Langoliers has come true.”
*SITS BY YOU, HOLDS HANDS TIGHTLY*
“Langoliers” was my first comment to my roommate when I heard about the plane. *HOLDING HANDS FOREVER*
IT FELL IN THE OCEAN BECAUSE SOMETIMES BAD SHIT JUST HAPPENS.
I hpoe they went whereever Amelia Earhart went, and that place is nice?
Yes please.
The latest conspiracy theory I heard was that the plane is sitting somewhere out in Western Australia, where the Iranaian asylum-seekers steered it so that they wouldn’t be diverted to Indonesia/PNG. (The fact that the Australian military would probably know about a plane entering its airspace, plus the fact that we would KNOW this by now if it happened, because they would *want* to be found once they landed, seems not to bother the proponents of this theory.)
OMFG, you guys, what about THIS THEORY: http://keithledgerwood.tumblr.com/post/7983894482…
No! Women of Letters was here in Austin last week. I always hear about the cool stuff after it happens.
I refuse to link to the dickbag TNR article about “wouldn’t it be kind of rad if they NEVER found the plane?” but you can talk about it here all you want.
My thoughtful, well-reasoned response: What a diiiiiiick.
diiiiiiick
no, it wouldn’t, because these are not just fictional characters that exist to create a fascinating mystery for you. They are real people, with people who loved them.
I can’t make a polite response because he is lower than pond scrum and the Toast Commenter Code of Honor forbids that kind of language.
I hope he gets a mysterious itchy rash somewhere embarrassing and when he goes to get it checked out his doctor tells him that writing a prescription would kill the suspense.
I miss Mallory though
Me too. She left my house yesterday and I have been moping around whining and reading my Yellowstone death book to cheer myself up.
Probably for the best that you stick to Yellowstone and aren’t reading this right now.
(ps: what Yellowstone death book? My dad is very into these sorts of things.)
I have the Yellowstone death book, the Grand Canyon death book, and the Yosemite death book, and I encourage everyone to use these handy affiliate links to buy them at once.
I love/hate that book so much! My brothers insisted on reading it aloud on the whole car trip (MI->Yellowstone) when I was eight, and I was pretty convinced we were all going to be gored to death.
These are the most perfect books to give my husband that have possibly ever existed.
DEATH IN YELLOWSTONE!!! The latest edition came out two weeks before traveled there in January!
1 – Everyone must go to Yellowstone in winter. Absolutely beautiful and amazing and eerie and wonderful and silent and perfect.
2 – Because it had been released so close to my arrival date, it came up in all conversations. Mainly, “wow, people really were dumb with wild animals,” and “BOILING TO DEATH IS AWFUL.”
Nothing more cheering than reading about idiots boiling themselves and getting eaten by bears
JAYA AND MATT!!!! So excited! And of course I miss Mallory as well.
Man, the Horse Whisperer guy is lucky he’s alive, but I just can’t stop thinking like… well he got a replacement kidney. The other two are still suffering and on dialysis. And think: he got his kidney when his heart was failing from the effects of dialysis, so his two friends are pretty bad off. What a thing to have to live with.
My mom grew up in Finland where you can pick mushrooms straight from the woods and cook them, but you have to know which ones, because those gorgeous little red ones with the white dots you see in all the pretty artwork with gnomes? Those will kill you. But they’re so preeeetty. So of course the first time I went with mom to go mushroom-picking as a kid I got a basketful of those because preeeeeetty and she nearly had a heart attack when I brought them to her. Basically, know your mushrooms before you go eating them. PLEASE OH PLEASE.
Those TNG haikus are gonna amuse me all morning long, but my favorite haiku is actually one that Andrew Lloyd Webber accidentally wrote into the Phantom of the Opera:
You will curse the day
You did not do all that the
Phantom asked of you
(BOM BOM BOM BOM BOMMMMMMMMM)
So I am clearly a lunatic and am in no way intending to impugn your mother’s expert knowledge, but my understanding is that amanitas muscaria is not in fact deadly, but will just get you rill rill high in a pretty unpleasant way. And might make you sick in the bottom? However, there are definitely other amanitas that will kill you, but as far as I know, they don’t look like the little red-hat-white-dots mushroom.
I want you to know how much genuine pleasure your near-clinical mushroom fixation is giving me! I am really enjoying it! You will not rest until we are all in our graves, green and wrinkly like Babar’s dad.
No part of that is sarcastic. I like you a lot! Never cease in your mushroom-boostery!
I couldn’t if I tried.
Nicole, you should NOT encourage me! An anecdote: once my gentleman associate and I were watching an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, and Janeway misidentified what was clearly an oyster mushroom as amanitas muscaria. My gentleman and I both shouted at the television screen simultaneously in righteous mushroom-based indignation “AMANITAS MUSCARIA DOESN’T LOOK ANYTHING LIKE THAT!” It was the most romantic moment of my life.
I mean, mom’s panic was probably still pretty legit as they’re poisonous, but yeah upon doing some googling it looks like it’s not classed as “deadly poisonous,” just “dangerously poisonous.” I bet for a small child it would still be worrying, though.
ALSO I noticed on the wiki page (because now I’m curious) that older books mistakenly list it as “deadly,” it’s possible that’s why she freaked out.
Oh, it’s totally legit! A child with a basket of hallucinogenic mushrooms is absolutely terrifying! I am just super pedantic. The history of mycology and how things are categorized is so interesting to me: so much has changed over time and we really are just scratching the surface of what we know about fungus in general.
There are some interesting theories about the origins of Santa Claus & flying reindeer: http://www.livescience.com/25731-magic-mushrooms-… Favorite part: “. . .I think it’s becoming general knowledge that Santa is taking a ‘trip’ with his reindeer.”
OH MY GOD, MUSHROOMS. Please know what they are before you eat them. My boss when I was a cook at a summer camp in the mountains (surrounded by many mushrooms), who is An Expert on mushrooms, told me that all mushrooms are edible, but some of them only once. I really enjoyed that line, but I prefer to eat them never and be extra cautious/paranoid about them. *sweats nervously*
That is a very good line.
I am a huge fan of mushrooms but I will get them from the grocery store in nice little boxes. I generally assume that if they’re growing in the woods, they will kill me painfully.
Oh yeah, I’ll eat store mushrooms (I guess, though I don’t really care for them), but some of my cohort at this camp were really into picking mushrooms and making snacks for all the staff, and my response was always just NO.
For sure. If you want to forage for mushrooms, go with experienced people! Bring a good guidebook!
Yes! My grandmother (a chemist who apparently got bored after becoming a stay-at-home mother/wife and needed some extra Science!) was a member of the Boston Mycological Society, and she was always out foraging for mushrooms. My mom generally gave them the side-eye, but I’m pretty sure if I was apt to eat wild mushrooms, I’d bring my nana along just in case.
I eat one kind of wild mushroom: chanterelles. They grow up where my parents live and a family friend likes to pick ’em but his family doesn’t like to eat all of ’em. Other than that, it is always grocery store mushrooms for me.
The only wild mushroom I ever pick myself to eat is Puffball, because you can’t mistake it for other mushrooms and it rots too quickly to be sold in shops.
There is just too small a difference between ‘delicious and fine’ and ‘will kill you’ for me to eat any other species of wild picked mushroom.
Somewhere in the UK does mushroom gatherin courses with an experienced… mushroomer (?) and I’d like to do that.
I have never, not once, bought locally foraged wild mushrooms from the stand at the farmers’ market because I cannot gather my courage to ask for their credentials, which I would absolutely have to hear before I could eat their mushrooms.
But for some reason, I totally trust that the dried wild mushroom mix I buy at grocery stores is safe. The logic doesn’t really check out: at least with fresh mushrooms, they’re still in an identifiable form, where the less expensive dried ones are often just shapeless lumps and chunks of brown.
I loved reading/was horrified by the I, too, am Oxford project; thanks for posting. Now I will go and feel some rage for how terribly humans treat other humans here in 2014.
I was confused by the boards saying “I am not a bounty”. And then I remembered my British candy brands and got really angry and sad.
I feel better about my life decision to never let any mushrooms pass my lips.
The Oxford project reminds me of my friend from grad school. She was from Kenya. She would get so mad because people assumed she was a poor scholarship student because she was black and African. She would tell them, “Growing up, my family had a live-in maid. Did your family have a live-in maid?”
See, I find those assumptions a little odd because, in my experience, international students are mostly pretty well off regardless of where they come from. Because it seems to me if you’re considering graduate study in a foreign country, you’re probably in a situation where it’s feasible for you to travel in the first place, scholarship or no scholarship.
That must’ve been beyond frustrating for your friend.
I don’t know about the UK but in the US to get a student visa you have to prove that you/your parents can pay the full tuition and that you can support yourself/your parents can support you for the 4 years you’ll be here. It’s to make sure the state doesn’t have to support you if you run out of money during college. So typically, international students tend to be fairly wealthy.
Obviously they are not 100% strict on the depending on what your scholarship situation is. For example, my cousin is an international student and while I know his parents don’t have cash on hand for the full tuition at the fancy expensive school that accepted him, he also has a letter from financial aid detailing athletic and academic scholarships that cover full tuition, housing, books allowance, free laptop, free cafeteria plan so, it’s pretty clear that as long as his grades/athletics stay up he’ll be fine. But even in this case my aunt is a high school teacher and is solidly middle class, not like, living behind a shack somewhere in Colombia.
It’s worth noting that in the US (and maybe at Oxford too?? or other UK schools?) it’s almost impossible for a foreign student to get need based aid. There is limited funding for that and it all goes to citizens. You can get academic or athletic scholarships, as I mentioned, but not need based aid. So if you are assuming that a student from Kenya must be poor, despite the fact that it would be very unlikely that is the case, that really says something about what you think of ‘Africa’.
you cannot protect them, nicole. we’re here, we are in the system
Putting in my vote for food trolling: mushroom edition
EXCEPT MALLORY WON’T SEE IT BECAUSE SHE’S GONE
I HATE MUSHROOMS.
Oh man Nicole, I strenuously object to your mushroom characterization. Yes, there are many mushrooms that will fuck you up, and yes, you shouldn’t eat mushrooms that were not harvested by/ in the presence of a real live expert, but there are such wonderful mushrooms that can ONLY be foraged. Morels are the biggest legal cash crop in the US, and they are entirely foraged! Mostly from burn sites! Are you not ever going to eat a morel? I WEEP FOR YOU.
Edited to reflect: Haha my user name is a mushroom name so you can see that I have really really strong feelings about this. Chanterelles and morels and HEDGEHOG MUSHROOMS and hen-of-the-woods are all some of the most delicious, wonderful fungi there are, and most are impossible to ever experience if you eschew all wild-crafted/foraged mushrooms.
(I will also note that I know people who just eat mushrooms willy-nilly, and I think they are idiots who deserve the very horrible liver-poisoning death that undoubtedly awaits them in the not-distant future.)
I mean, I definitely know Russian people I trust to carefully gather stuff, but I prefer to eat my wild mushrooms at restaurants which feel confident enough to take on the legal risk of serving them to me.
That is very fair and understandable! I can respect that.
Also one time I found a very lovely little mushroom and looked it up to find that its common name is “The Sickener,” and it’s only edible if first blanched, then pickled. Russians! You mycological bad-asses.
I love this little tidbit, and also all of your mushroom knowledge that you are sharing with us today, seriously. Please write a thing about mushrooms for The Toast (mushrooms on toast??)
Oh man I totally have a Google doc started. Thank you for indulging my extreme enthusiasm!
PLEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAASE I love everything about mushrooms I would love you forever.
Google images reveals that hedgehog mushrooms are not nearly as adorable as their name suggests.
What is wrong with me, b/c I think it is adorable.
If we’re being honest, I was really just hoping for this:
to be fair I used to be co-chairman of the Mushroom Hater Club in college (where oh god did I ever get tired of using mushrooms as MEAT SUBSTITUTE in my cook days) and have now come around to a pretty big MEH about them.
However I am also someone who used to work on a farm where hen of the woods grew naturally (in the woods! past the ox pasture and piggies!), that mushroom is PRETTY cool. Also order it on pizza at the colloquial pizza farm – if you’ve been there, YOU KNOW.
I DO KNOW! There’s a foraging hippie man who intermittently supplies our local, urban co-op and it is such a goddamn TREAT the couple of times a year I can bring home a big chunk. We always, always make pizza with it, too.
Mushrooms are not a meat substitute!!! WHY do people insist on doing this? Just give me some fucking beans, they are much cheaper than mushrooms, and they are less gross. Mushrooms just feel so…weird in your mouth and sometimes I try to love them, but it hasn’t really worked out yet.
I completely, completely respect your lived mushroom experience, but I think a huge part of why culinary mushrooms in general get a bad rap is b/c of how they’re prepared, and because of the limited varieties on offer. Fungus is actually more closely related to the animal kingdom than it is to the plant kingdom (as these things go) and are loaded with glutamates, which can contribute umami and fullness to the flavor of a dish! Raw button mushrooms are gross but also your body is incapable of digesting the chitin that composes them, so they must be cooked to have any nutritive value. (WHY SALAD BARS WHY.)
Instead of cooking them in butter or oil, try to dry-sautee them: slice and heat over medium-high heat until all the juices release and then are reabsorbed. The texture is completely different from that sort of slimy thing that happens with the oil-sautee technique, and the flavors are concentrated.
Low on Vitamin D? Leave your mushrooms in the sun, and their vitamin D content increases dramatically! What! That’s a real thing! 15 minutes in the sun! There are studies!
Oyster mushrooms are firmer and more savory than button mushrooms, extremely easy to grow, and really can provide a meat-type experience in something like a risotto, or atop a pizza. Bonus: they’re incredible bio accumulators and can be used to clean soil of heavy metals, though of course one should not eat heavy-metal laden mushrooms.
This entire reply is amazing, but I would particularly like to commend “I respect your lived mushroom experience.”
Can we talk about: what do you then do with the heavy-metal laden mushrooms? Landfill? Doesn’t that just move the toxicity?
Ok, well, I am not remotely an expert at all, so I would independently confirm all of this, but I believe the idea is that they would be disposed of as toxic waste, or incinerated whereby the byproducts could possibly be recycled? I for sure do not know if anyone has successfully done this before, but if you’re interested, you might check out the work Paul Stamets has been doing. He is a giant hippie, but the mycologists of my acquaintance have assured me that his science is solid.
Also the mycologists of my acquaintance all tend towards the hippie side of things as well! Full disclosure.
ALSO (god I am so sorry but I can’t help myself) here are the very interesting results of this test to treat soil contaminated by petroleum hydrocarbons with fungus: http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/research/reports/fullrepo… Not heavy metals but again: fascinating! If there’s a substance in this world, there’s a fungus that will figure out to eat it. So awesome/ terrifying/ wonderful/
Haha, I remember when it was discovered that my school had morel mushrooms growing in the woods (it was a weird private school) and they tasked all the kids with picking them and then sold them or something and I have no idea what they did with the money. Child labor at its finest.
Great anecdote, or greatest anecdote?
This was also the school where, when my mom chaperoned at a school dance she reported seeing the principal (!) pouring undrunk cups of punch back in the punch bowl (!!!). She pulled my brother and sister out pretty soon after that, but left me in to finish middle school. Thanks Mom.
Sounds like they got one of the amanitas there Amanita — I love foraging for mushrooms, but have a small group I’ll eat — morels, oyster mushrooms, porcini and chanterelles — there is a false morel but it’s easy to distinguish and the other three are also pretty singular looking.
Hard to tell from the story, but sounds like they were way way too cavalier about the whole thing. Ugh. Happens about once a year in California too — someone mistakes a matsuke for a young death cap and it’s liver failure for all …
I found a false morel the last time I was in California, and it was almost as exciting as finding a real morel (though not quite) and they really don’t look anything alike. Sort of like the hulking zombie version of the morel, right? It’s just so important to know one’s own limits, and respect them: you sound like a very responsible mushroom gatherer indeed!
This is my “policy” too. Only eat the distinctive ones.
For all your fungi porn needs: http://ediblefungi.tumblr.com/
I don’t know you but I think I love you.
That Oxford piece made me both sad that shit like that still fucking happens, and homesick for the city. I need to go and visit again sooooooon.
However, this response-tumblr *might* make you want to torch the place http://wearealloxford.tumblr.com/. I am especially embarassed/revolted for the white guy with dreadlocks reminding everyone that Oxford is a meritocracy and not racist at all actually.
I wanted to torch half the students for having their heads up their arses when I *was* a student there, I’m happy to torch them still too many years later!!
Nicole I AM STUCK ON THE FUNGUS. I once bullied my boyfriend into putting on a fungus-themed variety show! (IT WAS GREAT.) Also I know a charismatic and charming lady mycologist who is pretty dang busy but I could ask her if she’d be interested in an interview or something b/c man fungi are the best! The very best!
What is this ‘bounty’ term I see in the ‘I, too, am Oxford’ link? (I could google it, I guess. But lazy, I am.)
‘Bounty’ in this context likely refers to a chocolate bar – milk chocolate with a coconut insides. So, brown outside, white inside.
Gross way to refer to a person.
Ah yes. Makes sense. I’ve heard of other similarly gross terms (i.e., ‘Twinkie’ for Asian people).
It’s also the most horrible chocolate bar, so doubly awful.
Ah. In the U.S. i think the term is Oreo.
Why is everyone on the internet saying “YAAASSS” and “everything” [as in “____ is EVERYTHING”] lately? More generally, why are people compelled to use faddish terms to express themselves? Thank you for your kind attention.
Linguistic trends happen and spread faster because if the internet.
I just don’t understand people’s wish to jump on all these bandwagons.
Fun? People are generally inclined to imitate things they find to be cool or interesting. Particularly the Youngs.
Perhaps you can tell them to get off your lawn, then.
You never adopted a linguistic trend because you wanted to enjoy yourself or indicate membership of a group?
In my experience my use of those terms has been way more unconscious. I wasn’t typing stuff and then thought “Oh yes, now I will use “Yaaaas,” for it is a new bandwagon to be jumped upon.” It just kind of came out because I’d seen it and the word was stewing in my brain, and had a different connotation to me than plain old yes-with-an-e.
I feel concerned about the widespread internet use of “YAAASSSSS” and other phrases (“giving me life” etc. etc.) because a number of them are appropriated from black communities and/or AAVE and it’s another instance of non-black folks treating as trendy things that black folks get shit on for. BUT I am not generally critical of linguistic trends in and of themselves? Use doge, use lolspeak, whatever.
I mean, “I feel concerned” = “people experience and talk about this a lot,” but I don’t want to try and speak for anyone who isn’t me.
And, yes, that (appropriation) was part of the unspoken subtext of my original post.
SUCH WISE
MUCH KIND
(i.e., didn’t try to shame me for my opinion–thanks)
Well, your original comment came off as scornful/dismissive of “faddish” language and linguistic trends; that kind of thing does tend to irritate people. Dismissiveness toward linguistic trends, in particular, is often tangled up with dismissiveness toward teenage girls and young women — see any discussion of uptalk, use of “like” as a filler word, that brief period where everyone was talking about vocal fry, etc. — which is not likely to be received well in this particular setting.
I am scornful of faddish language, and I am annoyed by it. I admit it. But I don’t see how you made the leap from what I said to being dismissive toward teenage girls and young women. That is unfair, and I didn’t like being sneered at with that “get off my lawn” comment. That was a personal attack, and I didn’t attack anyone personally in my original comment.
I have been here, in this particular setting, commenting, for quite some time. It seems to me that people can say all kinds of outrageous things and express all kinds of exasperation, but wow, express a little linguistic conservatism and all of a sudden you’re a figure of fun and someone to be derided.
I’m not saying that your comment was itself dismissive toward teenage girls and young women; I apologize if that wasn’t clear. But the general category “criticism of linguistic trends” has a lot of overlap with “criticism of the way teenage girls and young women express themselves,” and I’m bringing that up as one possible reason that people, especially people here, may be particularly sensitive to criticism of linguistic trends.
I think it’s from this video featuring Lady Gaga: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Pn0JKmy5-M
and the resulting meme.
They spread and I feel even less comprehension the more I see them. This is a good place for me to put forth: I assume if someone says YISSS they’re a Kiwi or Aussie, but maybe I’m off by a few thousand miles.
I assume they are a duck in a Kate Beaton comic: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=326
Motha. Fuckin. Bread crumbs. <3
Be wary of mushrooms!
2 mushroom stories:
1. My mother is from one of those mushroom-gathering-for-fun-on-weekends nations (people get very excited about it), so she spent ca. 35 years of her life gathering and eating mushrooms in the woods. The one time she tried mushroom-gathering-for-fun-on-weekends in the US, she had to have her stomach pumped. And NOT because she had picked a mushroom that is all-around poisonous but because she had picked at mushroom to which SOME people (like her) have seriously allergic reactions.
2. While enjoying an awkward lunch out with extended family in the aforementioned mushroom-gathering nation, I ordered myself pasta with mushrooms. Mid-awkward-lunch, my right hand began to burn and swell up. Lunch and I were too awkward for me to do anything about it, so I just stopped eating and spent the rest of lunch not saying anything about it and staring at my hand in morbid fascination (burning / swelling went down after maybe an hour).
So, watch the fuck out (I still like / love mushrooms).
Separate from the phenomenon of poisonous mushrooms, it is possible to eat an edible wild mushroom and have a quasi-allegic reaction to it not dissimilar to poisoning. My brother suffered such an episode, and wound up in the hospital in a state of semi-paralysis for a few days.
I cannot thumbs up semi-paralysis. That is horrifying!
I’m sad those TNG haiku have not been updated in a month! COME BACK, YOU ARE PERFECT!
Toast Pitch: Variations of Affirmative: Yes vs Yea Vs Yas vs Yasssss vs Oh Yeah vs Yup vs Yep vs Yes yes yes yes yes she said yes
yiisss.
Yarp.
GCHAT IS DOWN.
What the hell is everyone doing? I mean, I wish my work was better but god knows nobody cares about a research assistant’s computer so lol database slow as shit.
Oh thank god it’s just not me, I thought my browser was just f’ed up or something.
it’s like, does google want me to actually text or fb chat my friends stupid memes I find on the internet? Psssssssh
Toasties! I just registered to take the GREs!
I finished undergrad in ’07. Eeek. Fortunately, I’ll be taking the test on May 3rd, so I have plenty of time to study!
hi, good luck! i am an anxious test taker and so i literally cried post gre’s because…i’m a wreck.
but then i walked 5 miles and got a hamburger and some fan-fucking-tastic french fries and it was all better.
my moods apparently shift with the wind.
No other Toasties are whining about the earthquake in SoCal this morning and OMG being woken up by that? It’s so scary as you never know if it’s going to get worse or if another, bigger one is coming. AND I STILL NEED A HUG.
How have I never heard that Eartha Kitt song before? It is really great!
Motha. Fuckin. Bread crumbs. <3
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