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shadowkatYou know you are getting older and potentially spinterish - when you get social networking invites to join meetupclub's which either are just below your age range or at it. I turn 42 next month and just got a NoDating Cafe meetup group invite for a group that has an age range from 22-42.
Have today off and getting relatively little down per usual. I did clean my apartment - sort of. Vaccummed. Cleaned the shower and the kitchen floor. Am blatantly ignoring the fridge as well as my desk and closet, not to mention the book shelves which, ahem, have books stacked every which way and two layered upon them. I either need to get rid of some of my books or buy more and bigger book shelves. The former would help with the allergies. Have made the decision to borrow books from friends, family, and the library from hereon in - let's see how long this resolution lasts. I also wrote numerous posts on the internet, as you know. Sort of stating the obvious there. And read numerous posts - which you don't know, because I seldom write responses - tend to be long-winded and prone to stick my foot in mouth.
Speaking of foot in mouth commenting...
I have been resisting the urge to post mocking responses to self-righteous rants about how Dollhouse or such and such is sooo misogynist. People, please, look up the word. Here, I'll do it for you. Misogynist means "hatred of women". It does not mean patronizing women or belittling women or treating women as your sex slave or having mommy issues or having an urgent need to protect women, or seeing them as little girls, infantile, and ignorant or even animals. It means "hate". People have been using misogyny as a catch-all phrase for every remotely anti-feminist thing they can think of.
Granted, I'm the last person to bitch about word syntax - since I misuse words half the time. But this one's not hard. And misusing it is making you look like an idiot.
Hint: if a character races to save a woman or a book shows a guy trying to save a girl. It is not misogynistic. If a character opens a door for a woman. He is not misogynistic. If he makes love to her or enjoys having sex with her - he is most likely not misogynistic.
He may well be paternalistic or chauvinistic. But not misogynistic.
Mad Men is not misogynistic. Paternalistic? Sure. But that's the industry it is portraying and the time period. People acted like that back then. Heck they act like that now. I know, I've interacted with that industry.
People do the same silly things with the word jealousy - confusing it with envy.
I always laugh when folks write: I'm so jealous of you, you are going to Europe. (Uhm okay, so you are jealouse because the person has stolen or taken away your trip to go to your Europe?) or I'm so jealous of your house. (Right, so, the house has taken your friend from you? You are competing with the house for your friend's attention? That's what jealousy means - it means that you are jealous of something you love's relationship with something else. Example - I am jealous of my husband's relationship with my cat. The cat likes my husband now more than me.)
Apparently, I can be as nit-picky about certain things as the next person. Good to know. Might make me a bit more tolerant of the nit-picky responses and rants I see online. Also, makes me realize how easy it is to misunderstand one another - when we use the wrong words or syntax in our writing. I feel really sorry for the people online who are using computers or dictionaries to translate posts that are in languages other than their own. We are not making this easy, are we?
Have today off and getting relatively little down per usual. I did clean my apartment - sort of. Vaccummed. Cleaned the shower and the kitchen floor. Am blatantly ignoring the fridge as well as my desk and closet, not to mention the book shelves which, ahem, have books stacked every which way and two layered upon them. I either need to get rid of some of my books or buy more and bigger book shelves. The former would help with the allergies. Have made the decision to borrow books from friends, family, and the library from hereon in - let's see how long this resolution lasts. I also wrote numerous posts on the internet, as you know. Sort of stating the obvious there. And read numerous posts - which you don't know, because I seldom write responses - tend to be long-winded and prone to stick my foot in mouth.
Speaking of foot in mouth commenting...
I have been resisting the urge to post mocking responses to self-righteous rants about how Dollhouse or such and such is sooo misogynist. People, please, look up the word. Here, I'll do it for you. Misogynist means "hatred of women". It does not mean patronizing women or belittling women or treating women as your sex slave or having mommy issues or having an urgent need to protect women, or seeing them as little girls, infantile, and ignorant or even animals. It means "hate". People have been using misogyny as a catch-all phrase for every remotely anti-feminist thing they can think of.
Granted, I'm the last person to bitch about word syntax - since I misuse words half the time. But this one's not hard. And misusing it is making you look like an idiot.
Hint: if a character races to save a woman or a book shows a guy trying to save a girl. It is not misogynistic. If a character opens a door for a woman. He is not misogynistic. If he makes love to her or enjoys having sex with her - he is most likely not misogynistic.
He may well be paternalistic or chauvinistic. But not misogynistic.
Mad Men is not misogynistic. Paternalistic? Sure. But that's the industry it is portraying and the time period. People acted like that back then. Heck they act like that now. I know, I've interacted with that industry.
People do the same silly things with the word jealousy - confusing it with envy.
I always laugh when folks write: I'm so jealous of you, you are going to Europe. (Uhm okay, so you are jealouse because the person has stolen or taken away your trip to go to your Europe?) or I'm so jealous of your house. (Right, so, the house has taken your friend from you? You are competing with the house for your friend's attention? That's what jealousy means - it means that you are jealous of something you love's relationship with something else. Example - I am jealous of my husband's relationship with my cat. The cat likes my husband now more than me.)
Apparently, I can be as nit-picky about certain things as the next person. Good to know. Might make me a bit more tolerant of the nit-picky responses and rants I see online. Also, makes me realize how easy it is to misunderstand one another - when we use the wrong words or syntax in our writing. I feel really sorry for the people online who are using computers or dictionaries to translate posts that are in languages other than their own. We are not making this easy, are we?
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Date: 2009-02-18 04:40 pm (UTC)In the latin languages, specifically French, if I recall - a lot of the words are either feminine or masculaine. The feminine nouns would have "e" at the end of them. While the masculaine would not. We'd end up with two versions of the same word - one with an "e" for the feminine and one without for the masculain.
Made life very confusing for me when I wrote in English and had to remember not to put "e"'s at the end of certain words. I still do it.
"Suite" as opposed to "suit" is just one example - of how this confused me.
Vous - in French, is either plural or formal. It is what you would call your teacher or a friend of a parent or an authority figure - you would use the pronoun "vous", while "tu" is informal and you use that for friends. French has informal and formal speech - English does too, actually - just read an academic journal. But the pronouns in English aren't always as formal.
Both languages do however specify gender - English is not alone in that. Neither language has found a way to handle someone who may not fit within either category, as far as I can tell. IT seems a bit nasty. S/He a bit hard to do orally. They? Too distant. You may have to make up a word.