Roses are red, that much is true, but violets are purple, not fucking blue.
I have been waiting for this post all my life.
They are indeed purple, But one thing you’ve missed: The concept of “purple” Didn’t always exist.
Some cultures lack names For a color, you see. Hence good old Homer And his “wine-dark sea.”
A usage so quaint, A phrasing so old, For verses of romance Is sheer fucking gold.
So roses are red. Violets once were called blue. I’m hugely pedantic But what else is new?
My friend you’re not wrong
About Homer’s wine-ey sea!
Colours are a matter
Of cultural contingency;
Words are in flux
And meanings they drift
But the word purple
You’ve given short shrift.
The concept of purple,
My friends, is old
And refers to a pigment
once precious as gold.
By crushing up molluscs
From the wine-dark sea
You make a dye:
Imperial decree
Meant that in Rome,
to wear purpura
was a privilege reserved
For only the emperor!
The word ‘purple’,
for clothes so fancy,
Entered English
By the ninth century
.
Why then are voilets
Not purple in song?
The dye from this mollusc,
known for so long
Is almost magenta;
More red than blue.
The concept of purple
is old, and yet new.
The dye is red,
So this might be true:
Roses are purple
And violets are blue
.
While this song makes me merry, Tyrian purple dyes many a hue From magenta to berry And a true purple too.
But fun as it is to watch this poetic race The answer is staring you right in the face: Roses are red and violets are blue Because nothing fucking rhymes with purple.
Hirple – To limp or walk awkwardly
Cirple – An old Scots word for the hindquarters of a horse
My 26 yr old sister still says things out loud like ‘ermagerd’ and ’___ ALL the things!’ Like…is that what’s gonna happen to me?am I going to be 30 still saying stupid shit like O shit waddup! Are all the youngins gonna be embarrassed by my use of outdated memes….how long until I myself am not Hip With It….how long until I am no longer a trendy memer…
my greatest fear honestly
Listen, I am 40. I was around for the early internet of webrings and hamsterdance. Homestarrunner. Those little cats in the boat singing to Immigrant Song. Longcat. Ceiling cat. Radiskull. Powerthirst.
So to me anything that is funny on the internet is, and always will be, cutting-edge and hilarious. If it’s funny the first time, it’s funny the eleven thousandth time. No exceptions.
I accumulate memes. Social media sites form actual strata in my soul, revealing my geological age in layers: Geocities, Myspace, Livejournal, Tumblr. Memes encrust me, like jewels, just layer on layer of reaction gifs and shitposts, some of which I barely understand, but I refuse to let go of. I cling to them, they are ever-relevant, undying.
You callow youths, who think in your innocence that that memes come and go, you are tepid fools who still smell of milk.
I am where memes go to die. I am where memes go to live eternal.
Someday, if you are lucky, you will join me. Bring your breadsticks meme, your Spiders Georg, your Bode, your big mood, your Supernatural gifs, your oh worm. Come with me and rejoice in pointless in-jokes and long-forgotten references. Embrace your encyclopedic knowledge of comedy sites ca 2006 and come share the knowledge with us. Come with me and lik the bred.
You gotta.
“You callow youths, who think in your innocence that that memes come and go, you are tepid fools who still smell of milk.”
Put this on my headstone, underneath a picture of Ceiling Cat.
so i just googled the phrase “toeing out of his shoes” to make sure it was an actual thing
and the results were:
it’s all fanfiction
which reminds me that i’ve only ever seen the phrase “carding fingers through his hair” and people describing things like “he’s tall, all lean muscle and long fingers,” like that formula of “they’re ____, all ___ and ____” or whatever in fic
idk i just find it interesting that there are certain phrases that just sort of evolve in fandom and become prevalent in fic bc everyone reads each other’s works and then writes their own and certain phrases stick
i wish i knew more about linguistics so i could actually talk about it in an intelligent manner, but yeah i thought that was kinda cool
Ha! Love it!
One of my fave authors from ages ago used the phrase “a little helplessly” (like “he reached his arms out, a little helplessly”) in EVERY fic she wrote. She never pointed it out—there just came a point where I noticed it like an Easter egg. So I literally *just* wrote it into my in-progress fic this weekend as an homage only I would notice. ❤
To me it’s still the quintessential “two dudes doing each other” phrase.
I think different fic communities develop different phrases too! You can (usually) date a mid 00s lj fic (or someone who came of age in that style) by the way questions are posed and answered in the narration, e.g. “And Patrick? Is not okay with this.” and by the way sex scenes are peppered with “and, yeah.” I remember one Frerard fic that did this so much that it became grating, but overall I loved the lj style because it sounded so much like how real people talk.
Another classic phrase: wondering how far down the _ goes. I’ve seen it mostly with freckles, but also with scars, tattoos, and on one memorable occasion, body glitter at a club. Often paired with the realization during sexy times that “yeah, the __ went all they way down.” I’ve seen this SO much in fic and never anywhere else
whoa, i remember reading lj fics with all of those phrases! i also remember a similar thing in teen wolf fics in particular – they often say “and derek was covered in dirt, which. fantastic.” like using “which” as a sentence-ender or at least like sprinkling it throughout the story in ways published books just don’t.
LINGUISTICS!!!! COMMUNITIES CREATING PHRASES AND SLANG AND SHAPING LANGUAGE IN NEW WAYS!!!!!!!
I love this. Though I don’t think of myself as fantastic writer, by any means, I know the way I write was shaped more by fanfiction and than actual novels.
I think so much of it has to do with how fanfiction is written in a way that feels real. conversations carry in a way that doesn’t feel forced and is like actual interactions. Thoughts stop in the middle of sentences.
The coherency isn’t lost, it just marries itself to the reader in a different way. A way that shapes that reader/writer and I find that so beautiful.
FASCINATING
and it poses an intellectual question of whether the value we assign to fanfic conversational prose would translate at all to someone who reads predominantly contemporary literature. as writers who grew up on the internet find their way into publishing houses, what does this mean for the future of contemporary literature? how much bleed over will there be?
we’ve already seen this phenomenon begin with hot garbage like 50 shades, and the mainstream public took to its shitty overuse of conversational prose like it was a refreshing drink of water. what will this mean for more wide-reaching fiction?
I’m sure someone could start researching this even now, with writers like Rainbow Rowell and Naomi Novik who have roots in fandom. (If anyone does this project please tell me!) It would be interesting to compare, say, a corpus of a writer’s fanfic with their published fiction (and maybe with a body of their nonfiction, such as their tweets or emails), using the types of author-identification techniques that were used to determine that J.K. Rowling was Robert Galbraith.
In an earlier discussion, Is French fanfic more like written or spoken French?, people mentioned that French fanfic is a bit more literary than one might expect (it generally uses the written-only tense called the passé simple, rather than the spoken-only tense called the passé composé). So it’s not clear to what extent the same would hold for English fic as well – is it just a couple phrases, like “toeing out of his shoes”? Are the google results influenced by the fact that most published books aren’t available in full text online? Or is there broader stuff going on? Sounds like a good thesis project for someone!
I’d like to point out that if you instead search books.google.com for a variety of phrases like “toed out of his shoes”, “toeing out of his shoes”, “toed out of her shoes” etc, you get a total of a couple hundred results – almost all of which are romance novels published in the last decade. Of the fic writers I personally know who have gone on to publish? Pretty much all of them published romance novels, or at least started there.
Obviously, I’m not saying all of these writers wrote fic first, but I bet a lot of them did, or at least read it, and then the language probably spreads to other romance writers. Where will it spread next? 🙂
But my real question is… how do other writers describe the process of using the toe of one foot to push your shoe off the other foot? I’ve certainly seen “kicked one’s shoes off” but that has a more forceful sort of connotation, obviously.
(Also, let’s all remember that young urban women are historically at the forefront of almost all linguistic trends. The “urban” part might be changing thanks to the internet, but given that most fic is written by younger women, it should be no shock if writing trends start there.)
(Another note: I once searched for “praise kink” because I was like, this is a concept I need language to talk about in real life – and all the hits were fanfic.)
I wish more people got this because some ‘low-empathy’ people are the most compassionate and sympathetic in the universe, and I hate it when that’s taken to mean ‘unfeeling and probably hostile’ when nothing could be further from the truth
Or, as my dad put it,
Sympathy: I know how you feel Empathy: I feel how you feel Compassion: is there anything I can do to help?
Sympathy: that sucks bro empathy: I feel that compassion: want me to send you some puppy and kitten pictures to make you feel better?
“So Bob said […]” indicates that I am directly quoting Bob.
“Then Bob was like […]” indicates that I am paraphrasing Bob.
“And Bob was all […]” indicates that I am paraphrasing Bob, and additionally I am being a dick about it.
I don’t know about you, but I think it’s fantastic that we have a specific grammatical convention for that.
What I find most frustrating is when people don’t understand this! I don’t know if it’s a generation thing, but sometimes I’ll be talking and say “So I was like “are you fucking kidding me” and the person will look at me all horrified and say “you didn’t actually say that, did you?”
There’s probably a German compound word for that feeling you get at 2am when you’re single in your mid twenties and the creeping doubt that you’ve somehow missed your only chance at love because you didn’t meet someone in college and now it’s too late
The german word you are looking for is ‘Torschusspanik’
• interrupt a line of thought with a sudden new one
• say ‘uh’ between words when unsure
• accidentally blend multiple words together, and may start the sentence over again
• repeat filler words such as ‘like’ ‘literally’ ‘really’ ‘anyways’ and ‘i think’
• begin and/or end sentences with phrases such as ‘eh’ and ‘you know’, and may make those phrases into question form to get another’s input
• repeat words/phrases when in an excited state
• words fizzle out upon realizing no one is listening
• repeat themselves when others don’t understand what they’re saying, as well as to get their point across
• reply nonverbally such as hand gestures, facial expressions, random noises, movement, and even silence
This is all good advice, especially if your dialog tends to be somewhat stiff or unnatural, but reading it all in a list, I’m imagining a section of dialogue with literally all of these, back to back, in order, and it’s fucking hilarious. Someone write me a microfic. I don’t even care who it’s about.
sparksoffandommagic 