Miscellany

[kaberett]

1. Singular they is well-attested, as we know, but I find myself wondering whether the appearance of they with the singular verb form in modern low-prestige grammars ("they was doing...") is part of what drives the prescriptivist sneering, consciously or otherwise.

2. I sincerely hope that today's Strong Female Protagonist is going to get narratively called out for the bullshit it is. I do pretty much trust the creators so my hopes are high, but I am bracing.

3. Body positivity: I keep on being frustrated by mainstream presentation & understanding of it as "ISN'T YOUR BODY GREAT DON'T YOU LOVE IT :D" where "love" means "have unambiguously solely positive feelings about", and I keep wanting to wade in to conversations about same with "okay but this is a ~MISCONCEPTION~ it's actually about COMPASSION and KINDNESS and UNDERSTANDING THAT IT'S DOING ITS BEST and d'you know what all the studies show this actually really helps" but I recognise that wouldn't actually be useful, so, you know, you all get a grumble here instead.

4. How To Tell If You "Need" A Mobility Aid: if, in spite of all the structural and systemic and social barriers, using one (part-time! full-time! whatever!) makes your life easier and more pleasant, you need it. That's genuinely it.

5. I swung by the local cheap gym the other day to scope out their level access or absence thereof; as I was giving up, the person at reception who'd seen me wander past and then back out came out and asked if they could help me. Oh yeah, they said, we can do that, let me just come and open the side door -- obviously we'd need to get a ramp but this is how you'd get in. And, you know, I can't get into reception with level access, but the way it's set up I'd be passing reception at eye-height with whoever's on front desk so could get their attention pretty easily. Anyway, I then e-mailed to say "recently post-op, would like to join up with my partner once I'm cleared to return to exercise BUT I'd need level access as discussed last week, here's some eBay links to examples of the types of ramp you could get"... and a few days later got the response "we've just placed the order, should be arriving in the next few days, please sign up whenever!" So that was vastly easier and more positive than I expected.

6. I appear to want to do more reading about thinking about anger, as an emotion, as it's experienced in my social context and consensus reality. For me it's basically always an expression of being scared, and if I can work out why it usually redirects into a different emotional experience; I'm curious about how other people experience it, so here's a placeholder note about that.

Comments

[the_rck]

For me, anger helps me keep going when my metaphorical path gets steep or bramble covered. It helps when I’m tired or scared or in pain or otherwise at a point where going on won’t happen without a push. Unfortunately, having chronic fatigue and chronic pain means being fairly perpetually in a fog of kind of generalized crankiness.

[sfred]

Hurray for easier-than-expected gym access experience.

[ewt]

I appear to want to do more reading about thinking about anger, as an emotion, as it's experienced in my social context and consensus reality. For me it's basically always an expression of being scared, and if I can work out why it usually redirects into a different emotional experience;

Me too, usually.

But then, I've a sortof theory that the vast majority of my emotions can be boiled down to love or fear if you dig far enough.

[tree_and_leaf]

I find myself wondering whether the appearance of they with the singular verb form in modern low-prestige grammars ("they was doing...") is part of what drives the prescriptivist sneering, consciously or otherwise.

Huh. I think you're on to something. Though I don't know how you'd test the theory....

[haggis]

One of the common ways of validating the idea of singular they is to argue that Shakespeare used it, which is a way of connecting it with high status language and grammar.

[alexseanchai]

That also refutes the neologism argument.

Not that the neologism argument needs refuting, I mean, people say "freemium" which dates to 2006 with a lot less fuss than they use Spivak pronouns which date to 1983, but.

[kaberett]

Indeed, which is hilarious in its own right given Shakespeare's target market ;)

Honestly, though, these days I mostly stick to something to the effect of "I'm not willing to believe you're making that argument in good faith if you don't have a problem with you."

[jesse_the_k]

Oohh. That's a lovely comeback. Must put in my "handy quotes" file along with if, in spite of all the structural and systemic and social barriers, using one (part-time! full-time! whatever!) makes your life easier and more pleasant, you need it.

Also YES! re gym.

[kaberett]

:-) <3 Thank you for letting me know!

[steorra]

I don't recognize myself feeling angry very often.
I think I probably actually don't get angry all that often.
I think I also tend to feel like I'm not allowed to get angry, so that might sometimes stop me from recognizing it.
I think sometimes parse anger as frustration because that seems more "okay".

[alexseanchai]

I mean general recognition that you're right about compassion/kindness/understanding wrt bodies would be useful

but XKCD 386

wrt gym: WOOOOOOOO

wrt anger: ...huh

[alexseanchai]

anger, for me, doesn't arise from scared

it arises from injustice, or at any rate unfairness, even if that thing will not harm anyone if left unchallenged

like. I have a rule on Facebook that if someone tags me a third time after I've told them a third time not to tag me (or if they say once that they're not going to abide by that clearly stated, easily-abided-by boundary), I block them. because the other option is I persist in stating the boundary and they persist in flouting it and I get angrier and angrier and also everyone else in the conversation watches the derail and gets angry too.

but these people aren't hurting me by tagging me when I've said not to. they're just pissing me the fuck off.

most injustices, of course, do do harm. hence "if you're not angry, you're not paying attention". and often even when one isn't a target of that harm, one is scared for those who are. *waves #BlackLivesMatter and #WaterIsLife flags*

so the same thing may, often does, give rise to both scared and angry

but that doesn't mean the angry is from the scared

[watersword]

Yeah, anger is often an expression of fear for me — because fear makes me vulnerable, and anger is a way to protect that vulnerability. Like so much else, it works as a temporary coping mechanism, but long-term, is not ...the best choice.

[meneltarma]

I do not know if you are looking for personal experiences of anger, but I have Many Thoughts about anger as an Angry Person (it is er, integral to my identity, that I was raised with a father with anger issues, that I am constantly struggling to deal with the fact I had no healthy role models for dealing with anger, and that my anger is deeply rooted in systemic ongoing trauma, so I am on a quest to always Deal With My Anger).

As an emotional experience it's rooted out of pain; I get angry when I perceive someone behaving or a system has been designed either to deliberately cause me pain or sees me as acceptable collatoral and not worth the care it displays for others. It's probably LITERALLY generations of genetic trauma, but the emotion manifests as a visceral desire to destroy the cause of my pain so it cannot hurt someone else. I want to redesign civic planning which is casually cruel (but I want to make its designers have my interaction with it first); abolish institutions that terrorize minorities; humiliate the person trying to humiliate me so th at they will never try that microaggression ever again on someone else, etc. In personal life when I feel anger the only way to avert that feeling is to shift the object of anger to an object of empathy: the pain being caused to me is in some way accidental, or rooted in pain or ignorance, and I then wish to respond from a place of compassion (but this is exhausting, and frankly frequently not applicable: I am caused deliberate harm a lot). When I merely "hold my temper" (do not act out my anger, do not re-frame the situation) I hold the rage-grudge the rest of my life against the person who Did The Thing That Hurt Me, which, counterintuitively, soothes my anger, I do not feel the need to act out on it after the fact because Grudge Holding involves communally sharing I have been aggressed upon so others may avoid the same experience.

[worlds_of_smoke]

I'm very glad that the gym was so prompt on fixing the problem!

For me, anger is often a result of sensory/emotional overload. There's just TOO MUCH energy coming in and I don't know how to transmute it, so it just turns into me lashing out to get rid of the excess energy.

[hilarita]

Yay for local cheap gym!

[jack]

Yeah, I've been holding my breath all through this SFP arc...

[kaberett]

FINGERS CROSSED, EH.

(Like. I do ship it. And I do ship flawed people making bad decisions but trying to work in good faith. But also this, specifically, is Some Bullshit and should not be permitted to stand.)

[recessional]

Anger for me can arise out of fear: I do not enjoy being scared, so then I tend to get pissed off that something scared me. I can also use anger as an antidote for fear.

However, there is a laaaarge swathe of Anger that has zero to do with fear, for me - like yesterday I got VERY ANGRY, watching a documentary on the USS Indianapolis, to discover the full details of just how MUCH the USN used the captain of that ship (who did EXACTLY FUCK ALL WRONG AND A LOT RIGHT AND SUFFERED HORRIBLY) as a scapegoat and allowed him to be perceived as garbage to the point where the hateful letters from the families of the deceased drove him to commit suicide.

. . . that pissed me the hell off. >.>

So for me, anger is anger: there are patterns to the things that make me angry, but none of them come down to "anger is an expression of injustice" or "anger is an expression of fear" or anything that simple. Anger is anger - many different things cause it (frustration, fear, outrage, grief, etc) but it is itself, inasmuch as contentment or fear is itself.

Almost without exception on the other hand is that Anger makes me want to Eat People's Faces. It is very primal and very violent. And if I can't vent it, if I can't use it, it will hit a sort of wall and result in me shaking and bursting into tears, and it feels Fucking Awful.

Only VERY rarely in my life have I been put in positions where Acting On The Anger has been the practically and morally correct thing to do without restraint, and in those cases fuck it felt AMAZING, but that's . . . very rare.

[recessional]

I think in some ways you could boil a lot of my primary emotions down to the spectrum of "yes" and the spectrum of "no".

Anger, fear and grief are all expressions of NO. They are emotions that arise when THIS IS NOT WHAT I WANT, depending on what the details of how exactly it is Not What I Want. Fear does not always produce anger, although fear almost usually produces a desire to attack - but attack and anger are not synonymous. (I can actually be quite violent in my responses while being totally detached and no anger involved, because the "NO" is still very much Fear-based.) Anger is a different kind of NO. Grief is a different kind of NO. They can all be overlapping or to happen at the same time, but.

Happy, calm, delight are all expressions of YES. They're for THIS IS WHAT I WANT. Similar spectrum.

[kaberett]

This is a framing I find interesting and I am chewing on it. (I have potentially more substantive and engaged response to previous comment, which is why it hasn't happened yet, because Scraping Words Together.)

[recessional]

it is also I note a framing of the VERY BASIC impulses - obviously shit gets super complicated and the states can be mixed in weird ways and this gives rise to the complex emotional landscapes of "wistful nostalgia for something I don't actually want" or "I love you but I kind of want to throttle you" or "bitter, bitter dark ironic laughter". Etc.

Just if we bore right down to the big, loud, basal split, it is YES[acceptance] and NO[rejection] and they sort of fan out into three-ish primary labels in each direction.

[deathbyshinies]

I also find this a very interesting and potentially useful framing; commenting here to remind me to check back for kaberett's response later.

[recessional]

A certain amount of babble as I procrastinate something else:

It comes a lot from working with very young children and particularly babies, in that babies in many ways really do not have enough brain yet for complicated emotions - VERY new babies, I couldn't even with confidence say that they differentiate between fear and anger in how they experience it, they just mostly have one state that is "all is OK can deal" and "NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!~!!~infinity" and one is shown by either sleeping or by attempting to focus these stupid eye things and wave their arms, and one is shown by screaming. A lot. Until the adult fixes what is wrong and the world returns to "is OK".

And some weeks to months pass and they move into a space where NO!!!!etc sort of complicates and differentiates into "angry!NO!!!", "scared!NO!!!!" "pain-based!NO!!!!" and "is ok" differentiates into "giggly-happy" and "want-and-want-is-fulfilled" and "calm-content" and then human emotions just sort of . . . get more nuanced, complicated and broad from there, like an endless network branching off from the former point.

But in some ways I think a lot of the time shit can go back all the way to "is ok" and "NO!!!!!!", or something similar.

[ewx]

#1. "They are" with singular referent is routinely challenged, so I'm a bit skeptical about that model...

[kaberett]

I'm well aware! :-) I'm postulating that some of why it's challenged is perhaps association with low-prestige grammars.

[recessional]

Randomly wandering back: I honestly suspect it has a lot more to do with the straight-up prestige-plays involved in "correct" usage that were more or less deliberately built-in to the 18th century project that gave us this bullshit, along with "don't split infinitives" and so on.

Like the actual deliberate project was to separate between Properly Educated (that is to say, slightly Latinate, and - grace à la Renaissance - Latin-is-the-Height-of-All-Languages*-assuming) Usage and The Vulgar Mob, at a time when more and more of The Vulgar Mob were making the previous divisions of "can read and write" very muddy and at the same time the other standby - "can speak French" - was no longer Prestigious because We're Better Than France Now.

Ironically the whole POINT is that the singular "they§", and the split infinitive, and many other "forbidden" elements of usage are totally and completely fucking natural in English and will totally creep into the usage of anyone who hasn't been explicitly trained out of them and continually reminded of the need to be trained out of them. Their designation as Unacceptable was actually straight up meant to be a way that you could tell someone who was really Properly Educated from someone Vulgar who'd just, you know, managed to read a lot of books or something, and properly sneer at the latter.

And they still ABSOLUTELY carry that set of connotations, and the desire to both maintain that set of connotations and to make sure they're on the right side of it is super present in the angst about Singular They. And because we still have the connotations and the prestige, resorting to these arguments offers people who are straight-up just being transphobic a boost to their argument.

You don't have to connect it to anything else for it to be absolutely working along an axis of straight-up snobbery and prestige-vs-disdain: that's built RIGHT IN. (And is also why people refer to Shakespeare and Austin when they point out that the singular "they" is historically attested: it's a direct challenge to the very heart of the argument, unless the person speaking wants to say that Shakespeare and Austin weren't speaking Proper English, at which point - because Shakespeare and Austin are EMBEDDED in the Canon, along with others - they look like the assholes they are and also like idiots.)


*except maybe Greek†
†but only ANCIENT Greek because actual persons from Greece are dirty superstitious foreigners who definitely aren't white whose language is "corrupted" from those ancient, elevated forms
§although to be super-pedantic the historical singular "they" in English was explicitly a general rather than specific pronoun, much like "on" in formal French usage or "one" in place of "I", used to refer to an individual when their specific identity was either unknown or irrelevant.

[kaberett]

Right, yes, I am Well Aware of the split infinitives nonsense (my first language puts SENTENCES in the middle ffs, English can Cope and indeed is clearer and more pleasant with the splits that without in many but not all cases); and I'm well aware of epicene they (hence increasingly responding with "get back to me when you've stopped using singular you"); but I had failed to put together the obvious connection that in fact both "urgh singular they" and the "they was"ing link back to bullshit prescriptivist prestige grammars. So yep, thank you for flagging that up!

[recessional]

I figured most people knew that the split infinitives and shite was nonsense, but yeah it often gets missed or sort of like . . . *waves hand* not fully unfolded that this wasn't even an ACCIDENT, you know? Like we did not develop these two registers or senses of what was correct "organically", it was a straight up project to create Correct English where Correct English would ensure that rank distinctions would be preserved and uppity pretenders to any right to be taken seriously would be eliminated and exposed, because the previous ones we'd used were decaying. (Almost nobody actually wrote extensively in Latin, it was no longer Done to elevate French, print made practicing reading and writing so much easier . . . )

I mean they didn't use those words to describe it, they were Codifying The Correct Laws of English, but so what, the people who made up Jim Crow laws also had nicer words to define it and it was still what it was. Thingie.

So yeah. And the snobbery perpetuates itself and in turn gives shelter/false-legitimacy to people who are, lbr, just being transphobic dickheads, because then they can hide under the umbrella of Correct Grammar and Usage.

Which we give way, way too much credence to, omg. And Linguistics as a field has only matured into " . . . well this is bullshit" in the past generation and a half.

/rambling more