who only by moving can balance

spot the difference!

preferment: the selection of clergy to hold positions of senior office in the Church (of England) (largely obsolete)
preferment: a preparation of a portion of a bread dough that is made several hours or more in advance of mixing the final dough

my recreational reading, you see, currently includes a nontrivial amount of Austen and a nontrivial amount of The Theory Of Sourdough. APPARENTLY in this modern day and age we don't believe in clarifying punctuation. as a result I am spending a lot of time being very confused about theology.

Specifically, the ableist issues with metaphorical deployment of "using something as a crutch" are well-documented. FwD suggests the alternative "training wheels", which never really worked for me; something about the connotations, I think.

I've just noticed that "using ... as a buttress" really does: while buttresses are reassuring and nice to look at, they fundamentally arise because we didn't understand physics so couldn't build things that stayed up without them. As we've deepened and developed our understanding of the world and our place in it they become superfluous: there are less visible and more efficient ways to achieve the same effect, but they require thought and work.

Which has a different flavour, to me, around whether there's an expected stepping stone to build confidence (as training wheels so often are), or whether one is fundamentally struggling to replace a maladaptive approach that was the best that could be done at the time but has been rendered obsolete, if you can get the budget and the time and the support to do the upgrade work.

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.

1. On Sunday, A & I went to The Postal Museum, including a ride on the Mail Rail. It was great. It was a SMALL TRAIN that went through POST TUNNELS and I was very excited and flappy. Be warned that it's quite cramped; I sat and watched one of the videos and it included a lot of elderly engineers ergo there followed a nontrivial quantity of inexplicable-to-onlookers weeping; I learned things about how the Royal Mail started out (genuinely just for royalty), the origins of the post horn (I knew perfectly well what it was for on Alpine post buses but hadn't put together how it started), the existence of both air mail pillar boxes and pillar boxes with integrated stamp dispensers (which were really very short lived because they fundamentally didn't work very well), and about Travelling Post Offices a preserved iteration of which we're now planning to make a visit to. I also fell down the rabbit-hole of trying to look up procedural differences in how first- and second-class post are handled; A found me a not-as-informative-as-I'd-hoped Freedom of Information request, and I found a video with obnoxious ableism/ageism and backing music but some interesting if irrelevant stuff (phosphorus detectors!). A+ nerding all round, would visit again.

2. A & I have got started on Leverage courtesy of a loan of the box sets from sebastienne and shortcipher.

3. Early this evening I submitted my first first-author paper. It took me four hours to get from "okay, I'm ready to submit" to actually hitting the submit button on the website. Good grief but the interface is terrible. I am feeling pretty good about this, and especially good that the latest night I've had working on it was Monday, when I was poking at it til shortly before midnight and then went to bed and... my supervisor made functionally 0 corrections to the bit I put together (from scratch) in that session.

4. New horn case is excellent, is indeed encouraging me to practice more, and I am very rapidly observing the benefits... just in time for Saturday's concert, or not, as the case may be. But: hopefully will manage to keep up the momentum.

5. I don't think I mentioned here that I finished the Duolingo Turkish tree last week, but I did and for all there are huge chunks that I am Really Not Very Good At Yet I am fundamentally pretty proud of myself for that one, too.

6. I have been spending more social time with people over the last few weeks than I had prior to that and it's been really good. Thank you, all. <3

I react to being described as "in" a wheelchair (as opposed to using a wheelchair) by snarling, and I've just (in response to a Sociological Images article The NYC subway to a person in a wheelchair) worked out some more of the why.

There's part the first, which is that it's inherently passive terminology that obfuscates or elides my agency. But the thing I've just noticed, the actual big deal, is that it makes it sound as though me being in a wheelchair is a permanent and unalterable state, and that in turn contributes to the idea that if I can stand or walk at all I shouldn't be using one, and that by using one I'm faking -- in a wheelchair precludes the possibility of being out of it. I'm pretty sure this framing contributes directly to strangers' horror if I stand up to reach something on a high shelf in a supermarket, or get up to carry my chair down a flight of stairs rather than taking a sloped half-mile detour, or what have you.

(There's other issues - who's surprised? - with that SocImages article, including the part where actually level and step-free access is important to all sorts of people. It's genuinely very important not to conflate "accessible" with "level access", or to conflate "level access" with "wheelchair accessible"; the former erases a very great many disabilities, and the latter assumes that all you need is flat surfaces and doesn't stop to think about whether aisles are wide enough or there's space set aside for wheelchair users to sit, or what have you. ... but there we go.)

Gifts are given; offerings are made or, well, offered. The latter is availability with no expectation whatsoever; the former implicitly requires acceptance, to a greater or lesser extent. I have been playing over the past few weeks with this distinction as applied to human interaction.

(Not sure what's going on here? The answer is Ancillary Justice.)

We're told that Radchaai does not bother with gendered pronouns. It seems to me that the default pronoun used means gender-irrelevant (rather than gender-unknown or gender-specific, which seem to me to be a useful way of considering pronouns of gendered beings). We're told that Strigan's society uses gender-known pronouns even though it professes to consider gender irrelevant.

And yet: the Radchaai frequently refer to ships as "it" (I note that the standard English pronoun used to refer to vessels is the same as the way in which the Radchaai default pronoun is rendered). It's clearly not as simple as in/animate - ships have emotions, ships have personality and identity, ships are sentient, ships have ancillaries. Except that this is done in a literally dehumanising way - ships are explicitly not Radchaai, not citizens, and therefore not considered human; characters who are uninterested in or unsympathetic toward ships are far more likely to refer to them as "it", whereas characters who like ships seem to mostly not pronoun them; non-Radchaai humans are generally called the standard pronoun for Radchaai, despite being considered by at least some in the society to have sub-human status - and so I am left picking away at what distinction it is the Radch is making here...

Thoughts very much appreciated!

The point of language is to communicate; if communication's been achieved, everything else is window-dressing and point-scoring. Who defines "accuracy" and "what (forms of) nuance matter)s(" is a case of privilege. Rich white folk not caring to understand Englishes (written or spoken) other than "Standard English" also means that communication loses accuracy and nuance, but oddly rich white folk (of which I am one!) don't seem, by and large, to be as worried about that. Taking the time to understand multiple Englishes (or multiple forms of any language) doesn't impoverish us - it makes our engagement with language richer.

See, e.g., linguistics blog Languagehat on the topic; I feel I should clarify that I'm Cambridge-educated and upper-middle class and I speak RP - but English is my second language and I speak a really weird hybrid of dialects in my first language, that combines the "standard" form of the language as legislated in the largest country in which it's spoken with forms of dialect that were definitely spoken in one very specific geographic area in the 1950s, but might well not have been since then. In my first language, spelling things the way I do is absolutely a political statement and will be interpreted as such, even though what it is in practice is "that's how my grandmother taught me to write". Just because the politicisation of Standard English is largely invisible to people for whom it is their first or primary language doesn't mean that the choice to use it (never mind attempts to enforce it) aren't political.

(Questions about the specifics I'm referring to re German etc welcome from you lot!)