As a southerner, I have long noted that one of the last remaining socially-acceptable bigotries is bigotry and stereotyping against the US south, which I see in almost any media you might run across (including comments here on File770.)
(I also used to be really annoyed by the term/category “Southern Writer”, as if people from the southern US had to be pointed out especially when they managed to write a book, like a chicken learning to play a piano. But that particular term seems to have died down–at least I don’t notice it anymore.)
I read Jemisin’s “Obelisk Gate” while I was at Worldcon. I found it even more moving than “The Fifth Season”, possibly because less happened externally, more inside people’s heads. Showing how Our Multi-Named Heroine came to her “Orogene Lives Matter” moment was very powerful for me. I didn’t find it preachy or pasted-on, but resonant: this is how it would feel, this is how it does feel.
As for the world-building, things now seem to be coming down a bit heavier on the Magic side of the Magic-Science spectrum. That’s partly because of Jemisin’s choice of words, but also that the Psi Powers that got tossed around so freely in the 50s-70s now look so much more magic-y and less science-y.
There are two things about the world-building that make me scratch my head. One is saying “Father Earth” instead of the usual “Mother Earth” — and then not talking about who the Mother might be instead.
There’s also the question of whether the “Stillness” continent is big enough to be a Pangaea-type supercontinent. Looking at maps of possible future supercontinents, I can see that the Stillness — which is about 5000-mi wide at the equator, but stretches pole-to-pole (10K-12K miles or more) might have the same area as Novopangaea or Amasia, but rotated 90°.
Living in the Love of the Comment People?
Commentwealth?
The Iceman Commenteth?
What Is Meant By Commentariat
Regarding Jack Vance’s 100th birthday, the German book program “Druckfrisch” just remembered him and recommended a new German translation of The Blue World as well as a new German language Jack Vance biography.
Druckfrisch host Denis Scheck is an SFF fan, In past shows, he’s interviewed George R.R. Martin and recommended Pat Rothfuss and Seveneves among others.
Just registered my attending membership for WorldCon 75. Helsinki, here I come!
Gah! My eReader has died and I am only 21% into Obelisk Gate.
Comment to my kitchen, ’cause it’s sure to be raining outside.
The Tragedy of the Comments
The Tragedy of the Comments
LOL.
Gah! My eReader has died and I am only 21% into Obelisk Gate.
Just your battery, I hope? I recently lost my much beloved Sony PRS-350 (bought in November of 2010) to an acute case of USB port failure.
The Commentist Manifesto
Darren Garrison on August 28, 2016 at 3:03 pm said:
As a southerner, I have long noted that one of the last remaining socially-acceptable bigotries is bigotry and stereotyping against the US south, which I see in almost any media you might run across (including comments here on File770.)
I had to crack up at this.
My father was from rural Mississippi, and he would expound on this very point at great length, and all this in the era of Green Acres, Mayberry, HeeHaw, etc., maybe he had a point.
Further, despite having himself an accent you could collect with a spoon, he maintained that there was No Such Thing as a southern accent: it was just another way people had of mocking southerners, who in fact spoke just the same as everyone anywhere else.
Until the time came, after he’d been living in the north for about twenty odd years, that his sister drove up from Collins to have a nice long visit with us.
When she’d left he admitted, reluctantly, that maybe she spoke just a little differently than people in Maryland did.
But Mississippi has a beautiful accent, it’s another nice way English can sound
Though growing up in Maryland we kids all ended up with none of it; we just all grew up with serious vowel confusion.
How do you say a given word; well, how should I know?
Just say it any old way, there’s always multiple possibilities.
Who am I trying to sound like?
How many syllables do you think it ought to have?
Diphthongs R us….
Favorite Song featuring Comment
Oxford Comments
Halley’s Comment
Dave Truesdale’s Tangent Online has published an essay by John Shirley, “Why Conservatives are a Necessary Component of a Vital Society,” that’s mostly political but takes the occasional toe-dip into some SF/F controversies — including the one that opened up his social calendar last Saturday and Sunday.
In Britain, mocking other parts of the country is up there with complaining about the weather and mocking our own part of the country as a national pastime.
Re: Doctor Science on August 28, 2016 at 2:03 pm
Does the society have an imperfect grasp of germ theory, or just Sokrates? Several of the Masters were from the 21st century, and the Just City seems to make its own antibiotics. Crocus’s programmers were pretty clear about the importance of plumbing, as were the women working in the birthing house who sent for him to make the emergency repair. It’s only Sokrates who’s like “Eh, just pee in the gutter and wipe your hands on your kiton.”
My linguistics teacher pointed me out to the class: “Kip has a phony accent,” he said. Then he relented a little and clarified that I spoke no dialect, but my own idiolect, which came from looking up pronunciations in the dictionary. I had always assumed I spoke like other Coloradoans, who (of course) had no discernible accent, though it was possible to broaden into one, with colorful idioms thrown in.
Twenty years later, I was just finishing the run of a play where I had employed a British accent (Received Pronunciation, aka BBC English) that came via a series of lessons on a tape, bolstered by an attentive Assistant Director’s notes after each rehearsal and performance. Needless to say, I was quite good. I was being congratulated by a respected friend in the production, who was particularly pleased with the accent, “especially considering your Southern accent,” she said, smiling.
At that moment, I turned in one of the greatest performances of my life: I kept smiling, even though I felt like I had just been punched in the gut. I swear to you all, I do not, did not, have a southern accent. But I knew she meant no harm, so I dealt with it. How well, you all can see. Festering resentment, doubt, fear… I don’t talk like the people around me, and I particularly don’t talk like the lovely people I knew in Georgia or Virginia.
In Virginia, in fact, I loved talking to one of the older music professors, because he had an accent I just didn’t hear from anyone else. A sweetly rounded, courtly voice that seemed incapable of uttering a harsh word. I often suspected that it was an old Virginia accent, but never verified this. It was also my pleasure to talk about the Philadelphia-based composer, Septimus Winner, who was a favorite obscure name for us both.
(Winner’s compositions are better known than his name. “Der Deitscher’s Dog,” aka “Vhere Oh Vhere Has Mine Little Dog Gone,” and “Ten Little Indians” (which contains not only the rhyme of the little boys dying one by one, but has the chorus ‘One, little Two, little Three little Indians…”) are both his, and as “Alice Hawthorne,” he penned “Whispering Hope” and “Listen to the Mocking-Bird,” which is known to all fans of the Three Stooges.)
Dr. Commento
ps: I received a premonition of the next thread title, and maybe you did as well. Still a few bugs in the system. We will not mention this again.
Premature Commentation?
[Yes, it’s a reference to the “Commentriggers 8/29” top post that made it to my email notification but isn’t (yet?) live.]
Comment Attraction.
John Shirley has a point. I wouldn’t mind having a conservative movement around which was small enough to drown in the bathtub.
Darren Garrison:
Speaking as someone from New Jersey: yeah, no. You ain’t seen what it’s like to be mocked for where you come from. The difference is that Jerseyans don’t actually claim to be better than anyone else, we’re just more cynical — though we think of it as “realistic”. NJ State Bird: Mosquito. State Flower: Poison Ivy. State Motto: Says who? State Song: “Born to Run”, and don’t you forget it.
Kip W. wrote:
“My linguistics teacher pointed me out to the class: ‘Kip has a phony accent,’ he said.”
YMMV and all that, but if one of my teachers abruptly pointed me out to my classmates as a liar, I’d be filing a complaint in the dean’s office at the earliest opportunity.
@Doctor Science:
It kills me that people think NJ folks say “Joisey.” That’s not at all the sound of the vowel. I’ve never heard a native say that. Sounds more like “Jayzey” (as reflected in the song covered by Joe Jackson, “Symphony Sid,” I think it was) to me. AND TO ALL RIGHT-THINKING PEOPLE.
@David K.M. Klaus:
The teacher was a friend of mine, and he explained, as I said. I’d already taken German from him, and I worked in the office of the foreign languages department, of which he was the head. I was proud of my idiolect, and clung to it for years.
IanP on August 28, 2016 at 5:30 pm said:
In Britain, mocking other parts of the country is up there with complaining about the weather and mocking our own part of the country as a national pastime.
Absolutely 😉
@Doctor Science NJ State Bird: Mosquito. State Flower: Poison Ivy. State Motto: Says who? State Song: “Born to Run”, and don’t you forget it.
They left that out of the welcome new NJ resident package. Thanks for making sure I don’t get run out of the state. 😉
rcade on August 28, 2016 at 5:29 pm said:
Dave Truesdale’s Tangent Online has published an essay by John Shirley, “Why Conservatives are a Necessary Component of a Vital Society,”
I mostly agree with that statement – but the corollary to that is “It is detrimental to a vital society when its conservative movements have become dysfunctional”.
Nickp:
Sokrates doesn’t know, but Ikaros doesn’t either — which is part of one strand throughout, that because more of the female Masters come from scientific centuries, science & tech tend to be disrespected by the male Masters.
Antibiotics are helpful, but it would take trained midwives & surgeons and a LOT more medicines to keep the death rate for women down. Without a lot of young men dying by accidents or violence, there’d be a gradual tilt of the adult sex ratio as women died in childbirth.
Walton shows how the women Masters start to get worn out by the stress and exhaustion of “childbirth season”, but she dodges what the effects would be of dealing with so much pain and death: of woman, of infants. Not to mention how she has one infant be exposed for “imperfection”, but no more — though the rate for birth defects should be several per hundred, at least.
And then there’s the problem of child-rearing. I realized, thinking about it, that the infant-creche and pooled-nursing system they set up would probably lead to a lot of infants dying from “failure to thrive” and attachment disorder.
rcade: Dave Truesdale’s Tangent Online has published an essay by John Shirley, “Why Conservatives are a Necessary Component of a Vital Society,” that’s mostly political but takes the occasional toe-dip into some SF/F controversies — including the one that opened up his social calendar last Saturday and Sunday.
Well, that’s a very nice essay — but it conflates the issue of conservatives being a valid part of US culture, with the issue of Truesdale abusing a position of power with which he had been entrusted and hijacking a panel for his own personal soapbox. It’s so nice for Mr. Shirley that he didn’t see anything wrong with Truesdale’s behavior — but I vehemently disagree with his perception.
Furthermore, he quotes Lawrence Person’s comment about Elizabeth Moon’s essay which was “mildly critical to Islam” (rolleyes) as if it actually proves something. Of course, Shirley didn’t see anything wrong with Moon’s behavior, either. Not only was that essay really offensive to Muslims, it was almost as offensive to me in the way that she arrogantly presumed to speak for all Americans. 🙄
Comment Feel The Noize
@rcade Dave Truesdale’s Tangent Online has published an essay by John Shirley, “Why Conservatives are a Necessary Component of a Vital Society,”
The term political correctness was thrown around a few times in the article. Again we have a straight white male declaring pearl-clutching isn’t a term used to demean women and PoC. I’m sick and tired of oblivious privilege showing and guys being unwilling to use Google before spouting off.
Mike, your new “Commentriggers” post that I saw in my email isn’t showing up.
@Kip W:
It kills me that people think NJ folks say “Joisey.” That’s not at all the sound of the vowel. I’ve never heard a native say that. Sounds more like “Jayzey” (as reflected in the song covered by Joe Jackson, “Symphony Sid,” I think it was) to me.
According to the sources I’ve read, the JZ in “go real crazy over JZ” stands for the radio station WJZ on which Symphony Sid had his show.
@microtherion:
“Dear Diary: Despite my best efforts, I learned something today…”
Bonnie McDaniel: Mike, your new “Commentriggers” post that I saw in my email isn’t showing up.
This is the open thread for today. That’s the open thread for tomorrow, which he has created early and set to go live tomorrow.
Kip W on August 28, 2016 at 5:38 pm said:
I was told once that I have a slight Oklahoma accent. I have to assume it’s actually the regional accent of my parents – southeastern Kansas and northeastern Oklahoma – because the total amount of time I’ve spent in that area in my life is about a week. (My father could put Oklahoma on when he wanted.)
I’m just here to second HRJ’s “A Cup of Constant Comments”. Because we are constant.
I have made my Hugo longlist post for 2016. Mostly this is just the stats arranged in a slightly different manner and cleaned up in some places, but it is part of my ongoing project to collect the longlist for as many years as I can find data.
Bonnie McDaniel: Mike, your new “Commentriggers” post that I saw in my email isn’t showing up.
This is the open thread for today. That’s the open thread for tomorrow, which he has created early and set to go live tomorrow.
Well hell, JJ, I too am posting to say that I GOT AN EMAIL with a link to the Commentriggers post, saying it was available right now today CLICK THIS LINK, and that that link does not work. Letting Mike know that there is a problem.
Maybe the problem is that we were informed early, but either way, you can’t just handwave this off, there is a problem to report. We were told that ‘Commentriggers’ was there, and it isn’t. Can you fix this?
@Kip W:
It kills me that people think NJ folks say “Joisey.”
All the years I was living in Mercer County, NJ, the only time I heard that was if I called Directory Assistance and got someone very obviously from NYC (typically with a Bronx accent you could cut with a knife). This was of course back in a long-ago decade when Directory Assistance was still a thing and staffed by humans.
Blame the idiotbox for that confusion. And confusion about the 1992 film “My Cousin Vinnie”, even though that’s a Brooklyn accent Joe Pesci (who’s actually from Ocean County, NJ) is putting on, and his character Vinnie Gambini and his feckless cousins are wiseguys from NYC, not Jersey.
FWIW, a New Jersey US Attorney praised the film as a teaching tool, thanks to how accurately it portrays the life of a lawyer, irrespective of the auslander accents.
Al the Great and Powerful: Maybe the problem is that we were informed early, but either way, you can’t just handwave this off, there is a problem to report. We were told that ‘Commentriggers’ was there, and it isn’t. Can you fix this?
I’m just the measly File770 crowdfunding coordinator and occasional IT-technical-question-answerer. You’ll have to find someone else who actually has some power. 😉
Well hell, JJ, I too am posting to say that I GOT AN EMAIL with a link to the Commentriggers post, saying it was available right now today CLICK THIS LINK, and that that link does not work. Letting Mike know that there is a problem.
There very likely isn’t. You’re assuming that since you got an e-mail, the post not being here is a problem. But the e-mail is most likely the mistake, because the post wasn’t supposed to go live yet. So the post got deleted, and that’s why the link in your e-mail doesn’t work.
Maybe the problem is that we were informed early, but either way, you can’t just handwave this off, there is a problem to report.
The problem is almost certainly that you were informed early. And without a time machine, that can’t be undone.
As such, ignore the e-mail, and boom, fixed.
We were told that ‘Commentriggers’ was there, and it isn’t. Can you fix this?
Wait until he posts it live for real, and not by mistake. That’ll be the fix.
In the meantime, don’t get wound up about requiring a fix or an explanation. Mike’s in the hospital, he’s got other things to focus on. Post in the threads that are here, and don’t worry about the one that isn’t, until it actually shows up.
The problem is almost certainly that you were informed early. And without a time machine, that can’t be undone.
So someone fire the file770 time machine back up.
Accent anecdotes:
I’ve occasionally encountered amazement, surprise, and sometimes outright disbelief when I say I’m from New Orleans. “You don’t sound like it.” And, well, this is true. I don’t sound like my parents or neighbors or school friends. I’m not the only one of the latter who’s sung in choruses and choirs from an early an age, but I seem to have picked up, more than the rest of them did, Proper Enunciation for Singing As Taught By Various Chorale Directors as my personal accent. I don’t know why. I don’t think it’s just the “accent sponge” factor, or surely I’d have picked up the regional accent that I heard spoken around me the rest of the day when I wasn’t at chorus rehearsal? It’s weird. Maybe I just took what the chorus director painstakingly taught us about sung enunciation, and instinctively extrapolated them into an idea of absolute objective rules for speaking correctly. I took the oddest things as gospel when I was a kid.
(Another factor might have been that I read a lot and tended to visualize words as I spoke them. If there was an “r” in a word like “heart” or “darling” I was going to pronounce it, darn it, even if no one else was going to!)
But it was probably just the accent sponge thing in full swing when, in college, I sang with the oratorio. Oratorium? Whatever you call the group that sings that style of music. Most of the time we just sight-sang Missas and Requiems, but once a year there’d be big performance–Verdi’s Requiem one year, Mendelssohn’s Elijah another. Anyway, during this time, while I was singing in Latin three days a week, I had an acquaintance ask me, “How long have you been here?”
“Here? You mean Seattle?” (This was the University of Washington.)
“No, I mean in the States.” Turned out he thought I was from somewhere in the UK, or maybe Italy, I’m not sure.
Back to the bit about “You don’t sound like you’re from New Orleans” — I suspect I’d’ve gotten that no matter what. Most of what I grew up hearing, and could have been expected to sound like, was some variation on yat (which my husband tells me I do start to pick up, after all, during an extended visit home) plus some fading shreds of a Cajun accent from Dad’s side of the family. But I think what my college acquaintances were expecting to hear was Southern Belle a la Scarlet O’Hara. And the only person I grew up hearing talking like that was originally from Arkansas.
Some here might be interested in doing the Harvard Dialect Survey. (It proclaimed I’m from Minneapolis, or perhaps Omaha, or perhaps Phoenix, or perhaps New England, which is all off the mark, but my dialect(s) is(/are) probably a challenge, being an airline brat from everywhere and nowhere.)
Rick Moen: Some here might be interested in doing the Harvard Dialect Survey.
I apparently broke it; it keeps saying that there is a problem, but to save the link and try again later.
This does not surprise me, as peoples’ guesses as to where I am from are usually all over the map, and mostly not close to the actual place.
@ Ann Leckie: Here’s the link I promised you at the con.
Translator Zeiat has an idea for improving tea.; hilarity ensues.
@ Lis: My mantra is, “I’m not a Texan, I just live here.” Having lived for at least a decade in several different states, I have found that they all have their good points and their bad points, and that none of them is “better” than all the others except from an entirely subjective standpoint. There are many good things to be said about Houston, and a few things I absolutely hate; and an awful lot of small-town/rural Texas really has nothing to brag about, but brags anyhow.
As a southerner, I have long noted that one of the last remaining socially-acceptable bigotries is bigotry and stereotyping against the US south, which I see in almost any media you might run across (including comments here on File770.)
(I also used to be really annoyed by the term/category “Southern Writer”, as if people from the southern US had to be pointed out especially when they managed to write a book, like a chicken learning to play a piano. But that particular term seems to have died down–at least I don’t notice it anymore.)
I read Jemisin’s “Obelisk Gate” while I was at Worldcon. I found it even more moving than “The Fifth Season”, possibly because less happened externally, more inside people’s heads. Showing how Our Multi-Named Heroine came to her “Orogene Lives Matter” moment was very powerful for me. I didn’t find it preachy or pasted-on, but resonant: this is how it would feel, this is how it does feel.
As for the world-building, things now seem to be coming down a bit heavier on the Magic side of the Magic-Science spectrum. That’s partly because of Jemisin’s choice of words, but also that the Psi Powers that got tossed around so freely in the 50s-70s now look so much more magic-y and less science-y.
There are two things about the world-building that make me scratch my head. One is saying “Father Earth” instead of the usual “Mother Earth” — and then not talking about who the Mother might be instead.
There’s also the question of whether the “Stillness” continent is big enough to be a Pangaea-type supercontinent. Looking at maps of possible future supercontinents, I can see that the Stillness — which is about 5000-mi wide at the equator, but stretches pole-to-pole (10K-12K miles or more) might have the same area as Novopangaea or Amasia, but rotated 90°.
Living in the Love of the Comment People?
Commentwealth?
The Iceman Commenteth?
What Is Meant By Commentariat
Regarding Jack Vance’s 100th birthday, the German book program “Druckfrisch” just remembered him and recommended a new German translation of The Blue World as well as a new German language Jack Vance biography.
Druckfrisch host Denis Scheck is an SFF fan, In past shows, he’s interviewed George R.R. Martin and recommended Pat Rothfuss and Seveneves among others.
Just registered my attending membership for WorldCon 75. Helsinki, here I come!
Gah! My eReader has died and I am only 21% into Obelisk Gate.
Comment to my kitchen, ’cause it’s sure to be raining outside.
The Tragedy of the Comments
LOL.
Just your battery, I hope? I recently lost my much beloved Sony PRS-350 (bought in November of 2010) to an acute case of USB port failure.
The Commentist Manifesto
Darren Garrison on August 28, 2016 at 3:03 pm said:
As a southerner, I have long noted that one of the last remaining socially-acceptable bigotries is bigotry and stereotyping against the US south, which I see in almost any media you might run across (including comments here on File770.)
I had to crack up at this.
My father was from rural Mississippi, and he would expound on this very point at great length, and all this in the era of Green Acres, Mayberry, HeeHaw, etc., maybe he had a point.
Further, despite having himself an accent you could collect with a spoon, he maintained that there was No Such Thing as a southern accent: it was just another way people had of mocking southerners, who in fact spoke just the same as everyone anywhere else.
Until the time came, after he’d been living in the north for about twenty odd years, that his sister drove up from Collins to have a nice long visit with us.
When she’d left he admitted, reluctantly, that maybe she spoke just a little differently than people in Maryland did.
But Mississippi has a beautiful accent, it’s another nice way English can sound
Though growing up in Maryland we kids all ended up with none of it; we just all grew up with serious vowel confusion.
How do you say a given word; well, how should I know?
Just say it any old way, there’s always multiple possibilities.
Who am I trying to sound like?
How many syllables do you think it ought to have?
Diphthongs R us….
Favorite Song featuring Comment
Oxford Comments
Halley’s Comment
Dave Truesdale’s Tangent Online has published an essay by John Shirley, “Why Conservatives are a Necessary Component of a Vital Society,” that’s mostly political but takes the occasional toe-dip into some SF/F controversies — including the one that opened up his social calendar last Saturday and Sunday.
In Britain, mocking other parts of the country is up there with complaining about the weather and mocking our own part of the country as a national pastime.
Re: Doctor Science on August 28, 2016 at 2:03 pm
Does the society have an imperfect grasp of germ theory, or just Sokrates? Several of the Masters were from the 21st century, and the Just City seems to make its own antibiotics. Crocus’s programmers were pretty clear about the importance of plumbing, as were the women working in the birthing house who sent for him to make the emergency repair. It’s only Sokrates who’s like “Eh, just pee in the gutter and wipe your hands on your kiton.”
My linguistics teacher pointed me out to the class: “Kip has a phony accent,” he said. Then he relented a little and clarified that I spoke no dialect, but my own idiolect, which came from looking up pronunciations in the dictionary. I had always assumed I spoke like other Coloradoans, who (of course) had no discernible accent, though it was possible to broaden into one, with colorful idioms thrown in.
Twenty years later, I was just finishing the run of a play where I had employed a British accent (Received Pronunciation, aka BBC English) that came via a series of lessons on a tape, bolstered by an attentive Assistant Director’s notes after each rehearsal and performance. Needless to say, I was quite good. I was being congratulated by a respected friend in the production, who was particularly pleased with the accent, “especially considering your Southern accent,” she said, smiling.
At that moment, I turned in one of the greatest performances of my life: I kept smiling, even though I felt like I had just been punched in the gut. I swear to you all, I do not, did not, have a southern accent. But I knew she meant no harm, so I dealt with it. How well, you all can see. Festering resentment, doubt, fear… I don’t talk like the people around me, and I particularly don’t talk like the lovely people I knew in Georgia or Virginia.
In Virginia, in fact, I loved talking to one of the older music professors, because he had an accent I just didn’t hear from anyone else. A sweetly rounded, courtly voice that seemed incapable of uttering a harsh word. I often suspected that it was an old Virginia accent, but never verified this. It was also my pleasure to talk about the Philadelphia-based composer, Septimus Winner, who was a favorite obscure name for us both.
(Winner’s compositions are better known than his name. “Der Deitscher’s Dog,” aka “Vhere Oh Vhere Has Mine Little Dog Gone,” and “Ten Little Indians” (which contains not only the rhyme of the little boys dying one by one, but has the chorus ‘One, little Two, little Three little Indians…”) are both his, and as “Alice Hawthorne,” he penned “Whispering Hope” and “Listen to the Mocking-Bird,” which is known to all fans of the Three Stooges.)
Dr. Commento
ps: I received a premonition of the next thread title, and maybe you did as well. Still a few bugs in the system. We will not mention this again.
Premature Commentation?
[Yes, it’s a reference to the “Commentriggers 8/29” top post that made it to my email notification but isn’t (yet?) live.]
Comment Attraction.
John Shirley has a point. I wouldn’t mind having a conservative movement around which was small enough to drown in the bathtub.
Darren Garrison:
Speaking as someone from New Jersey: yeah, no. You ain’t seen what it’s like to be mocked for where you come from. The difference is that Jerseyans don’t actually claim to be better than anyone else, we’re just more cynical — though we think of it as “realistic”. NJ State Bird: Mosquito. State Flower: Poison Ivy. State Motto: Says who? State Song: “Born to Run”, and don’t you forget it.
Kip W. wrote:
YMMV and all that, but if one of my teachers abruptly pointed me out to my classmates as a liar, I’d be filing a complaint in the dean’s office at the earliest opportunity.
@Doctor Science:
It kills me that people think NJ folks say “Joisey.” That’s not at all the sound of the vowel. I’ve never heard a native say that. Sounds more like “Jayzey” (as reflected in the song covered by Joe Jackson, “Symphony Sid,” I think it was) to me. AND TO ALL RIGHT-THINKING PEOPLE.
@David K.M. Klaus:
The teacher was a friend of mine, and he explained, as I said. I’d already taken German from him, and I worked in the office of the foreign languages department, of which he was the head. I was proud of my idiolect, and clung to it for years.
Absolutely 😉
@Doctor Science NJ State Bird: Mosquito. State Flower: Poison Ivy. State Motto: Says who? State Song: “Born to Run”, and don’t you forget it.
They left that out of the welcome new NJ resident package. Thanks for making sure I don’t get run out of the state. 😉
I mostly agree with that statement – but the corollary to that is “It is detrimental to a vital society when its conservative movements have become dysfunctional”.
Nickp:
Sokrates doesn’t know, but Ikaros doesn’t either — which is part of one strand throughout, that because more of the female Masters come from scientific centuries, science & tech tend to be disrespected by the male Masters.
Antibiotics are helpful, but it would take trained midwives & surgeons and a LOT more medicines to keep the death rate for women down. Without a lot of young men dying by accidents or violence, there’d be a gradual tilt of the adult sex ratio as women died in childbirth.
Walton shows how the women Masters start to get worn out by the stress and exhaustion of “childbirth season”, but she dodges what the effects would be of dealing with so much pain and death: of woman, of infants. Not to mention how she has one infant be exposed for “imperfection”, but no more — though the rate for birth defects should be several per hundred, at least.
And then there’s the problem of child-rearing. I realized, thinking about it, that the infant-creche and pooled-nursing system they set up would probably lead to a lot of infants dying from “failure to thrive” and attachment disorder.
rcade: Dave Truesdale’s Tangent Online has published an essay by John Shirley, “Why Conservatives are a Necessary Component of a Vital Society,” that’s mostly political but takes the occasional toe-dip into some SF/F controversies — including the one that opened up his social calendar last Saturday and Sunday.
Well, that’s a very nice essay — but it conflates the issue of conservatives being a valid part of US culture, with the issue of Truesdale abusing a position of power with which he had been entrusted and hijacking a panel for his own personal soapbox. It’s so nice for Mr. Shirley that he didn’t see anything wrong with Truesdale’s behavior — but I vehemently disagree with his perception.
Furthermore, he quotes Lawrence Person’s comment about Elizabeth Moon’s essay which was “mildly critical to Islam” (rolleyes) as if it actually proves something. Of course, Shirley didn’t see anything wrong with Moon’s behavior, either. Not only was that essay really offensive to Muslims, it was almost as offensive to me in the way that she arrogantly presumed to speak for all Americans. 🙄
Comment Feel The Noize
@rcade Dave Truesdale’s Tangent Online has published an essay by John Shirley, “Why Conservatives are a Necessary Component of a Vital Society,”
The term political correctness was thrown around a few times in the article. Again we have a straight white male declaring pearl-clutching isn’t a term used to demean women and PoC. I’m sick and tired of oblivious privilege showing and guys being unwilling to use Google before spouting off.
Mike, your new “Commentriggers” post that I saw in my email isn’t showing up.
@Kip W:
According to the sources I’ve read, the JZ in “go real crazy over JZ” stands for the radio station WJZ on which Symphony Sid had his show.
@microtherion:
“Dear Diary: Despite my best efforts, I learned something today…”
Bonnie McDaniel: Mike, your new “Commentriggers” post that I saw in my email isn’t showing up.
This is the open thread for today. That’s the open thread for tomorrow, which he has created early and set to go live tomorrow.
Kip W on August 28, 2016 at 5:38 pm said:
I was told once that I have a slight Oklahoma accent. I have to assume it’s actually the regional accent of my parents – southeastern Kansas and northeastern Oklahoma – because the total amount of time I’ve spent in that area in my life is about a week. (My father could put Oklahoma on when he wanted.)
I’m just here to second HRJ’s “A Cup of Constant Comments”. Because we are constant.
I have made my Hugo longlist post for 2016. Mostly this is just the stats arranged in a slightly different manner and cleaned up in some places, but it is part of my ongoing project to collect the longlist for as many years as I can find data.
@Doctor Science:
Oh yeah? What exit? ;->
Well hell, JJ, I too am posting to say that I GOT AN EMAIL with a link to the Commentriggers post, saying it was available right now today CLICK THIS LINK, and that that link does not work. Letting Mike know that there is a problem.
Maybe the problem is that we were informed early, but either way, you can’t just handwave this off, there is a problem to report. We were told that ‘Commentriggers’ was there, and it isn’t. Can you fix this?
@Kip W:
All the years I was living in Mercer County, NJ, the only time I heard that was if I called Directory Assistance and got someone very obviously from NYC (typically with a Bronx accent you could cut with a knife). This was of course back in a long-ago decade when Directory Assistance was still a thing and staffed by humans.
Blame the idiotbox for that confusion. And confusion about the 1992 film “My Cousin Vinnie”, even though that’s a Brooklyn accent Joe Pesci (who’s actually from Ocean County, NJ) is putting on, and his character Vinnie Gambini and his feckless cousins are wiseguys from NYC, not Jersey.
FWIW, a New Jersey US Attorney praised the film as a teaching tool, thanks to how accurately it portrays the life of a lawyer, irrespective of the auslander accents.
Al the Great and Powerful: Maybe the problem is that we were informed early, but either way, you can’t just handwave this off, there is a problem to report. We were told that ‘Commentriggers’ was there, and it isn’t. Can you fix this?
I’m just the measly File770 crowdfunding coordinator and occasional IT-technical-question-answerer. You’ll have to find someone else who actually has some power. 😉
There very likely isn’t. You’re assuming that since you got an e-mail, the post not being here is a problem. But the e-mail is most likely the mistake, because the post wasn’t supposed to go live yet. So the post got deleted, and that’s why the link in your e-mail doesn’t work.
The problem is almost certainly that you were informed early. And without a time machine, that can’t be undone.
As such, ignore the e-mail, and boom, fixed.
Wait until he posts it live for real, and not by mistake. That’ll be the fix.
In the meantime, don’t get wound up about requiring a fix or an explanation. Mike’s in the hospital, he’s got other things to focus on. Post in the threads that are here, and don’t worry about the one that isn’t, until it actually shows up.
So someone fire the file770 time machine back up.
Accent anecdotes:
I’ve occasionally encountered amazement, surprise, and sometimes outright disbelief when I say I’m from New Orleans. “You don’t sound like it.” And, well, this is true. I don’t sound like my parents or neighbors or school friends. I’m not the only one of the latter who’s sung in choruses and choirs from an early an age, but I seem to have picked up, more than the rest of them did, Proper Enunciation for Singing As Taught By Various Chorale Directors as my personal accent. I don’t know why. I don’t think it’s just the “accent sponge” factor, or surely I’d have picked up the regional accent that I heard spoken around me the rest of the day when I wasn’t at chorus rehearsal? It’s weird. Maybe I just took what the chorus director painstakingly taught us about sung enunciation, and instinctively extrapolated them into an idea of absolute objective rules for speaking correctly. I took the oddest things as gospel when I was a kid.
(Another factor might have been that I read a lot and tended to visualize words as I spoke them. If there was an “r” in a word like “heart” or “darling” I was going to pronounce it, darn it, even if no one else was going to!)
But it was probably just the accent sponge thing in full swing when, in college, I sang with the oratorio. Oratorium? Whatever you call the group that sings that style of music. Most of the time we just sight-sang Missas and Requiems, but once a year there’d be big performance–Verdi’s Requiem one year, Mendelssohn’s Elijah another. Anyway, during this time, while I was singing in Latin three days a week, I had an acquaintance ask me, “How long have you been here?”
“Here? You mean Seattle?” (This was the University of Washington.)
“No, I mean in the States.” Turned out he thought I was from somewhere in the UK, or maybe Italy, I’m not sure.
Back to the bit about “You don’t sound like you’re from New Orleans” — I suspect I’d’ve gotten that no matter what. Most of what I grew up hearing, and could have been expected to sound like, was some variation on yat (which my husband tells me I do start to pick up, after all, during an extended visit home) plus some fading shreds of a Cajun accent from Dad’s side of the family. But I think what my college acquaintances were expecting to hear was Southern Belle a la Scarlet O’Hara. And the only person I grew up hearing talking like that was originally from Arkansas.
Some here might be interested in doing the Harvard Dialect Survey. (It proclaimed I’m from Minneapolis, or perhaps Omaha, or perhaps Phoenix, or perhaps New England, which is all off the mark, but my dialect(s) is(/are) probably a challenge, being an airline brat from everywhere and nowhere.)
Rick Moen: Some here might be interested in doing the Harvard Dialect Survey.
I apparently broke it; it keeps saying that there is a problem, but to save the link and try again later.
This does not surprise me, as peoples’ guesses as to where I am from are usually all over the map, and mostly not close to the actual place.
@ Ann Leckie: Here’s the link I promised you at the con.
Translator Zeiat has an idea for improving tea.; hilarity ensues.
@ Lis: My mantra is, “I’m not a Texan, I just live here.” Having lived for at least a decade in several different states, I have found that they all have their good points and their bad points, and that none of them is “better” than all the others except from an entirely subjective standpoint. There are many good things to be said about Houston, and a few things I absolutely hate; and an awful lot of small-town/rural Texas really has nothing to brag about, but brags anyhow.