#what a prescriptivist is

[headful-of-worms]

“I’ve decenter the male gaze in my life”

Really? You’ve decided to stop objecting women in your art? I didn’t realize that was such a big part of your life. I’m glad you’ve figured out a better way to depict women.

Oh, you just mean you’re taking about your dislike of men more often? You’re just using the new phrase you’ve heard on tik tok?

Well I guess I’m happy for you or whatever

[lesmiserablol]

you either die a “actually, he’s not frankenstein, he’s frankenstein’s monster” or you live long enough to become a “actually, he’s frankenstein’s creation”

[nerdyqueerandjewish]

genre of Reddit thread I love seeing unfold

- OP has a personal interpretation of an existing word that contradicts all widely accepted meanings

- OP make a statement specifically using this unusual personal definition

- OP get annoyed when other people don’t agree

- bonus round: OP explains that this is based off of their own personal definition of the word (it’s personal so you can’t say it’s wrong!) gets further annoyed when people are like “ok, what you’re describing is something different tho”

[touchlikethesun]

*putting on my best rp accent and sweating profusely as i see the sniper take aim*

[nathaniacolver]

katie mcgrath...i love you, i really do, but WHY did you have to pronounce "anions" the ways you did the WHOLE EPISODE (s02e20.) (they were all wrong)

(i must use ipa bc ANY OTHER WAY is disgusting)

[ǽniə̀nz]

and

[ənɑ͡ɪ́ənz]

like i actually hate her! she said it wrong with her full chest AS LENA LUTHOR like girllllll

[linguenuvolose]

I have my iron supplements at work and yesterday I had three left so I told my colleague I was taking the antepenultimo one he said that’s not a word we used I said but I do because I’m a #linguist <3

[quatregats]

Thank you for Irish English speakers for using "amn't" and singlehandedly shoring up this language

[gothprentiss]

"real people can't queerbait" has got to be one of the most annoying things people on the internet are still fucking saying. okay buddy sure. profiteering off of queer aesthetics. fruity fishing. like literally every day i see someone use gaslighting to mean "a small and really quite transparent lie" with zero friction whatsoever but every time someone says harry styles looking swagless in couture is queerbaiting there's 500 gaylors (i assume they are gaylors) lining up to be like ummmm actually the line between fiction and reality is so stark and bright that this is a distinction we can make

[lunaticamic]

why are essays so fucking wordy

[engagemythrusters]

Wrong. English hosts so many beautiful and wonderful dialects. The diversity in American English alone is something to behold. To denounce all English is to denounce the dialects of the working classes, of the small religious communities, of the many oppressed races and ethnicities, of immigrants and refugees and even people who just wanted to pick up a second or third or fourth language.

There is no immorality in the language those people speak.

not only are there no bad languages there are also no bad or annoying dialects

[grunge-mermaid]

I swear to god if I hear "blurple" one more time...

indigo.

the word you are looking for is indigo.

it's not even a rare or obscure word or colour. it's so fucking common that it is in the colours of the rainbow acronym

[llycaons]

people on here quote terry pratchett like he's marx

[raointean]

Silmarillion Fandom Terminology Quiz

So, I'm doing a project for linguistics class and I'm studying fandom terminology in the Silmarillion fandom and whether or not demographics make a difference. The only demographics are age category, gender, continent, language background, and fandom background, after which you get into more fun questions, including but not limited to...

What is a Blorbo?

The Thorn Debate

What is "Accidental Baby Acquisition"?

Who is Crablor

What is a "PWP"

The quiz has three sections: Demographics, General Fandom Terms, and Silmarillion Specific Terms. Have fun with it, share it with your Silm friends!

Edit: Will close November 15th so I have time to process the results before presenting them.

Edit edit: Due to the sheer number of responses (I may have forgotten how... academically inclined this fandom is lol) I will be closing the survey on November 1st. Thank you all for your lovely contributions so far! I think I saw Fëanor called a "bitch-ass prescriptivist" and I think my professor will get a kick out of that 🤣

[heatheniousmaterials]

I used to be extremely against them. But I got over myself.

you can pry starting sentences with 'and' or 'but' out of my cold, dead hands

[fatalism-and-villainy]

My other frustration with how D/s gets discussed in fandom is that, yes, sometimes people can be overly prescriptivist and essentialist in how they argue for their headcanons about characters' role preferences. Or they just conflate the external kayfabe of a given role with a character's overall personality (there are many doms who are shy and neurotic, lol. Just for one example).

But this sort of thing gets conflated with having literally any character-based justification for imagining them preferring a given role (or actively disliking another one). No, there's no particular "type" of person who enjoys dominance or submission, but there's also no particular "type" of person who enjoys, idk, hockey, or scrapbooking. People come up with headcanons for characters' other hobbies or interests all the time, and will use traits or preferences that they show in canon to justify them. Why is it suddenly off-limits to take into account how a character interacts with others, what they desire from relationships, or what their overall fantasies are when imagining how they might relate to kink? People's sexualities are generally not separable from their entire self, or how they process or relate to people and objects in a non-sexual context.

Or why is it permissible to do that but only if you're open to seeing them in either role? Sure, many of the same inclinations and preferences in their abstract form can manifest in either dominance or submission, but this varies greatly from person to person. Part of the process of coming up with headcanons is imagining a character as a specific person, rather than an abstract construct or cluster of signifiers, and thus a specific manifestation of a wide array of potentialities. "I think they'd find this unpleasant, unfulfilling, or boring, for xyz reasons" can be just as meaningful character work as "Here's a way they could possibly be into this."

A specific subset of my frustration with this sort of thing as well is the subtext I sometimes pick up on that the only reason you'd imagine a character as dominant is because you're horny for them, and giving them the "chance" to be submissive is the only way of bestowing care or vulnerability or interiority in general onto them. (And thus the idea that imagining both characters as switches is the only way for them both to get their needs met.) And I really wish people would stop framing things this way.

[concerningwolves]

I just finished First You Write A Sentence by Joe Moran & I loved it (so much so that I procrastinated on the last chapter for like a month bc I didn't want it to be over). in no particular order, are some of my favourite things about it/reasons why I think it's great for writers to read:

It really feels like a nice guy is gently but enthusiastically nerding out about sentences and creative writing, in a non-preachy way

encourages writers to think about their voice! Moran isn't a prescriptivist. He talks about why certain styles of writing sentences feel more natural to read, psychologically and linguistically, but also explores lots of ways in which the writing "rules" have been (successfully) broken and explains why these worked

and, similarly, explores different pieces of advice from multiple angles – e.g., instead of "you should avoid the passive voice", Moran's approach is "here's what the passive voice does well, why it's sometimes necessary, and why it weakens our writing at other times"

Little anecdotes that kept it interesting. A lot of "how to be a writer" books wear me out because the focus is so heavily on writing that I get over-saturated with advice, but Moran goes on well-timed and relevant meanders that both reinforce and let you take a lil break from the advice

Takes you through from the small, mechanical level of What Is A Sentence (i.e., nouns & verbs), to word order, to sentence length, to the effects of different punctuation marks, to how to connect sentences seamlessly, to the larger scale of fitting everything into paragraphs and prose

It put into words so many things that I do semi-intuitively bc I've been writing for so long now, but never really thought about. And now that I'm actually thinking about them, I can feel the skills getting stronger!!

Like, you can shift where your reader's attention falls by placing a word or phrase at different points in a sentence. Which i realised I'd been doing anyway, but now I can consciously think about it when I write and revise, and it's really fun to play around with :D

Big focus on clarity and conciseness, but not at the cost of voice and personal style. Really helped me see how to find a balance between the two, especially in my academic writing.

The writing of the book itself feels so graceful and easy to read that it's like you're in safe, knowledgeable hands. this is someone who absolutely practises what he preaches (although, as I said, it doesn't feel like you're being preached at)

There's probably more, and if I get the time and mental space I certainly want to summarise my favourite points from this book, but for now my parting endorsement is that I already want to read it again, this time with a notebook and page markers on hand.