#words of the trade

[theoutcastrogue]

Commentary more than welcome! Which word flatters you, which intrigues you or attracts you? (In the broad sense, though the narrow sense is very much viable.) Which repels you, and which, weirdly, does both? Terry Pratchett wrote that rogue is "a word with a twinkle in its eye", but there's no shortage of words like that. How do you like them?

[theoutcastrogue]

most languages see this thing and go aww, how cute, it's a fire-fly/bug, or glow-worm/beetle, or light-fly/beetle, or little light/lamp, or more poetically a wandering little light, and then greek goes. it's an ass-fire.

[theoutcastrogue]

Adventuring Party S21E03: "Wonder Awaits"

Siobhan Thompson on how to solve a cryptogram.

[batcavescolony]

Katniss is such an unreliable narrator. She says "Then something unexpected happens. At least, I don't expect it because I don't think of District 12 as a place that cares about me" girl you deliver strawberries to the Mayor, you hunt and trade for the district, when you fell at Prim being chosen someone caught you, when you went to Prim people parted for you, when you volunteered EVERYONE stopped. Idk how to tell you but I think you're a pillar of the community.

[theoutcastrogue]

Apollo Sphaerobolus (Ἀπόλλων Σφαιροβόλος)

like discobolus but throwing a ball instead of a discus

The tribes of Tumblr appeared to worship Apollo as their primary patron deity, most often under the epithet Apollo Spairahemon ("Apollo the Ball-Thrower") as a god of prophecy and sport. His name was typically invoked to celebrate a user blessed with uncommon prescience. Moments of prophecy were considered highly sacred and were often recorded, and such texts are sometimes accompanied by an artistic depiction of the god — either his traditional masculine image or, unusually, in the form of a young woman, which appears to have been an earlier style before a conservative shift toward more conventional iconography — preparing to cast a round rubber ball that our scholars believe was used in the sport known as "dodge ball". Much as other cults regarded his arrows as bringers of disease and health, this community believed that being struck by this ball would bestow prophetic visions.

Some icons are reproduced below:

An earlier depiction (c. 2020) of Apollo as a girl clad in a simple tunic and playing with other children. Figures are smiling and the image is brightly colored, indicating a celebratory outlook toward knowledge of the future.

A later piece (c. 2022) that resembles the traditional appearance of Apollo. References to childhood and play are omitted, and the god carries a more frightening aspect; perhaps this icon represented grim omens rather than good tidings.

[theoutcastrogue]

Scene from The New Art and Mystery of Gossiping, Being a Genuine Account of All the Women’s Clubs in and about the City and Suburbs of London, c.1760 showing some of the swear words that most raised pulses in early modern England.

"I stumbled upon this question as a historical consultant for a new drama set in the 16th century, when I needed to assess whether certain curse words in the script would have been familiar to the Tudors. The revelation – given away in the title of Melissa Mohr’s wonderful book Holy Sh*t – is that all swear words concern what is sacred or what is scatological. In the Middle Ages, the worst words had been about what was holy; by the 18th century they were about bodily functions. The 16th century was a period when what was considered obscene was in flux.

The most offensive words still used God’s name: God’s blood, God’s wounds, God’s bones, death, flesh, foot, heart, arms, nails, body, sides, guts, tongue, eyes. A statute of 1606 forbade the use of words that ‘iestingly or prophanely’ spoke the name of God in plays. Damn and hell were early modern variations of such blasphemous oaths (bloody came later), as were the euphemistic asseverations, gad, gog and egad.

Many words we consider, at best, crude were medieval common-or-garden words of description – arse, shit, fart, bollocks, prick, piss, turd – and were not considered obscene. To say ‘I’m going to piss’ was the equivalent of saying ‘I’m going to wee’ today and was politer than the new 16th-century vulgarity, ‘I’m going to take a leak’. Putting body parts or products where they shouldn’t normally be created delightfully defiant phrases such as ‘turd in your teeth’, which appears in the 1509 compendium of the Oxford don John Stanbridge. Non-literal uses of these words – which is what tends to be required for swearing – like ‘take the piss’, ‘on the piss’, ‘piss off’ – all seem to be 20th-century flourishes. For the latter, the Tudors would have substituted something diabolical – ‘the devil rot thee’ – or epidemiological – ‘a pox on you’.

But the scatological was starting to become obscene. Sard, swive and fuck were all slightly rude words for sexual intercourse. An early recorded use of the f-word was a piece of marginalia by an anonymous monk writing in 1528 in a manuscript copy of Cicero’s De officiis (a treatise on moral philosophy). The inscription reads: ‘O d fuckin Abbot’. Given that the use of the f-word as an intensifier didn’t catch on for another three centuries, this is likely a punchy comment on the abbot’s immoral behaviour.

Frig and jape were also on the cusp of offensiveness. Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 French-English dictionary translates the French fringue as ‘to lecher or lasciviously frig with the tail’ (tail was a euphemism for penis). Cunt was also starting to move from being the most direct word to describe a part of the anatomy into obscenity. Shakespeare makes jokes in Hamlet about ‘country matters’ in which he clearly means (as the next line says) what ‘lie[s] between maids’ legs’. Bugger remained a non-explicit word for anal sex.

Today many of these words have an admirable grammatical flexibility for which the Tudors had no clear substitute. For a phrase to express unfortunate circumstances that seem impossible to overcome (‘we’re fucked’), the Historical Thesaurus of English tells us that they would have proclaimed themselves to be ‘in hot water’ (first use 1537), ‘in a pickle’ (1562), ‘in straits’ (1565) or, in the most extreme predicament, at one’s ‘utter shift’ (c.1604). To ‘fuck up’ or spoil something, they’d have used ‘to bodge’ or ‘to botch’. To say something was codswallop, baloney, bollocks, they’d have gone with trumpery, baggage, rubbish or the wonderful reduplicating terms that appear in the 1570s and 80s: flim-flam, fiddle-faddle, or fible-fable.

But, holy words aside, if you really wanted to offend someone in the 16th century, you’d call them a whore, knave, thief, harlot, cuckold, or false. They still cared more about a reputation for behaving badly than how to describe the behaviour itself."

– Suzannah Lipscomb

[dingledraw]

South Downs cottage fluff based on the Dolly Parton song “Berrypie” 🩷

[ceevee5]

[theoutcastrogue]

everyone say thank you to green's dictionary of slang (and thieves' cant of course)

hey boy don't kill yourself. green's dictionary of slang is available online and allows you to explore 500 years of english vulgarity. you can search by part of speech, source, time period, etymology, and usage. there's a whole category for gay slang. they even have specific citations listed so you can see the exact context for yourself. boy did you know that in 1927 "to kneel at the altar" was slang for "to sodomize"

[mearchy]

Like Mand’alor Din Djarin who is completely politically incompetent is very funny and good but what about Mand’alor Din Djarin who just comes out of nowhere and absolutely slaughters (metaphorical) these career politicians across the negotiating table bc he has 20 years of experience cutting contracts with the worst and most unbearable people in the galaxy. And he had to figure out ways to say I Am Not Fucking Doing That without ever technically breaking his code of honor by violating his contract or whatever. 

[jangillman]

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[theoutcastrogue]

"British comedian Michael McIntyre has a standard bit in his standup routines concerning the many (many!) slang terms posh British people use to describe being drunk. These include "wellied," "trousered," and "ratarsed," to name a few. McIntyre's bit rests on his assertion that pretty much any English word can be modified into a so-called "drunkonym," bolstered by a few handy examples: "I was utterly gazeboed," or "I am going to get totally and utterly carparked."

It's a clever riff that sparked the interest of two German linguists. Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer of Chemnitz University of Technology and Peter Uhrig of FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg decided to draw on their expertise to test McIntyre's claim that any word in the English language could be modified to mean "being in a state of high inebriation." Given their prevalence, "It is highly surprising that drunkonyms are still under-researched from a linguistic perspective," the authors wrote in their new paper published in the Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association. Bonus: the authors included an extensive appendix of 546 English synonyms for "drunk," drawn from various sources, which makes for entertaining reading.

There is a long tradition of coming up with colorful expressions for drunkenness in the English language, with the Oxford English Dictionary listing a usage as early as 1382: "merry," meaning "boisterous or cheerful due to alcohol; slight drunk, tipsy." Another OED entry from 1630 lists "blinde" (as in blind drunk) as a drunkonym. Even Benjamin Franklin got into the act with his 1737 Drinker's Dictionary, listing 288 words and phrases for denoting drunkenness. By 1975, there were more than 353 synonyms for "drunk" listed in that year's edition of the Dictionary of American Slang. By 1981, linguist Harry Levine noted 900 terms used as drunkonyms.

So the sheer number of drunkonyms has been increasing, with BBC culture reporter Susie Dent estimating in 2017 that there are some 3,000 English slang synonyms for being drunk, including "ramsquaddled," "obfusticated," "tight as a tick," and my personal favorite, "been too free with Sir Richard." " [keep reading]

[theoutcastrogue]

look, just because y'all get aroused when you hear "yes, chef" doesn't mean

The origin of "chef" as an English word to mean "one who cooks" comes from the French term chef de cuisine, a title still used in restaurants to this day to denote a cook in a managerial role. What makes this an interesting bit of etymology is that while in English, "chef" is only ever used in the context of cooking and restaurants, in French chef just means "chief", "head" or "leader" and there are many common titles in French that include this word. A Head of State is the Chef d'Etat, a musical conductor is the chef d'orchestre, a business owner is the chef d'entreprise, and so on and so forth. So with this in mind, one could make the argument that as a gender neutral term denoting authority, "chef" could potentially have utility in BDSM as a

[unbfacts]

Salt was once so valuable that it served as currency in various cultures. The word "salary" comes from the Latin "salarium," rooted in "sal" (salt).

[relaxxattack]

via the last ask, is Karkat a freak or would it just be a form of troll polyamory? or am I forgetting some important quadrant lore or smth and this is a dumb question

KIDS REALLY DON’T KNOW THAT KARKAT’S GAY ANYMORE… i joked about this earlier but i didn't think it was true 😭😭

ok i don't blame you for not knowing since, imo, fandom seems to have forgotten this when it comes to karkat and alternian analysis. somehow. even though it's his whole thing.. let me explain.

basically, karkat vantas is queer.

his arc sort of pointedly mirrors dave’s in that it’s about how hard he’s compensating for that - constantly obsessing over romance and “doing it right”, then enforcing that on himself and others.

karkat starts as a bootlicker. he wants to be in the military, he wants to fill his quadrants, he wants to lead, he wants to be the best and most successful troll that's ever lived... to make up for the fact that he's mutated. this isn't just implied, it's stated; karkat is desperate to prove he can be the Standard Alternian Troll.

karkat is a mutant marked for extermination, which obviously is different to sexuality. but it's worth noting that karkat's arc is already about putting up fronts for things about him that are "wrong"...

...especially when it's revealed that his sexuality is also "wrong".

trolls believe in having one destined partner per quadrant- four separate relationships that must not mix. it's enforced both culturally and by drones. but the concept of a troll romance that goes "beyond the four quadrants" is introduced to us by karkat's ancestor. we come to realize that karkat's romantic issues might not just be circumstantial-- they might be a legitimately different form of attraction he feels.

towards the end of the story, when davekat is officially canonized, the story plays a little cheekily about "nobody knowing" which quadrant dave and karkat settled in.

because just like how dave came to terms with how bullshit the cultural restrictions of human sexuality are, and talks about this at length; karkat may have realized that it's okay to break the rules.

while some people think that this means karkat was destined for "human romance"... i personally think that's a bit silly, since karkat has proven he can't stick to pure red feelings for someone. it's more likely that his new relationship involves all those quadrants he loves, simultaneously. who cares about rules?

TL;DR: yes, karkat vantas is queer for a troll and that's all there is to say on the matter.

[theoutcastrogue]

I dunno, more than 10 for sure. But honestly, I can say "fuck" (or equivalent), in more languages than I can say "thank you". Largely, but not ONLY, thanks to the kurwa and siktir nations.

*waves happily to the kurwa and siktir nations*

Please reblog, I'm curious