myqueerass:

nerdloveandlolz:

That stupid post about “pussy” being short for “pusillanimous” pisses me off so fucking much and I’m going to tell you why. (PS: Masters degree in English linguistics talking here ya’ll.)

In short, no. “Don’t be a pussy” is not short for “don’t be a pusillanimous.” No. It isn’t. And people should stop saying it. You need some reasons to believe me?

1. It doesn’t make sense grammatically. Pusillanimous is an adjective — a describing words — not a noun. In the same way you can’t say “Don’t be a quiet” or “Don’t be a small” or “Don’t be a green” or “Don’t be a spicy”, you can’t say “Don’t be a pusillanimous.” You can’t tell people not to be a/an adjective.

2. It isn’t backed up by any scholarship whatsoever. Per Mirriam-Webster, the version of “pussy” that means “weak” or “timid” is short for “pussycat.” Not pusillanmous. Look up the word “pants” and you’ll see that it’s short for pantaloons, or the word “perks” and you’ll see it’s short for perquisites. Dictionaries do note origins like that. They don’t, however, state that pussy is short for pusillanimous, because it’s NOT.

3. There is plenty of documentation to connect the word “pussy” to the concept of women. It was for a while a term of endearment for women, especially for very old or very young women. (Read any Agatha Christie book starring Miss Marple and you will probably encounter someone who refers to Miss Marple as “a sweet old puss” or “a nice old pussycat.” In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Eva’s father calls her “pussy.”)

It also is well known as a slang for a woman’s genitals. Per etymology online, it is “Perhaps from Old Norse puss ‘pocket, pouch’ (cf. Low German puse ‘vulva’)” but might also be connected to cats, based on the  “notion of ‘soft, warm, furry thing’; cf. French le chat, which also has a double meaning, feline and genital.’  “ It isn’t just a coincidence of words, morphemes or phonemes; there seems to be a cultural connection between the idea of a cat and the idea of a woman.

4. There is also plenty of documentation for it being used to degrade men for being seen as weak or feminine. Again per etymology online, from the 1580s it was used of effeminate men. For example, “To play pussy was World War II RAF slang for ‘to take advantage of cloud cover, jumping from cloud to cloud to shadow a potential victim or avoid recognition.’”  At dictionary.com, the third meaning of the word “pussy” has four senses: 1) the vulva, 2) sex with a woman, 3) a woman viewed as a sex object and 4) a weak, timid, or effeminate man. Note that they didn’t separate these four senses into completely different definitions, either. The definition of pussy as “weak man” is seen as intrinsically related to pussy meaning “the sexual aspect of a woman.”

5. People hear what they hear, no matter what you think you’re saying. What if I decided to say that the word “dick” is short for “dictator”? And then whenever I called someone a dick I said, “but I don’t mean it as in penis, I mean it as in short for dictator!” Whether or not it was true, it wouldn’t matter. What people would hear is dick as in penis, and that would be what they would understand. Similarly, even if, buried in the far mists of time, pussy really were short for pusillanimous — which I again state definitively it is not — but even if it were, that isn’t how people understand it now.

6. Sometimes words are offensive just because of what they sound like. Consider, for example, the word “niggardly.” Did you sort of wince when you read that? Because I winced a little as I typed it. The thing about that word is it has nothing whatsoever to do, etymologically, with the n-word. The n-word derives from the Latin word for “black” (for example, the word ‘negro’ means ‘black’ in Spanish). Niggardly derives from a totally different source and means “miserly” or “ungenerous.” But we all know what it sounds like. So it has become a word that most people don’t want to use anymore. And you know what? That’s fine. I love language, and I’m sad to see a word die, but we have “miserly” and “ungenerous” right here to fill that particular void, and I am fine to wave goodbye to “niggardly” because it sounds like a very offensive word. So what I’m saying is, if a word seems offensive, then it is. That’s how language works. In a polite society, we don’t deliberately use offensive words when other words are available that aren’t offensive.

7. Using the word to draw a connection between women’s sexuality and weak, useless men indicates that feminine sexuality is weak and that men shouldn’t act like women unless they want to be ridiculed. And that’s fucking ignorant and sexist against both genders.

8. Because it is clearly offensive, just stop. STOP. And don’t fucking quote Stephen Fry’s “who cares if it’s offensive” quote at me. You’re probably taking it out of context anyway. Listen: offensiveness is important because this is a cooperative species and we should fucking work together to not be assholes. Simple enough.

TL;DR? Pussy is not short for pusillanimous. Going back through the research, the word is closely related to women, women’s genitalia, and weak, effeminate men. The use of the word to mean “coward” is offensive to both genders — somewhat more to women than to men — and if you have an ounce of maturity you will stop using it that way.

Context matters.

salazar-slanderin:

The different levels of tumblr anonymity fascinated me.

Like you have those who have a main blog, completely cut off from the rest of their life -they don’t even tell people in real life they know what Tumblr is. Maybe they have an even more obscure side blog. No personal info, no personal photos

Then there are people who have a super low profile main, but like 10k followers on a sub and they never tell anyone what their main is vise/versa

Then there are people who blog and talk about their real life so you get a glimpse but realistically you’ll never know who they are or anything about them, maybe the occasional face reveal but primarily reblogs and shitposts. They may have a a couple of real life friends as mutuals

Right here falls people who have their real self as their avatar

And then there are people who have their Tumblr, Facebook and email all connected and that shit makes me uncomfortable

sexualthorientation:

writernotwaiting:

philosopherking1887:

claricechiarasorcha:

raven-brings-light:

johanirae:

riverofwhispers:

vaspider:

s-leary:

laughlikesomethingbroken:

ceruleancynic:

elodieunderglass:

spcsnaptags:

elodieunderglass:

seekingwillow:

cribbagematch:

one time in sixth grade i did my math homework and then because i was excited that i had grasped the lesson so well, i did the next day’s homework too

the next day in class i told my teacher, and she looked constipated for a second, and then said dismissively, “well, then you’re not very good at following directions, are you.”

#I identify strongly with this#I got reprimanded on multiple ocasions for reading ahead and/or already having knowledge

__

 Cause tags are truth. Maaan ,that one time a teacher stole my encyclopedia cause it proved her wrong.

when I was eight and in public school, we could do a report based on any historical character who had a book about them in the school library.

I picked Harriet Tubman because Harriet Tubman, and I wrote about how her master had thrown an anvil at her head, leaving her with a permanent dent in her forehead. I know that the anvil part was definitely in the school library book.

My teacher circled the word “anvil” and took off points.

“I HAVE SPELLED ANVIL CORRECTLY,” I roared in tiny confrontation.

“No,” she said, and it transpired that she didn’t know or care that “anvil” is a word or that “anvils” are a thing.

And so despite my helpful attempts to explain what anvils were, including references to blacksmiths and the Roadrunner, I had points taken off OH MY GOD.

YES, I AM STILL MAD ABOUT THIS TWENTY YEARS LATER.
FUCK YOU, LADY. YOU ARE DOUBTLESSLY DEAD BY NOW AND I HOPE YOU KNOW YOUR STUDENTS STILL HATE YOU.

ANVILS ARE A THING.

From “Daring Greatly” by Brene Browne:

“…85 percent of the men and women we interviewed for the shame research could recall a school incident from their childhood that was so shaming, it changed how they thought of themselves as learners.”

I think about this quote a lot when I think of school.

Sometimes you just see a combination of posts that really crystallizes something for you. thank you spcsnaptags for putting these thoughts together this way.

In second grade I used the word “boon” in a composition and my teacher marked it wrong because, she said, it was not a word. 

I brought in the Chambers English Dictionary the next day to show her. 

That was the same school where even after I had demonstrated to them that I could read by READING A PAGE OF A BOOK OUT LOUD IN FRONT OF THEM, I was judged to be in the somethingth percentile for learning to read. Boy, was that a fun two years in the American public school system. 

I had an english teacher tell me that she was one of the smartest people I would ever met when I corrected her on the definition of gaslighting

Wow, @elodieunderglass and I apparently wrote the exact same Harriet Tubman paper.

I lost points on a third grade spelling test for answering “chaise,” because I had known how to spell “chase” since I was four and could not fathom why it would be on my vocabulary list at eight.

My 5th grade teacher tried to tell my father not to do my work for me, because I did a project on how similar the moon landings were to Jules Verne’s books on going to the moon, and she didn’t believe I had actually done the work.

I was so angry at her. My father and I traded off reading pages of those books, and I had just finished From The Earth To The Moon. 

This is the same teacher that tried to tell me that ‘ion’ wasn’t a word and took away privileges for getting up and getting the dictionary and showing her that it was too a word. 

One time my English teacher put me in detention because I corrected his pronunciation of Pompey, which he said like “Pompeii”. I raised my hand and he apparently didn’t like being corrected, and said I was getting detention for disrupting class.

I didn’t like that, because I knew he was saying the word wrong. So during study time I went to his desk, and I backed up what I was saying by showing him the pronunciation guide in the text book. He said, “No one likes a smart aleck.” And the detention was extended from a day to an entire week.

That was about when I decided not to listen to teachers anymore.

I had an English teacher spend the entire English lesson tallying up our year end grades. Everybody in the class was to take all our term papers and essays scores, average them out in the complicated equation she devised. And if what you got and what she got doesn’t match, she spent the next 10 minutes abusing you. I got called a r****d because in my nervousness and stress I failed to round up to 1 decimal point to her satisfaction. The next day, when the entire class expected her to apologize for her truly bizzare behavior, she only said that “she will not apologize because she did nothing wrong.”

In fifth grade we had to do a creative writing thing and I had a character say “I’m ever so lonely.” I also had a dragon “take wing.” The teacher circled both of those phrases and told me that they weren’t English. ?!?!?! That was the year I realized that teachers weren’t tiny gods and didn’t actually know everything.

I still remember the day my high school English teacher told me “entranced” wasn’t a word and I must have meant “enchanted.”

Yeah, she didn’t like the dictionary trick either. Especially as I was using the word for writing fiction and also explained to her the nuance between the two. Pfft.

(With that said, I had better English teachers in the end, like the one who, after I read the novel we were studying long before the rest of the class, got me the two sequels we weren’t studying, had me read those, and gave me stuff to do in class that took all three books into account instead of just the one.)

When I was in first grade, I got marked wrong on a spelling test for capitalizing “North Pole.” Not because it’s wrong – it’s correct if you’re talking about the northernmost point on the planet, not the north pole of any old magnet – but because we “weren’t supposed to have learned that yet.”

My brother got in trouble when he pointed out to his physical science teacher that aspirin was, indeed, an organic chemical.

I am 41 goddamned years old and I am still bitter about my 7th grade history teacher who took points off of one of my papers because he refused to believe that plethora was a real word. He didn’t appreciate the dictionary gesture either.

rosebeaches:

personally i don’t like talking shit about someone’s looks no matter how shitty they are as a person bc someone completely decent could probably have those same features and get affected by those words but whatever