Do you pet your pet because it is a pet? Or is it a pet because you pet it?
I can answer this.
Pet, noun: “tamed animal,” originally in Scottish and northern England dialect (and exclusively so until mid-18c.), of unknown origin. Sense of “indulged child” (c. 1500) is recorded slightly earlier than that of “animal kept as a favorite” (1530s), but the latter may be the primary meaning
Pet, verb: 1620s, “treat as a pet,” from pet [above]. Sense of “to stroke” is first found 1818.
So: you pet it because it’s a pet. It’s a noun that was verbed, rather than a verb that was noun’d.
[[ Image Description: A photo featuring a fishing cat resting on a rock, looking up with an aggressive look, with a post on it by user samanticshift.
The post reads: ““i don’t judge people based on race, creed, color or
gender. i judge people based on spelling, grammar, punctuation, and
sentence structure.”
i hate to burst your pretentious little bubble, but linguistic
prejudice is inextricably tied to racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia,
and ableism.” ]]
Hahahah what? Literally what? Care to explain that “inextricable link?”
The way people speak being a basis for your judgement of them is obviously linked to bigotry. It has for centuries.
Obviously people who do not have English as a first language aren’t going to have perfect writing skills, and the use of English and rules you agree to as the basis for intelligence globally is hardcore americentrism and imperialism.
Education in writing is not easy for everyone to obtain – the poor, poc, and immigrants do not have as much access to good education in general, and often are discriminated against in education (being singled out more often as “trouble makers” or “lost causes”, and ignored by teachers, for example) and more often bullied and harassed, making concentration or achievement more difficult. Additionally, they more often have more pressing issues in their lives – such as family issues, financial issues, hunger, discrimination, and so on – making it more difficult to focus in school.
That is of course just regarding people who actually can go to school at all. People who can’t or who are forced to drop out don’t even get a chance.
The discrimination in education is also common against girls (consider the excess focus on making girls conform to arbitrary dress code rules), and much of the hatred towards “improper English” is tied to how girls communicate or are assumed to communicate – such as texting, kawaii culture, emoticons, and so on – which is based in the connection that anything girls (particularly young girls) do or like is inherently inferior, unintelligent, and worthless.
And I mean, if you wanna talk “both ways”, the media tropes of fathers and lower middle class (or lower) men and boys (and often women/girls) are pretty obvious.
The ableism is the easiest part. Difficulty speaking and writing is very often based in disability – mental or physical. Looking into the history of the word “dumb” is a quick way to understand – it referred to a person who was mute or mostly mute, in the same way “idiot” was used for people of certain neurodivergences or as a rank in IQ, and came to be used as a synonym for significantly unintelligent, and this is easily because of the connection between speech capabilities and assumed intelligence.
Just taking a glance at popular comedy TV can show the link – when people are portrayed as “stupid”, what do you see as part of their character? AAVE. Poverty. Developmental disability. “Girly” characteristics. Being foreign. “Idiot savant”. Slavery. “Dressing slutty”. Being dirty/unclean. “Illegal alien”.
What is “proper English” is arbitrarily decided and constantly changing (as language does), so what exactly is the reason it should be any basis of judgement? But that’s pretending that judgements based on writing/speaking skills aren’t also arbitrarily decided – if you think everyone who demands strict following of these rules, doesn’t frequently break them themselves, and only really wants to enforce them during “friendly debate” about discrimination and bigotry, or towards whether we should take a marginalized person/group seriously as part of respectability politics (cough”thugsvsMILKJr“cough), I would say you’re naive but we all know it’s purposeful ignorance. Once you’re out of high school, 12 pt Times New Roman papers with Opening, Body, Body, Body, Closing paragraphs really aren’t important or a part of the real world at all, but this is intentionally forgotten.
And that’s ignoring these “rules” have historically adhered to or been based on expectations set to squeeze out the poor, poc, immigrants, women, and the disabled, to keep them from being taken seriously or considered and from reaching higher statuses.
There’s also the situational argument over “real” and “fake” words and its complete ridiculousness being 100% based in discrimination towards marginalized groups, particularly black people, trans people, and young people.
This is just a starter, if you really are interested to learn and aren’t just looking for an opportunity to pound out “SJWS! LOL TRIGGERED!” on your keyboard.
i would like to take this opportunity to present my headcanon about that infamous “language!” line: steve and the howlies had such dirty mouths that they had to be constantly reminded to clean it up for the reporters that followed them around. so steve heard a swear word over the radio and had a kneejerk stop that we’re being filmed for the folks back home reaction.
in other words, he said “language” not because he never swears, but because if he’s not on guard he swears way too much. 😀
“the word ‘fucking’ came to function as no more than “a warning that a noun is coming”
And the interesting thing about actually dealing with people who do swear to that degree, which I have, is that eventually your brain completely tunes the word fucking out.
You basically don’t hear it. It becomes unimportant noise.
I was actually just talking to someone last night about how when I was a kid (the 80s), no one said “fuck” or “shit,” ever, but people casually tossed slurs around like nobody’s business. Now people use “fuck” and “shit” like punctuation, but slurs are increasingly taboo–and that’s exactly how it should fucking be.
Oxford Dictionary is under fire after Michael Oman-Reagan, an anthropologist and Ph.D. candidate, pointed out these instances of sexist example sentences accompanying words like “rabid” and “shrill.” At first, Oxford Dictionaries responded with the above flippant tweet — but later apologized and vowed to change at least one of the words.
WOW this is so not okay
This is what we mean when we talk about invisible sexism. Each of these makes perfect sense to most people, fits perfectly with our social context and our cultural worldview. Only when they’re put together do you see the pattern all at once and go “oh…yeah that’s actually kinda fucked up, isn’t it?” Because tiny, invisible things create a cultural context which builds into an overall attitude of mocking, minimizing, and dismissiveness towards a full half of the population.
This is also a good example of why “but the dictionary says-” isn’t a valid argument when discussing racism, sexism, etc.
if anyone ever tells you that english isn’t ridiculous remember that the reason why we have a silent b in debt is because a group of guys got together to standardise english spelling and got to the word debt, which at the time was primarily spelled either ‘dett’ or ‘det’. so they basically went:
‘everyone speaks latin, right? so let’s put a silent b in debt. like debitum, which is latin for debt. problem solved.’
also the reason why there is a h in ghost is because when the printing press first came to england the only people trained to operate it were flemmish speaking, and they put a h after g because that’s what you do in flemmish. they put shit like ghirl and ghoose, but the only reason why ghost stuck is because people saw ‘the holy ghost’ in the bible and were like ‘well, that MUST be right’.
so yeah english is a really stupid language with some of the most ridiculous spelling
Anyone telling you that English isn’t a bullshit Frankenstein language is lying.
the thing about writing fantasy stories is that language is so based on history that it can be hard to decide how far suspension of disbelief can carry you word-choice wise – what do you call a french braid in a world with no france? can a queen ann neckline be described if there was no queen ann? where do you draw the line? can you use the word platonic if plato never existed? can you name a character chris in a land without christianity? can you even say ‘bungalow’ in a world where there was no indian language for the word to originate from? is there a single word in any language that doesn’t have a story behind it? to be accurate a fantasy story would be written in a fantasy language but who has the time for that
Tolkien had the time apparently
LIsten. Linguistics Georg, who invented over 10,000 conlangs each day, is an outlier and should not have been counted.
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