Specifically, to “swash a buckler” referred to the act of pounding a buckler (small shield) against one’s own chest as a sort of macho display.
What about fuckface?
Ignoring the joke (sorry), that IS a curious one because! Any of the compound words mentioned above would, if switched from exocentric to reg compound, have the boring-ass -er ending and the noun positions would trade places, right? I.e. thriftspender, pocketpicker etc. The meaning remains the same.
So fuckface would turn into Facefucker. Buuuut. That changes the meaning entirely! It implies that the target… let’s call him Wulfric, is a fucker of faces. However og Fuckface means Wulfric’s face is the face in need of a thorough fucking, and definitely on the receiving end. Poor (lucky?) Wulfric. So would that still make it a true exocentric compound noun? Since it doesn’t keep its meaning? SO FASCINATING!!!
As an aside, the German word for Fuckface is Backpfeifengesicht, meaning a face in need of a slapping. While less severe, it’s endlessly more delightful and pleasing to say.
brooding men who cannot communicate their feelings if their life depended on it are only hot when they’re fictional. if i have to deal with one in real life i will curse him and pray for his downfall every night before i go to bed
It’s because the writer communicates their feelings for them. If people wanna pull that off in real life they need to hire a guy to walk around behind them narrating.
We need to bring back the bait fish because sometimes it feels like yall can’t tell when someone is trolling you
Look at him! He’s so cute and he knows that someone posting stupid, brain dead or offensive comments is just trying to get you mad, and you should make fun of them for that.
Rereading Dickens Christmas Carol for the first time in a long time. And the more I reread, the more it strikes me how seamlessly a queer reading could slip within these pages. Not an especially twee reading, wherein all Scrooge’s troubles start and end with grief over Jacob Marley’s death. For we know that Scrooge was a “Tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!” And we know that he and Marley were “two kindred spirits”
And perhaps that very fact makes the similarities to queer life, unintended as they most likely were by Mr. Dickens, achingly poignant to me. Scrooge is, we’re told, “secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster.” How much that resonates, for so many of us who shield our innermost selves but from a select group of friends. And we know that Scrooge and Marley were, at the very least, certainly that for one another. Scrooge is Marley’s sole mourner; his sole executor and beneficiary; and even Dickens notes, “friend.” How reminiscent is that of queer couples across history, estranged from their families?
Scrooge lives in a set of chambers that once belonged to Marley—clearly Dickens wanted us to believe Scrooge gave up his own dwellings after Marley’s death to economize. But with only a flicker of change, those chambers become _their chambers, rented by Marley as the senior member of the couple. The place is so desolate Dickens notes “one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and have forgotten the way out again.” The perfect abode for two queer misers who wanted no one prying into their business.
Marley’s name is still above the door of Scrooge’s counting-house: a mark by which, no doubt, Dickens meant to convey Scrooge such a penny-pincher he couldn’t bother to have it changed. But a thing can be both! mark of frugality to ludicrous excess and! mark of mourning. “sometimes,” Dickens opines, “People new to the
business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him.”
This is why “death of the author” matters so much, in expanding our interpretations of texts. It is vastly far from the lens Dickens would have intended. But, the idea of a ghost of queerness, so taboo in the society it could barely be glanced at sidewise in this tale that is all about the inexplicable and yet that lingers over everything becomes an astonishing lens through which to read this book. Thinking of Scrooge as a queer man, his “melancholy dinner at his usual melancholy tavern” becomes a eerie prefiguring of the hollowness of days spent by Isherwood’s A Single Man. In this universe, little wonder Scrooge doubly hates mention of time with family, marriage, etc. when the precise nature of his grief is both unacknowledged and unacknowledgable.
And readings like this are vital, because the uncomfortable truth is, discrimination doesn’t “discriminate between sinners and saints”, to borrow a Miranda phrase. It is easy, in my liberal circles, to fight for queer people who hold “the good sorts of politics”. But what about men like Michael Hess, culpable for supporting Reagan even as his contemptuous homophobia let the aids epidemic run rampant? How much harder is it to remember Michael had a partner? That he deserves empathy and compassion for being practically tarred and feathered out of the party upon his own aids diagnosis?
Expanding our imaginative universes to include queerness, not as redemptive panacea, but merely as one aspect of identity, personality, often in vicious conflict with others. Even! as we consider those stories equally worthy of being told feels vital if we’re ever to truly express the complexity of what queer humanity looks like.
I apologize for derailing, but I recently had a very similar experience with reading The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde as an adult (and specifically, as a queer adult who last read it as a teenager raised in a religiously conservative family).
i think all quiet on the western front and the lord of the rings are in direct conversation with each other, as in theyre the retelling of the same war with one saying here’s what happened, we all died, and it did not matter at all and another going hush little boy, of course we won, of course your friends came back
someone should remake lord of the rings as a grandfather telling a fantasy story to his grand child with flashbacks to world war one showing the dead boys and men the characters were based on. grandpa why didn’t they just fly. because they didn’t. they didn’t.
i’m fine
I will never get over how Tolkien & Lewis took the horrors of war and spun them into fantasy.
Shivering in the trenches dreaming of cozy hobbit holes, shaking as bombs pockmark a forest and imagining each shallow mud-filled crater contains a new world—that maybe there are still as many beautiful things in the universe as there are bombs—that maybe the world is bigger than this moment and this ugliness and one day this will be a peaceful forest again full of small ponds.
I mean look at these photos of the shell craters in Sanctuary Woods, near Ypres Belgium and tell me it’s not the Wood Between The Worlds:
Miri ♥ old enough to have seen some shit ♥ she/her/hers ♥ aroace. English. Teacher. Degree in over-analysing fiction. Emotions over characters a lot. Currently living in Japan. I have a queue running from about 3-12pm GMT, so if you see me posting around then you can probably assume it's that. This is a multifandom blog, whose main focus depends heavily on what my dash is reblogging today and/or what shows are currently airing. A complete list of fandoms you'll find on here would take forever, so just rest assured that I always tag stuff with the fandom for your TS needs. (Also included on this blog are random nonfandom things that make me feel things or I think look cool, and a fair bit of posting about social justice issues.) I'm something of a multishipper. Even if I don't ship it, my policy is ship and let ship, so I won't judge you for yours if you don't judge me for mine.
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