Inside the Little Plastic Castle

Ugh I’ve got a chest cold which could mean endless coughing. The good news is I have a recliner for sleeping mostly upright, and copious amounts of guaifenesin-pills-and-water, and the right sort of social network.

• When I woke up early, I commanded Siri #4 to narrate amaruuk’s sweet Rosie & Johnlock series Paternity

• Got a phone call from kestrell

• Hopped on here, and tozka linked me to an excellent concert from Cathy Fink, Marcie Marxer and Chao Tian, hosted by the Smithsonian. Fink & Marxer were role models when I was a "movement musician" between 1976-1981, and I love how closely Chinese yangqin (hammered dulcimer) and Appalachian banjo music can intertwine

• Today’s prettygoodword was the wonderful campanulate

• minoanmiss shared strategies for smuggling the good bacteria past TSA

My public library’s Kanopy subscription provided two profound films, both under nine minutes:

• CODA is an animated short from 2015. This Irish masterpiece follows a lost soul’s encounter with death. Pro captions, no audio description, no gore. Watch on YouTube or ( stream here )

• Bacon & God’s Wrath meditates on loss of faith when Razie Brownstone, at age 92, tries bacon for the first time. CONTAINS: Very lifelike animated dead pig’s head, racist autocomplete results, emesis mentioned. Watch on YouTube without captions or ( stream here )

I write to urge the use of Usonian to mean "someone who lives in the USA."

The noun Usonia is formed from the first letters of the United States Of North America. Add the "-ian" suffix meaning "from this place" to make a very useful adjective.

Many writers of my acquaintance recognize this issue, and use USian to describe USA residents. Unfortunately, USian is hard to say. Usonian rolls readily off the tongue.

Why bother? This point was brought home to me while chatting in an English-language practice conversation with a visitor from Chile. He was dumbstruck—how dare these estadounidense claim ownership over all of America?

America, of course, begins way up in Nunavut, Canada, North America and extends all the way south to the Diego Ramírez islands in Chile, South America. Usonian is a more precise way to describe people from the United States.

You may have heard the word before: Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Usonian house as an affordable architecture that responded to the width and openness of the US suburban. The first Wright Usonian house is just a mile from me.. While Wright is often credited with coining the term, the credit is actually due to Scottish immigrant James Duff Law, who wrote in 1903:

We of the United States, in justice to Canadians and Mexicans, have no right to use the title "Americans" when referring to matters pertaining exclusively to ourselves. A much more euphonious word is "Usonia," and as it represents in a similar way the "United States of Northern Independent America " (a most important qualifying and accurately descriptive adjective being added) I am inclined to think it makes a perfect word and a dignified name to designate our land, our people and our nation — "Usonia," "Usonian" and "Usonians" sounding equally well. It has also to us Scots the added merit of making a good rhyme to Caledonia, and thus knitting more closely together both Usonians and Caledonians.

Here and There in Two Hemispheres

What say you! American? USian? Usonian? Terran?

You Suck at Cooking Xmas Cookies

You don’t need a cookie cutter! Silly combination of sober instructional voice and pace with surreal language and detailed pictures so it manages to push through the brain case anyway.

( 6-minute uncaptioned embedded video )

Prompts From Your Birth Year

Merriam-Webster hosts a gizmo where you plug in your birth year and get more than 25 words that entered the dictionary at that time.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/time-traveler/1955 is mine. You don’t have to use their input scheme: just put a four-digit birth year at the end of the link.

I’m thrilled to find words dear to me:

• hidden agenda
• motormouth
• Peking duck
• stir-fry
• wet suit

The Decameron Project

100 short sf stories (and novel excerpts) free to read:

https://www.patreon.com/projectdecameron

Racism As a Public Health Issue

Right2Health was founded by Leslie Gregory, a certified Physician Assistant, navy veteran, Black woman and mother of two. Since 2006, she’s been focused on healing those affected by everyday racism.

Right To Health is about health prevention. It’s about bringing people together to share, care and alleviate the disparities that come with racial injustice and economic inequality. We are a wholly volunteer group with a vision: to create a national network of healthcare providers, researchers, scientists, healers, community leaders, technologists, educators and anyone else committed to alleviating the ills of racism across all ethnic groups, with particular attention to Black Americans.

https://www.right2healthus.org/about-us

Thirty-minute radio interview (no transcript) exploring the evidence for "racism as public health" from 20 years experience:

https://kboo.fm/media/82934-right-health-director-leslie-gregory-campaigns-racism-be-considered-public-health-issue

Black Nerd Comics by Ajuan Mance

These are beautiful, funny, insightful

http://www.ajuanmance.com

https://checkallthatapply.com

8_rock

Found her work through Drawing Power: Women’s Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival. It’s a golden group of excellent creators, although sometimes hard reading.

The Black Language Podcast

by blacklangpod

https://blacklangpod.buzzsprout.com

Creator Anansa Benbow opens my brain to the huge varieties of black language, especially AAVE/Ebonics. The first episode declares: no grammar police and pinged my disability pride when she said, "I stutter. Imma gone make this podcast" and carried on. The second explores the pragmatic function of aight so boom in storytelling. The third episode takes direct aim at the reality that Black creativity drives US culture, including language change, and yet White people valorize White AAVE speakers while excoriating Black AAVE speakers.

She compares the experiences of Rachel Jeantel, star prosecution witness in the George Zimmerman trial whose testimony was simply not understood by white jurors, with Bhad Bhabie, a white rapper who gained fame by disrespecting her mother on Dr Phil:

Language appropriation of Black people is not simply language borrowing, unfortunately, it comes with the erasure of Black people. Again, the push to promote stan/twitter/internet language, instead of recognizing that the language used on social media comes from Black people is an example of that erasure.

Sorry to report no transcripts for this podcast.

Accentricity

by accentricitypod

https://www.accentricity-podcast.com

Sociolinguist Sadie Ryan explores linguistic ideology as applied to Scots. In her words:

This is a podcast about people and how they talk. About accents, and why we care about them. About languages, and how they refuse to be controlled. About why there is no such thing as bad grammar, no language is more important than any other language, and every voice is valid.

I learned that Scots language is scorned as uneducated by many English power brokers. A pair of episodes document kids just learning to talk and how they speak one year later.

I had to listen to the first episodes several times to get accustomed to her accent — sadly, no transcripts. Excellent bedtime listening.

Learned about both of these from the Huge List of Linguistics Podcasts hosted by Lauren Gawne aka superlinguo:

https://www.superlinguo.com/post/158448074588/linguistics-and-language-podcasts

Long-Term by idiopathicsmile

Completely adorkable Good Omens gen fic, POV of a very queer, very UU minister interviewing a couple she calls Bowtie and Sunglasses. Only canon you need to know is that the couple getting married are a demon and an angel who’ve been flirting for 6000 years.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/19703515

Second of several posts about the SDS@OSU Virtual Conference held the first weekend in April.

Communicating and Framing Diagnosis and Difference

Rachel Larrowe, a DePaul University MA student, presented a fascinating paper on "BPD, CPTSD, and Identity: the Discursive Construction of Diagnostic Possibilities." She deployed a very close reading of how the two conditions are defined which raised the following issues:

• There’s significant overlap in diagnostic criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder and Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. C-PTSD was considered and excluded from the most recent US diagnostic/billing/research tool, the DSM-5, while it is part of the rest-of-the-world tool ICD-10.
• People DXed with BPD often have terrible, traumatic childhoods.
• Quoting her presentation: ‌What if so-called disordered personalities are the psychological consequences of childhood abuse? What if trauma doesn’t always look how the medical establishment and the media have taught us to expect? How can a disorder be post-traumatic if a child never experiences a time pre-trauma?
• There’s gender trouble here: CPTSD is more commonly DXed in men, BPD in women. CPTSD is partly defined by events people experience, while BPD is defined by how people are. Some of the behaviors unique to BPD, such as ‌Individuals with borderline personality disorder make frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment overlap with how women are defined as needy and "too much."
• What if we could accommodate these needs? Her example: if I’m doubting my place in a relationship, could it be okay for me to text someone "I’m afraid you’re hating me right now" and they could reply with "🧡👍 all clear" and we’d all be good?

ETA: 23 Apr 2020, correct researcher's name and degree

Gretchen McCulloch's daily linguistics blog, All Things Linguistics atlinguistic_feed, posted: Survey on developing fluency in non-binary singular they

An interesting survey to take about strategies for getting better at using non-binary singular they. The linguists involved have been especially encouraging people who are currently learning or did recently to take the survey. From the description: 

As an output of the 2019 They, Hirself, Em, and You (THEY) conference held at Queen’s University, the course focuses on the use of non-binary singular they specifically – that is, singular they as the personal pronoun of reference to refer to a known non-binary person (i.e., the pronoun that a person would like others to use to refer to them in the third person). As part of the process of our design of the MOOC, this informal survey is intended to gather feedback on what types of resources and practices would be useful to speakers who may be acquiring non-binary singular they for the first time, or who have recently made the decision to dedicate time to acquiring it with intention. 

Check out the survey.

Pam Wye's Graphic memoir "Water I've Loved" is serialized In Mutha Magazine. Very detailed drawings explore daughter- and motherhood in pools and the ocean near Boston. Author's mom has mental illness. Wye captured aquatic joys I'd never had words for.

Typing emoji on a Mac is a lot easier now that I know control-command-spacebar brings up an emoji browser with a search field.

Copyediting FAQ from the great Robert Benjamin Dreyer

( Read more... )

Bella continues to be the best dog

( contains diarrhea )

I have a weekly news alert set for "chronic fatigue syndrome" +"PACE". Today a remarkable link popped into my mailbox from
https://galpost.com/named-a-little-known-cause-of-pathological-fatigue/19571/

It claims to be a Quebec-based English language site. The content has been processed by some kind of bot. The results are pretty funny, and finding humor about this damned disease is just what I needed on a steamy 88°F/32°C afternoon when the storm hasn’t arrived yet.

"SPOT" = "POTS"

( 100 word salad )

Which raises a question: I’ve closed my Gmail accounts. Can you recommend an alternative for news-crawling? I like that Google offers me a weekly digest.

When I prepare to publish something here, I think "I'm writing a post." When my gentle readers respond to what I've written, I think "they're making comments." Yet the official Dreamwidth vocabulary is not so straightforward. These are the things that keep me up at night!

To publish the current item, I tapped the "Post" link on the navigation bar. The next screen is called "Create Entries," yet the final action button is called "Post a $securitylevel Entry." With each entry I control who responds with "Comment" settings, yet the relevant FAQ talks about "replies."

One of Dreamwidth's quirkier features is how you can customize much of the user interaction texts https://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/options?group=text My favorite example is sovay, who titles the Comment/Reply function "Performable Epic."

( So, the poll )