internet explorers club | language changes, teen girls, and doubting childhood memories
SO! Researchers studied 6000 letters written during the Early Modern Period and found out that women were adapting linguistic changes sooner than men. This came out of this idea that Shakespeare invented quite a lot of words, and the the article points out something I never thought of: if he was inventing so many words, how would people understand him? Instead, they propose, he's just on the bleeding edge of slang, and incorporating what people are already saying. Still super cool! This article about it is my favorite in recent memory because it contains a few of my favorite things:
- defense of teen girls' speech
- historical data / surveys
- pushback against those articles that lecture women how to talk1
- talking about how language changes / is fluid
Speaking of changing language, someone has written The New Devil's Dictionary (cf. Ambrose Bierce's original) and it's super great. Recommended entries include doge, Kickstarter, and gif.
Some really interesting articles about race in America: Gita Jackson talks about what Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell taught her about American blackness (and her father's lived experience) and it just completely blew me away. Hyperallergic talks about how the Met is abandoning blackface (who knew they even still DID that?!) and the legacy of African-Americans in Opera. Finally, What To Do When Your App Is Racist is a post-mortem of an app called SketchFactor that was not perhaps fully thought through, and the creator, who doesn't appear to show any understanding that there was a problematic way her app could be used.
In the vein of Vivien Meyer, someone found some medium format negatives that show a woman in the 50s (ish) in the ocean, and is looking for clues. To my semi-trained eye, these don't look fake, but who knows.
Just in time for summer is the Brief History of the Swimming Pool.
Finally, prepare to get lost in the Berest#in Bears / parallel universe theory. Briefly: a bunch of people, myself included, remember the iconic childhood books as BerenstEin Bears. Some people pointed out that books that they have found say BerenstAin Bears instead, which led some people to propose that the E people were transported from a parallel universe where BerenstEin Bears was the proper spelling. Dig deeper here.
Etcetera: How the US Military Helped Invent Cheetos. SEXY CONGRESS. I love the Dog of Wisdom so much.
—Emily
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1These articles have been all over the place recently, and I'm too exhausted / frustrated with them to have included them here—basically they all condemn vocal fry and uptalk, despite uptalk not being a singularly female issue, and ignore the fact that we're just lecturing women to talk like men and claiming that it's "neutral." I could go on at length, but please just read this great article deconstructing the problem, which says it so much more eloquently than I could!
