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Dec. 8th, 2010 03:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorcyressSo, I find myself dissatisfied with certain aspects of my vocabulary.
Some of these are because they're harmful language. I'm trying to avoid using bitch, cunt, lame, crazy, insane, gyp, and more recently, idiot and moron. (and I never did get much into retarded or gay). If nothing else, I see it as a challenge --I could use a word that I've been told is harmful, or I could be clever and come up with something much more interesting. And really now, is it anywhere near as satisfying to call someone a "lame ass-faggot1 bitch" as to casually inform them that they are "a thrice-cursed stain on the dirty socks of society"? Gets exactly the point across without using any marginalized groups as insults. Brilliant!
Starting sentences with conjunctions is one of my cardinal writing sins, and I've been working to fix that. Not well, unfortunately, but I've at least started noticing when I do it, and sometimes I even rewrite the relevant sentence.
While I highly endorse using the word fuck often and liberally (it just has such a great sound to it), even I must admit that it shows an occasional lack of creativity. Even more problematically is the fact that...well...I don't think sex should be seen as a swear! It's much too fun for that, which makes me loathe to associate a good act with whatever fuckery is going on today.
Of course, I've already mentioned in this journal that I way overuse the modifying adverb "really really", sometimes with added symbology, such as *asterisks* or _underscores_. This does such a disservice to all the other wonderful modifiers in the world, like extremely, emphatically, excellently (not to mention the ones that start with the other 25 letters of the alphabet!), and, like my overuse of my favourite expletive, shows a lack of creativity that I simply refuse to associate myself with.
It's not a lack of creativity I fear, but lack of sophistication when I like, way slip into, the totally valley ways of talkin', or start droppin' letters like a proper South'ner. It wouldn't be such a flaw if I could keep it to my actual speech, but I think like I talk like I write, and all three can be affected by my most recent media inputs. So watching TrueBlood or the Walking Dead is all well and good, but man, does it ever make me start to drawl.
Combining my first and third points, you get my discomfort with any number of religious words --God, Jesus, Christ, and damn. "For cat's sake" is a phrase I stumbled across in a book recently, and I've taken an immediate liking to the wording, meaning I may very well start using it to fill the gap left by my discomfort from asking someone else's god to damn things. Cursed serves nicely as a substitute for damn as well, but I've been a blasphemous little thing for a very long time, so fixing my ways may take some time indeed.
(Additionally, I do tend to use Athe or Mama when I need to swear by a god --better to use my own than anyone else's, if mine have trouble with my irreverence, they can take it up with me, and I can make proper reparations.)
Going off the theme of adding things to my vocabulary rather than subtracting them, you come across my insistence that I should be using the dictionary built into Vera *far* more often than I actually do. I've been trying to make a point of it lately --when my mind wishes to use a word that I am not quite sure of the proper definition, too often I'll substitute something safer, and generally less interesting. Having a one click dictionary absolutely saves me from the conundrum, and I've been doing my best to, when confronted with a word I am only seventy percent sure I'm using correctly or so, I take the time to look it up. More often than not, I was right.
I was recently told, in no uncertain terms, that I was no longer to use the sentence structure of "I am" followed by a negative. I do things, or occasionally do not do things, and sometimes those are bad things and make me feel bad, but they don't make me a bad person. This is an amazingly tricky habit to unlearn --I've spent a long time reinforcing the fact that while I am a pretty awesome person, I also tend to behave in the fashion of an absolute buffoon, most especially where my academic career is concerned.
I don't expect I'm doing a particularly good job of the challenge, but the right-thinking parts of myself (which have too-little opportunity to speak up sometimes) consider it to absolutely be a thing for me to do. Words have power after all, and if I can steer my mind away from the concept that I am, inherently, a failure and towards the thought that perhaps sometimes I merely fail, I'm sure I'll wind up being happier all around.
That's about all I can think of off the top of my head, at least for this particular instant of my life. Because my core idea of myself is so tied into the concept of being a writer, and because I operate so deeply in words, the language and vocabulary I choose or do not choose to use is never all that far from my mind.
Adieu, mein leibchen.
~Sor
MOOP!
1: xkcd stopped me using adjectve-ass noun forever. I still use it sometimes, but I do so consciously, and always in the adjective ass-noun form.
Some of these are because they're harmful language. I'm trying to avoid using bitch, cunt, lame, crazy, insane, gyp, and more recently, idiot and moron. (and I never did get much into retarded or gay). If nothing else, I see it as a challenge --I could use a word that I've been told is harmful, or I could be clever and come up with something much more interesting. And really now, is it anywhere near as satisfying to call someone a "lame ass-faggot1 bitch" as to casually inform them that they are "a thrice-cursed stain on the dirty socks of society"? Gets exactly the point across without using any marginalized groups as insults. Brilliant!
Starting sentences with conjunctions is one of my cardinal writing sins, and I've been working to fix that. Not well, unfortunately, but I've at least started noticing when I do it, and sometimes I even rewrite the relevant sentence.
While I highly endorse using the word fuck often and liberally (it just has such a great sound to it), even I must admit that it shows an occasional lack of creativity. Even more problematically is the fact that...well...I don't think sex should be seen as a swear! It's much too fun for that, which makes me loathe to associate a good act with whatever fuckery is going on today.
Of course, I've already mentioned in this journal that I way overuse the modifying adverb "really really", sometimes with added symbology, such as *asterisks* or _underscores_. This does such a disservice to all the other wonderful modifiers in the world, like extremely, emphatically, excellently (not to mention the ones that start with the other 25 letters of the alphabet!), and, like my overuse of my favourite expletive, shows a lack of creativity that I simply refuse to associate myself with.
It's not a lack of creativity I fear, but lack of sophistication when I like, way slip into, the totally valley ways of talkin', or start droppin' letters like a proper South'ner. It wouldn't be such a flaw if I could keep it to my actual speech, but I think like I talk like I write, and all three can be affected by my most recent media inputs. So watching TrueBlood or the Walking Dead is all well and good, but man, does it ever make me start to drawl.
Combining my first and third points, you get my discomfort with any number of religious words --God, Jesus, Christ, and damn. "For cat's sake" is a phrase I stumbled across in a book recently, and I've taken an immediate liking to the wording, meaning I may very well start using it to fill the gap left by my discomfort from asking someone else's god to damn things. Cursed serves nicely as a substitute for damn as well, but I've been a blasphemous little thing for a very long time, so fixing my ways may take some time indeed.
(Additionally, I do tend to use Athe or Mama when I need to swear by a god --better to use my own than anyone else's, if mine have trouble with my irreverence, they can take it up with me, and I can make proper reparations.)
Going off the theme of adding things to my vocabulary rather than subtracting them, you come across my insistence that I should be using the dictionary built into Vera *far* more often than I actually do. I've been trying to make a point of it lately --when my mind wishes to use a word that I am not quite sure of the proper definition, too often I'll substitute something safer, and generally less interesting. Having a one click dictionary absolutely saves me from the conundrum, and I've been doing my best to, when confronted with a word I am only seventy percent sure I'm using correctly or so, I take the time to look it up. More often than not, I was right.
I was recently told, in no uncertain terms, that I was no longer to use the sentence structure of "I am" followed by a negative. I do things, or occasionally do not do things, and sometimes those are bad things and make me feel bad, but they don't make me a bad person. This is an amazingly tricky habit to unlearn --I've spent a long time reinforcing the fact that while I am a pretty awesome person, I also tend to behave in the fashion of an absolute buffoon, most especially where my academic career is concerned.
I don't expect I'm doing a particularly good job of the challenge, but the right-thinking parts of myself (which have too-little opportunity to speak up sometimes) consider it to absolutely be a thing for me to do. Words have power after all, and if I can steer my mind away from the concept that I am, inherently, a failure and towards the thought that perhaps sometimes I merely fail, I'm sure I'll wind up being happier all around.
That's about all I can think of off the top of my head, at least for this particular instant of my life. Because my core idea of myself is so tied into the concept of being a writer, and because I operate so deeply in words, the language and vocabulary I choose or do not choose to use is never all that far from my mind.
Adieu, mein leibchen.
~Sor
MOOP!
1: xkcd stopped me using adjectve-ass noun forever. I still use it sometimes, but I do so consciously, and always in the adjective ass-noun form.
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no subject
on 2010-12-08 09:19 pm (UTC)*ducks*
no subject
on 2010-12-08 09:20 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-12-08 09:43 pm (UTC)Fixed.
~Sor
no subject
on 2010-12-08 09:19 pm (UTC)Thus, instead of "I have accidentally started a thermonuclear war. I am thus a failure", we can say "That is full of fail", or even just the shortening of "you fail" to "Fail". It somehow makes the failures more objective, but also less personal, that it is a matter of the specific circumstance instead of your inherent ability.
At least, that is how I like to think of it.
Right-thinking is hard, and I commend and encourage you.
no subject
on 2010-12-08 09:28 pm (UTC)I don't, in general, restrain from using religious words - depends on the religion. If I'm with religious friends I might, simply out of respect to them, but not out of the ideology that restrains me from using phrases like "that's gay" as a negative. This is because most of my blasphemous swearz involve Jesus, and Christians are a privileged group in western society, where I am doing the swearing.
Wibble is an injoke between me and Jan, wherein I have trained my brain to automatically say Wibble when it's about to say cunt. XKCD makes me want to say adjective ass-noun even *more*, because it cracks me up, but it's not something I was in the habit of doing so it doesn't tend to occur.
Do you know what your autoswear is? Your autoswear is swearword that just bursts out of you in rage or pain without you stopping to actually pick a phrase. The best way to find this out is to accidentally slip over on an icy footpath into the gutter full of dirty rotting leaves in your nice jacket just as a car comes past. Mine was Jesus Christ! as of 2008, am not sure if it remains the same. It may have absorbed more Fuckings since then.
no subject
on 2010-12-08 09:42 pm (UTC)I used to regularly use "bite" as a swear word, often in conjunction with other swears. So, "oh bite, ow" would happen sometimes too.
Ask me off-elljay for my similar-to-wibble reason that I use pilgrim sometimes to refer to groups of people (as in "'sup pilgrims").
Shitstain's alright, I suppose. I've never really liked douche as an insult, though I use it pretty often. I don't tend to refer to people as shit very often though --not any real reason, just not how my insults roll.
I like asshat, too. I used douchecanoe the other day, and totally made someone giggle, so that was good.
Soyeah.
~Sor
no subject
on 2010-12-08 10:11 pm (UTC)Also: http://img528.imageshack.us/img528/4771/asshat.png
Do you feel inspiring? :P
no subject
on 2010-12-09 03:00 am (UTC)no subject
on 2010-12-09 04:25 am (UTC)~Sor
no subject
on 2010-12-09 08:02 am (UTC)no subject
on 2010-12-08 09:44 pm (UTC)The God ones bother me especially a lot, how integrated they are into my language. I don't worry about 'damn', since it has a secular context too, but the others? God, Jesus, and Christ? Hell, too. It bothers me that I use them, but they're SO hard to excise because I don't like made-up cusses -- they just SOUND contrived. :/
The only one I've really managed to get rid of is "Bless you," which I have replaced wholesale with "Gesundheit."
no subject
on 2010-12-08 09:55 pm (UTC)Few people who exclaim "Jesus Christ!" when they spill hot coffee on themselves are really supplicating our lord and savior to be saved from first-degree crotch burns; they need something to say that has psychological weight.
Sadly, curse words that are infrequently used ... don't. That's why I can't really make myself use them.
no subject
on 2010-12-09 01:39 am (UTC)(Rackle suggested "piss off" which I kinda like, but doesn't quite fit what I'm looking for. We'll see if I can come up with anything better.)
~Sor
no subject
on 2010-12-09 02:49 am (UTC)Bear in mind, I am usually around folks that won't take that as an offer. YMMV.
no subject
on 2010-12-09 04:28 am (UTC)~Sor
no subject
on 2010-12-08 10:17 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-12-08 11:33 pm (UTC)...but not scientific (or probably other academic) papers.
no subject
on 2010-12-09 01:37 am (UTC)Sometimes when I try to rewrite, I am unable to get the cadence back, so I leave it in. It's just a thing to be wary of, especially as I am slowly having to write more academic papers.
~Sor
no subject
on 2010-12-09 01:15 am (UTC)I'm (again!) taking things slow and just trying to get rid of the word “retarded”. Using it (using't) somehow became habit a long time ago and it keeps sneaking up on me. :-( Alas!
no subject
on 2010-12-09 01:34 am (UTC)(I feel kinda awkward about this, because I don't like to be all "RAR YOUR GRAMMAR IS WRONG HOW DARE YOU YOU BUFFOON!?" to people, especially not in my elljay, but...uh...I have no idea what all your parens mean otherwise.)
It's hard to fix words. I recommend buffoon!
~Sor
no subject
on 2010-12-09 03:36 am (UTC)Don't worry about correcting me if/when you want to, though. Observe the following reasons!
1) I tend to speak/write before thinking. If I try to edit at all, I generally wind up silent.
2) I am REMARKABLY UNEDUCATED, so sometimes I just don't know basic things. Yes, I graduated college with a 3.9 GPA, but I mostly stuck to courses in my actual fields of interest. Beloit College had very few basic requirements. This, combined with my failure to attend high school, means I've never studied things like grammar or American history.
3) I'm really difficult to offend.
So yeah, sometimes I'm a bit dim, but no worries. :-)
no subject
on 2010-12-09 04:30 am (UTC)Also, Beloit, really? My adoptive-older-brother went there, and graduated last year. Groovy stuff!
~Sor
no subject
on 2010-12-09 04:50 am (UTC)no subject
on 2010-12-09 03:06 am (UTC)Context matters in writing. Starting sentences with conjunctions is fine if you're writing as if it's taking the place of speech (like LJ, in most cases). Obviously that's not the case in, say, a formal academic paper.