#aggressive linguistic prescriptivism

[exercise-of-trust]

turkish spindle gang make some noise (imagine having to wind your singles off your spindle before you can start plying, couldn't be us)

#miriel therinde #tolkien fanart #silmarillion fanart #massive self-report here this is actually how i spin. distaff arm fully over the head and all. #subcreation #aggressive linguistic prescriptivism #(that's the fiber arts tag þerindë or bust motherfuckers)

[thelordofgifs]

Thinking about that line in the Shibboleth of Fëanor that even his sons might not have all adhered to the old-fashioned thorn pronunciation after his death - which immediately raises the question, so which ones did?? Random headcanons only vaguely supported by anything in the text below.

(Disclaimer that this all obviously became somewhat moot when Thingol’s Quenya ban came into play. Using crispy Amrod canon here.)

Maedhros: there are pages I could write on Maedhros’ complicated relationship with his father and his father’s legacy, it absolutely fascinates me. Initially Maedhros is the son of Fëanor who most openly defies his father - he stands aside at Losgar, he goes to parley with Morgoth literally as soon as Fëanor is dead, and, most notably, he gives the crown to Fingolfin. These are not the actions of a dutiful eldest son devoted to his father’s memory, which makes me fairly confident in saying that Maedhros definitely dropped the thorn post-Thangorodrim. It’s a fairly minor gesture of reconciliation compared to dispossessing his entire house, and I really don’t think Maedhros has many fucks left to give about linguistics after decades hanging from a cliff.

How did this change, say, post-Nirnaeth when there were effectively no descendants of Indis left to make nice with? I don’t know, but I rather like playing with the headcanon that Maedhros started using the thorn again in the last century or so of his life, especially when his mental state was particularly bleak.

Maglor: I don’t think Maglor’s feelings about his father were much less complicated than Maedhros’. He’s specifically noted as hanging out with Finrod and being trusted by Maedhros not to cause a scene at the Mereth Aderthad, suggesting that he very much follows Maedhros’ lead in reconciliation with the other side of the family. On the other hand, Maglor has always been rather fascinated by his dead grandmother, and he maintains that people’s names should be pronounced the way they want them to be pronounced. Also, several of his older works contain puns that absolutely hinge on the th/s distinction. He doesn’t drop the thorn.

Celegorm: actually never used the thorn consistently in the first place, a constant source of annoyance for his father. Celegorm values fast and efficient communication over linguistic precision - if foxes don’t have a word for what he wants to express, he’ll borrow one from Dog. Meaning over pedantry. Prescriptivism is stupid. He’s one of the fastest of the sons to pick up Sindarin, and displays zero interest in actually studying it. Post-reconciliation of the Noldor, he uses the thorn when the distinction is necessary for clarity, and doesn’t otherwise. Everyone is used to this.

Caranthir: I could go either way here, not having many headcanons about Caranthir’s relationship with his father. Since he’s not particularly on board with Maedhros’ efforts at diplomacy, let’s say he keeps the thorn, purely because nobody can tell him what to do.

Curufin: absolutely does not drop the thorn, that was his father’s hill to die on which means it’s his too. Is constantly furious with his brothers whenever they mispronounce something, this is personal, how can they just betray everything Fëanor stood for like that?? Will fully march Tyelpë out of the room if non-Fëanorian Quenya is being spoken there, his child’s ears are Pure and will not be Sullied with Improper Language. The Fëanorions are generally annoyed by Thingol’s Ban, but at least it gives Curufin a new target for all his linguistic aggression.

Amras: has never forgiven his father for Losgar and never will. Drops the thorn out of pure spite. 

#silmarillion #meta #my meta #shibboleth of feanor #maedhros #maglor #celegorm #caranthir #curufin #amras #the line of miriel #is going to be my feanorian feels tag

[enceladian]

almost three years since i got the warp on the loom but it’s finally done!! hashtag kinslayer pride or whatever

bonus: a slightly crunchy timelapse of the weaving process; for context each row took ~2mins because of all the color changes

#silmarillion #feanor #weaving #tapestry #fiber art #silm art #// #subcreation #property law #aggressive linguistic prescriptivism

[nyxqueenofshadows]

ngl, but the amount of language prescriptivism in fandom spaces deeply concerns me

#text #me #linguistics #language prescriptivism #does fandom have bigger problems than this? #absolutely #without question #but this is very much not the form i expected prescriptivism to take going forward #and i'm worried about the impact it might have later down the line #with the younger people who grow up seeing these kinds of mentalities #and the aggressive pushback against any form of linguistic change #just #ah #been thinking about it a lot #prevailing view on here seems to be that it's okay for new 'good' words to come in #and for old 'bad' words to go out #but any kind of grey area in between is absolutely rigid and mustn't be changed. #for such a quote unquote progressive space such as tumblr #that's odd to me #not queued #rambling in the tags

[ariaste]

Nah but like noblebright is the established opposite of grimdark from the community that created grimdark to begin with. And like you can't shit on that guy for saying Noble is the opposite of grim, when you're trying to say Punk is the opposite of dark

*smooches your forehead* thank you so much for taking the time to send me these valuable and thoughtful words, it really means a lot to me that you would pay so much attention to something so relatively inconsequential when there are so many other things going on in the world and probably in your own life!First of all, the word hopepunk is derived from “cyberpunk”, you beautiful bright well-meaning soul, and as much as I Fucking Hate cyberpunk, it DOES include a foundation of fighting against The Man (aka Institutional Authority aka The Oppressor) and so forth, which is Very Punk no matter what. This is also why “steampunk” is a ridiculous failure of an heir to cyberpunk, because steampunk is all, “ahahaha WOW guys the British Empire sure was neato!!!” which is Not Punk. I love the steampunk aesthetic, don’t get me wrong, but it is Colonialist And Imperialist And Racist As Fuck.

Secondly, “grimdark” as a genre has primarily been the wheelhouse (read: comfort zone) of a lot of old straight white men who think that depicting the systematic rape of their female characters is about ~*~historical accuracy~*~, so forgive me if I don’t put much stock in what they think and/or do and/or write. They want to invent something called “noblebright”? Cool, go for it, my dudes. I’m a professional author and I’ve never fuckin heard of it before, but it sounds different to what hopepunk is. This may come as a shock, but sometimes two things can exist at the same time even if they are sort of similar. This is why, for example, the words “turquoise” and “cyan” exist at the same time.

Thirdly, the argument that “hopepunk isn’t the opposite of grimdark because the individual halves of the compound words aren’t literal dictionary opposites” is kind of a thin one. English is a real squishy language, my dude, and I was a linguistics major in college, so let’s not even try to pretend like there are Prescriptivist Rules for language and naming things and so forth. Prescriptivism, like steampunk, is also colonialist, imperialist, and racist. In other words, it is Not Punk. The cool thing about the English language is that you can literally just MAKE UP WORDS and say, “This thing means this,” and if enough people agree then THERE U GO, FAM. Seems like so far about 3400 people agree that hopepunk is the opposite of grimdark, so I guess we’re pretty much done here?

Fourthly, perhaps you would be interested in reading the wee essay I wrote about what hopepunk IS, rather than sending me passive aggressive notes about how it’s not a real thing because there’s already a different word or whatever. It’s right here if you want to see it, and it’s got a video of Samwise Gamgee at the end! (Samwise Gamgee is the MOST hopepunk.) I bet that essay will illuminate a lot of the things that are maybe going over your head. 

tl;dr: you’re wrong but that’s ok

(PS sending a message like this as anon makes it seem like you don’t really care about standing up for what you believe in. That’s not very hopepunk of you, my buddy. It’s Not Very Punk of any flavor.)

#hopepunk #punk #grimdark #writing #Anonymous

[sheith-is-good]

anti's tend to rally against anything that threatens their preference. its never about morality. its never about whats right or wrong. they will dig up anything that remotely fuels their ideals and wield it like the iron fist of a fascist dictator. anyone that disagrees with them is a traitorous criminal and they fuel their propaganda machine with the bones of the dissenters and hateful rhetoric. because they are desperate. desperate because what ever they are anti-ing threatens their delusion.

Mm It really does feel like that sometimes! I don’t entirely blame them for doing it because it’s something that I do too (kinda) but grr still incredibly frustrating to witness. EG: I dislike klḁnce because I’m high-key jealous of the popularity it receives, so I’m willing to point out any flaws I might see in it... even when I know it’s a bit hypocritical. If I disliked shëith and didn’t care about shḁladin, it would certainly be easy to fixate on the “gross ship” aspect of it and fool myself into believing that’s why I hated it so much.

I don’t think any of us are that honest really! Antis pretend they care about morality, but it’s probably just a good justification + easy to cling to. Shippers pretend they’re accepting of all ships, but I suspect we all have some ships that we don’t agree with. Both sides are pretty similar, but of course antis (as is the nature of their debate) are far more “aggressive” because they think they are the morally righteous ones who can spit on the so-called evil shippers. Meanwhile, shippers aren’t the ones who started this debate so we naturally take a more passive role.

I don’t agree with it, but I can understand why it happens because it’s easy to see that mentality everywhere else.

Oh! In my English Language class we’ve been studying the linguistic debate of “descriptivism vs prescriptivism” and I recommend having a look at it! I’ll link to some things if you’re interested; it parallels the “anti versus shipper” argument almost 100%. One side believes they’re setting a standard of purity and protecting minors from corruption, the other side believes minors are not affected and withholding a standard of purity is both unrealistic and unprecedented in real life. Mmm :/

#ask #txt #Anonymous

[exercise-of-trust]

seemingly cool fiber arts person i followed a little bit ago just put radfem shit on the dash, anyway the blanket statement that the only contributions of men to textile production are capitalist/exploitative and the only contributions of women are household-centric/victimized is patently untrue. while less of a documented presence, women in medieval europe [1] absolutely participated in weaver's guilds and commercial cloth production [2], and men have been participating in household knitting in all parts of europe for as long as knitting has been a thing there [3]. like i'm not trying to say women haven't been deeply excluded from economic opportunities in the textile trade for centuries but you cannot be making sweeping statements like that about everyone in every part of the world through all of history and expect them to be true. do, like, a basic level of research and have a basic understanding of nuance, i beg of you [4]

footnotes/sources/etc under the cut, sources are a bit basic because i just grabbed whatever was nearest to hand but they should suffice to prove my point:

[1] i'm only referring to western europe here because that's the only region i feel comfortable talking about in any detail without embarrassing myself. systems of medieval cloth production in european guilds are not gonna look anything like the systems of hundreds of servants employed to do textile production for a household in china. don't make categorical statements about everyone everywhere all at once, you will end up with egg on your face.

[2] quotes from "when did weaving become a male profession," ingvild øye, danish journal of archaeology, p.45 in particular.

england: "in norwich, a certain elizabeth baret was enrolled as freeman of the city in 1445/6 because she was a worsted weaver, and in 1511, a riot occurred when the weavers here complained that women were taking over their work" + "another ordinance from bristol [in 1461] forbade master weavers to engage wives, daughters, and maids who wove on their own looms as weavers but made an exception for wives already active before this act" germany: "in bremen, several professional male weavers are recorded in the early fourteenth century, but evidently alongside female weavers, who are documented even later, in 1440" -> the whole "even later" thing is because the original article is disputing the idea that men as weavers/clothiers in medieval europe entirely replaced women over time. also: "in 1432-36, a female weaver, mette weuersk, is referred to as a member of the gertrud's guild in flensburg, presently germany" scandanavia: "the guild of weavers that was established in copenhagen in 1500 also accepted female weavers as independent members and the rules were recorded in the guild's statutes"

[3] quotes from folk socks: the history and techniques of handknitted footwear by nancy bush, interweave press, 2011, don't roast me it was literally within arm's reach and i didn't feel like looking up more stuff

uk/yorkshire dales: "...handknitting had been a daily employment for three centuries [leading up to 1900]. practiced by women, children, and men, the craft added much to the economy of the dales people." (p.21) uk/wales: re the knitting night (noson weu/noswaith weu) as a social custom practiced in the 18th/19th c.: "all the ladies would work on their knitting; some of the men would knit garters" (p.22) uk/channel islands: "by the early seventeenth century, so many of the islands' men, women, and children had taken up the trade of knitting that laws were necessary to keep them from knitting during harvest" (p.24) -> this one is deeply funny to me, in addition to proving my point uk/aberdeen: "the knitters, known as shankers, were usually women, but sometimes included old men and boys" (p.26) denmark: "with iron and brass needles, they made stockings called stunthoser, stomper, or stockings without feet, as well as stockings with feet. the men knit the legs and the women and girls made the heels" (p.32) iceland & faroe islands: "people of all ages and both sexes knit at home not only for their own use but for exportation of their goods as well" (p.35)

[4] actually? no. i'm not begging for shit from radfems. fuck all'a'y'all.

#fuck it maintagging because i'm genuinely deeply annoyed about this #eta: un-maintagging bc after a couple days' reflection - i stand by the substance of what i said but i don't stand by my tone or attitude #shoot-from-the-hip reactionary anger is seldom effective and more to the point it's not a response of grace or love & i should do it less #aggressive linguistic prescriptivism #<- personal fiber arts category tag #<- that tag can stay tho i think this is an internal use only kinda post

[exercise-of-trust]

after loudly dissing the classic drop spindle it occurred to me. hey. maybe i should at least give it a try. so i made this ridiculous thing in 15 minutes out of a sandwich skewer a loose screw eye and a roughly 1-inch-diameter jade charm i had lying around in my odds and ends drawer. whole thing weighs about 1/4oz. and, i can’t believe i’m saying this, i don’t completely hate it? it’s a much faster-paced experience than my turkish spindle because the moment of inertia is comparatively nonexistent and so the spin tends to just disappear the second your fingers leave the shaft, and i was right, winding off (and on) is a monumental pain. but the single came out way more even than i was expecting, the lighter weight means i can spin way finer than on the big one, and the hook is a fun change from doing a half hitch every time. it’s a bit impractical to do my usual wingspan-length amount of spinning in one shot so i have to pause to wind onto the cop way more often than i do with the turkish spindle but that does mean i don’t end up with my elbows around my ears as often. which is nice for my shoulders, i guess.

anyway i made this thing as a joke! but it is genuinely kinda fun and i will probably be using it again in the future.

#hand spinning #it's such a bad spindle and yet every time i tried to put it down and work on the other one i ended up saying 'ok just a couple more feet' #the very definition of makes no sense compels me though #subcreation #aggressive linguistic prescriptivism

[exercise-of-trust]

@littleyarngoblin okay okay i have a paper due tomorrow and can’t spend the entire afternoon catching up on a decade of research on indigo vs woad dyeing like i want to, but i don’t want to write about pacific salmon anymore so i’m going to talk about the burgos tapestry wool instead, and i’ll yell about the history of dye later

so at some point the burgos tapestry, or, christ is born as man’s redeemer, got cut up into four huge irregular pieces (this is a massive tapestry. it’s over 25 by 13 feet and spans the entire wall of the room they have it in, it’s enormous and incredible and i don’t want to think about how much time it would have taken to weave initially but it’s gorgeous and i love it). and for a while people at the met were tossing around the idea of restoring at least the chunks? but they tried washing a section and it shrank weirdly and the whole project was shelved again. fast forward to, i think it’s the seventies? when conservators start talking about patching it up.

the problem is that the burgos tapestry is hundreds of years old and in those hundreds of years we’ve bred sheep differently so the wool commercially available today, or even forty years ago, is completely different from the wool of the tapestry itself (which, okay, that must have been such a frustrating thing, to want to fix this thing and realize that you have to undo hundreds of years of sheep breeding, but honestly that’s such a cool problem to have)

the solution they came up with was to get some wool from the national museum in prague, who also did tapestry conservation, and also had non-merino sheep, to have some basis to go off, and so the met started mailing prague and asking hey! hey could you sell us some wool?

no, said prague, we don’t have enough wool, fuck off, which is code for look-the-communist-regime-will-not-let-us-sell-you-wool-but-we-would-like-nothing-better-please-buy-our-wool.

so someone from the met went to prague and had coffee with folks over there and was told, go to this street, find this ice cream vendor, he’ll tell you where to go, and from there he got directions to go visit the musical conservatory, where he met someone else and was told okay, get on your plane, go through security in this particular line, here’s a bill to be paid to a bank account in switzerland and when you get through security you’ll meet someone who will give you the package

and then the met took their wool and used it as the basis for the massive amounts required for the rest of the project and then spent the next 35 years dyeing and spinning and stitching the tapestry back together and filling in all the missing and shittily patched sections. in conclusion if you are ever in nyc or anywhere near nyc you should go up to the cloisters and see it, it’s just to the left as you come in and honestly i was even more excited to see it than i was to see the hunt of the unicorn tapestries, the original is incredible and the amount of work that went into the restored version is mindblowing and the met is an amazing place doing amazing stuff

#more things in heaven and earth #tangentially college-related i guess #/not tolkien #no but seriously i could live in the cloisters and just appear from the walls to yell at people about tapestry conservation #aggressive linguistic prescriptivism

[exercise-of-trust]

TENN’ AMBAR METTA MOTHERFUCKERS

#in other news i don't have fingers anymore #feanor #the silmarillion #embroidery #fibruary #is a thing i used to be doing until this bastard consumed all my time #property law #/eli shut up #aggressive linguistic prescriptivism #subcreation #the matter of song

[exercise-of-trust]

look all i’m saying is if they’re scouts they need merit badges

#we know the devil #venus wktd #why did these take so long!! they're tiny!! #anyway i'm having a lot of emotions about fairness and wanting things. too many emotions. it's exhausting. #// #txt #/not tolkien #reality on purpose #subcreation #aggressive linguistic prescriptivism

[exercise-of-trust]

things i do not have: an actual lace crochet hook

things i do have: an exacto knife, a bamboo skewer, too much time on my hands

#i am so incredibly smug that this actually works #i don't even have an actual project in mind i'm just excited to have a very tiny crochet hook! #aggressive linguistic prescriptivism

[exercise-of-trust]

first shot at cross stitch and, okay, maybe sixteen thousand miles of backstitch is Not My Thing, but i’m happy with how it turned out (and it’ll be worth it when i finish the thing it needs to go on)

[[pattern from @shitpostsampler]]

#the demerit badges in progress underneath it are also headed for the same big project and oh god this is going to be such a disaster #learning experience!! learning experience!!!!! #/eli shut up #/not tolkien #aggressive linguistic prescriptivism #subcreation

[exercise-of-trust]

i didn’t spend three goddamn weeks doing nothing but hand stitching this motherfucker not to show it off

[from @mctreeleth’s pattern which i said only god could stop me from doing, and which god in the form of sixteen miles of top stitching attempted to do]

#never quilted before and i'll be damned if i ever do it again #txt #/not tolkien #aggressive linguistic prescriptivism #subcreation

[exercise-of-trust]

so i got to see the cloisters yesterday and holy mcfucking shit catch me taking the first free weekend i get and going up to look at them again because i could spend an entire year in there if you let me

there were the unicorn tapestries! and they were just as awesome as they are in the pictures, and i did get to see all the individual weave and all the thousands of individual flowers and leaves and it was /great/, and i’d kill to get to see the back, and see how the ends were woven in (because that’s not always the standard for tapestries but all the unicorn ones are perfectly finished on the back and it’s incredible) and i still do want to see the colors before they were faded out, but it was so cool to just. stare at them.

and the nine heroes tapestries! they were kinda wonky looking and some of them are still being restored (i think the arthur one was missing?) and some are just fragments but i do appreciate that hector takes precedence in the three pagan heroes over achilles, because fuck achilles, anyway they were so cool to look at! and i got some nice detail photos of the weave and it was just a great time all around

and holy shit, i got to see christ is born as man’s redeemer, and oh my god you can’t even tell they had to put it back together. i mean sure joseph has three arms but i think that’s a mistake in the original, and given the scale of the thing? given how fucking huge it is? yeah! you’re going to have some mistakes! anyway it took over thirty years to restore and involved all kinds of spy shit in prague to get the wool for the project in the first place, which i can’t talk about or this post will get even longer than it already is. but the color matches are perfect, you genuinely can’t tell that it was chopped into four massive pieces and woven back together over the course of three decades, anyway i need to stop talking about this now but holy shit, the burgos tapestry is incredible, holy shit.

in conclusion this was the best field trip of my life and i’m seriously considering a medieval studies major just so i can have an excuse to study this for the rest of my life

#i just. fuck. it was so good. #also i've been watching the recordings from the tapestry restoration symposium #from the celebration when the burgos tapestry was actually finished in 2009 #and it's just an incredible resource for all that good good textiles research #somebody duct tape my mouth shut before i start screaming dye facts from the roof of my dorm #more things in heaven and earth #/not tolkien #/eli shut up #for the love of God SHUT UP #aggressive linguistic prescriptivism

[exercise-of-trust]

anyway just so we’re all clear on where this blog stands re: the shibboleth

also i don’t know how to do embroidery for shit and french knots can bite me

#miriel therinde #silm art #property law #/miriel #shibboleth #aggressive linguistic prescriptivism