Being Amber Rhea

It’s been very interesting reading people’s definitions of kinky. (Keep ‘em coming!) The definitions are varied, but most of the commenters so far at least seem to agree that “kinky” is subjective.

What fascinates me, though, is that there does seem to be some concept of a generally-accepted meaning of the word, nebulous though it may be when you actually try to pin it down. But when people make your garden-variety stupid “oh, so-and-so is into the kinky stuff!” joke, there seems to be at least a general understanding of what that refers to. (Or not? Am I totally off base here? This is the impression I get.)

Maybe it’s pointless to try to reconcile individual’s personal definitions of/ruminations on the word with a larger cultural meaning, but this stuff fascinates me. I guess it’s the linguistics nerd in me.

I feel like in general, “kinky” is taken to mean “weird,” but “weird” includes stuff that actually isn’t weird by a lot of people’s standards, when you actually ask them. Which is why I think this general definition comes from a cultural level, which can be slower to change than the minds of individuals.

Am I making any sense here? I’m making sense to myself, but I feel like I’m probably making no sense whatsoever to anyone else.

Anyway, I’ll move right along and talk about what kinky means to me. Honestly, when I hear the word “kinky” or that someone is “into kink” or that a place is “kink-friendly” or whatever, I think of BDSM. I wonder how many other people equate kink and BDSM to some degree? I think I do it because I know quite a few people who are into BDSM to some degree and they do tend to use the terms interchangeably - or at least that’s how it appears to me, as a non-BDSMer looking in.

So to my mind, “kinky” tends to involve some or all of the following: leather, corsets, elaborate costumes, various props, bondage, domination/submission, safe words, not necessarily any actual fucking, most likely the term “scene,” and possibly the term “aftercare.”

It seems like in the thread where people were offering definitions, a lot of people were defining kinky the way I’d define sex-positive. I have to admit when I hear about kink this or kink-friendly that, sometimes a little red flag goes up, and I wonder if this is going to be my scene (ha!) or not. Look, I have nothing against BDSM and all that stuff; some of my best friends, an’ all. I’m just not into it. As a friend who shall remain nameless (unless s/he chooses to self-identify!) said about first learning about BDSM: “When’s the part where you have sex?” That’s basically how I feel about it. The whole dom/sub thing, and the props and the costumes and whatnot, does absolutely nothing for me. Now, I certainly like handcuffs from time to time, or being smacked on the ass with a belt, and other assorted fun stuff. But there’s usually fucking going on at the same time… I guess that’s the kicker for me.

Now before any of my BDSM-loving blog associates read this and get all worked up because I’m attacking your preferences - hey, you don’t have to. ‘Cause I’m not. Whatever anyone is into is awesome, for them! To my mind, the most important thing is for people to have the kind of sex they enjoy, and - I’ll borrow a phrase from the BDSM crowd here - to always be safe, sane, and consensual.

…and must remember to casually slip into conversation at some point.

• Scofflaws
• Inchoate
• Grimoire

(Pardon my split infinitive.)

I’m waiting to find out exactly how thoroughly I am going to get fucked by the IRS, but since I can’t do anything about it no matter what the outcome, I’m trying not to think about it. Slowly emerging from my pity party, but I’ll keep having it for as long as I goddamn feel like, until all the booze is gone and the guests are good and plastered. Wait, what? That analogy doesn’t work…

Anyway, that being said, here’s an email from one of my Correspondents in the Field (who really needs her own blog, because she writes so many blogworthy emails!), which cheered me up because it’s really fucking funny.

So…one of my co-workers wondered aloud what “stan” meant. Stan as in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, etc. One quick google search later and we learned that “stan” is a Farsi word meaning “land.” Makes good sense (England, Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, etc.).

Apparently Afghanistan means “Land of the Afghans,” Uzbekistan means “Land of the Uzbeks” and Pakistan means “Land of the Pure.” Yep. Land of the Pure.

Less reliable sources also define “taj” as “person wearing a crown” and “ik” as head, ergo Tajikistan means “Land of the Person Wearing a Crown on Their Head.”

Maybe someday we’ll rename our country Jesustan. It has a nice ring to it. And feels autocratically appropriate.

But seriously, Land of the Pure?

LOL!

It has come to my attention that some people have a difficult time grasping the difference between the etymology of a word and the definition of a word. This is a very basic, yet (apparently) commonly misunderstood, distinction. Allow me to explain.

Etymology refers to a word’s linguistic origins. The definition, on the other hand, is the meaning of the word as it is used in the language today. A word’s etymology may suggest its original meaning at the time of its earliest occurence, but usually that meaning is very different from its current usage. Or, to put it more simply: Definitions change; etymology does not.

To illustrate this point, let’s take a look at the English word “husband.”

The word comes from Old English hus (house) + OE buan (to dwell or live).* So, the word’s etymology is, “one who dwells in the house.” That was, most likely, what the word meant in the popular lexicon of 11th-12th century Britain.

The definition of the word today, as we know, is very different. Merriam-Webster defines it as, “a male partner in marriage.” Notice that the roots contain no reference to men, marriage, or partnership, yet that is how we use it today. That’s natural language change at work - which is what the entire field of linguistics is based around.

But what about the word “husbandry”? Some have suggested that because “husbandry” is most often used to refer to the breeding of livestock, that this somehow demonstrates an inherent misogynism in the English language - a perception of women as no better than livestock. This conclusion is disingenuous at best, and just plain stupid at worst.

Clearly, “husbandry” derives from “husband.” The suffix -ry signifies an action, process, or state of the root noun. Therefore, the etymology of husbandry is, “the act of dwelling in a house,” or even, more liberally, “the care of a household.”

Are we all clear now? (I haven’t linked to the blog post that inspired this Linguistics 101 lesson, because I have more to say about it later, and I don’t want you all jumping ahead and reading it before I can go off on my other rants related to it.) If you need further clarification, well, I don’t know what more I can do for you.

* Ed. note: “Husband” was originally borrowed into English from Old Norse, but the ON roots had the same meaning and were almost the same phonemically. Therefore, this further bit of history is immaterial to the example, but I wanted to point it out lest someone try to call me on an error.

Yes, it’s true - the blog Pat and I started kind of as a joke (Literally, A Weblog) is getting publicity in the blogosphere. It was mentioned in the Language Log* on Oct. 25th (though I don’t know if I like their description of it as being “slavishly devoted to particular points of grammar, punctuation, or usage” [emphasis mine]) and in a Slate article Tuesday. W00t! Now where are those profits…

* Also featured in the Language Log is Apostrophe Abuse, which was started by a friend of Ryan’s who was inspired by the literally blog.

In vaguely the same vein (Jenny, that phrase was for you) as the previous post… tonight Sam decided that the saying, “A man is only as good as his word” needed to be updated. The new version (2.0?) is:

A person is only as good as his or her sentences.

Self-aggrandizement: the act of going from soft penis to hard penis.

Yes, we finally came up with one. Okay, not so much we as Sam. Here it is: y’all’dn’t've. Which derives, of course, from “you all would not have.” Here’s an example of using it in a sentence: “If y’all’dn’t've stayed out so late last night, y’all’dn’t be so tired this morning.” Discuss.

Is “my own personal opinion” really redundant? (You know where I stand on this; and I know Niki, for one, will back me up.) The debate has begun, over at Garrett’s blog (scroll to the comments section), where he’d wanted to talk about healthcare, but instead has been sucked into a semantics debate. Mwahahaha!!

Quote from a Flagpole article comparing UGA and Ga. Tech:

Before a student can begin to understand engineering, he or she must have a steady foundation in physics, chemistry, mathematics and other fields; before a student can become a programmer ready for the corporate world, he must have the practice of writing thousands upon thousands of lines of code.

Clearly, this is blatant sexism. In the first clause, the author uses “he or she”, since a student of enigeering can be either male or female. But in the second clause, the author uses just “he” — implying that only males can be programmers. One cannot use the “technically, that’s proper grammar” argument here, since the author did use “he or she” once already.

Ladies, looks like we gotta keep fightin’ the good fight!

On another note, Flagpole has changed its website to PHP (and also, apparently, a new server). Muy interesante.

An interesting bit of etymology to ponder…

The modern English word sin derives from Old English synn. The same root shows up in other Germanic languages — e.g., Old Norse synd, German Sünde. It may ultimately derive from the Indo-European root *es-, which meant “to be.”

It’s my bedtime. But just one quick post…

Adrian asked about New York City and where Chris and I would live when we move back up there, and so on and so forth. I felt it was a topic worthy of sharing with a broader audience (read: the 3 or 4 people who actually read this - one of whom is Adrian) so here ya go, a cut-and-paste job from the email I sent him:

“I realized I never answered your question, and it is something about which I feel the need to briefly pontificate (contradiction in terms?) Yes, there are huge variances in housing costs in NYC. Living in Manhattan is pretty much out of the question - an apartment the size of our bedroom would cost around $2000/month. (I’m not kidding.) I kind of got spoiled living in Manhattan when I was at NYU, but I was in the dorms, which is the only reason it was doable. Instead, Chris and I would live in either Brooklyn or Queens. I have friends who live in both. Within every borough there are good and bad neighborhoods. You may have heard of Bedford-Stuyvesant; that’s the notoriously bad neighborhood in Brooklyn. It’s just a matter of knowing what’s what. As for the Bronx and Staten Island? They hardly count. (Sorry, New York humor there… kidding…) Another possibility is living right across the river in Jersey. The PATH trains go there.

“I can see how you would feel lost in an urban forest when visiting NYC. The thing about living there is, you quickly find out that it’s not just one big huge 8-million-people city. It’s lots and lots of individual neighborhoods. So when people ask where you live, you don’t say “I live in New York City”, you say the Village, or Soho, or Astoria, and so on. While I was at NYU, I rarely ventured above Times Square, and when I did I felt like I was entering unfamiliar territory.

“As for the legal definition of a borough? I don’t know. I’ve often wondered that myself. Mirriam-Webster online says:

Etymology: Middle English burgh, from Old English burg fortified town; akin to Old High German burg fortified place, and probably to Old English beorg hill — more at BARROW
Date: before 12th century
1 a : a medieval fortified group of houses forming a town with special duties and privileges b : a town or urban constituency in Great Britain that sends a member to Parliament c : an urban area in Great Britain incorporated for purposes of self-government
2 a : a municipal corporation proper in some states (as New Jersey and Minnesota) corresponding to the incorporated town or village of the other states b : one of the five constituent political divisions of New York City
3 : a civil division of the state of Alaska corresponding to a county in most other states

“So there you go. That didn’t really clear anything up now, did it?”