illiterate dairy maid in 1750, hundreds of years before germ theory was even thought of: because of my exposure to cowpox, im immune to smallpox. if we expose people to cowpox, they won’t die of smallpox
upper middle class college educated mother with internet living in the year of our lord 2018: vaccines are the devils handiwork and a conspiracy i’d rather my child die of polio than be the autism
we should make fun of americans more. why dont their shops include tax in the price tag. like how much does this item cost? its a surprise 🙂
Honestly, tea. I’ve lived here my whole life and I have never once known what my total is gonna be at the register. Total fucking mystery.
im an ex-american living in new zealand for the past two years and it still never fails to blow my mind that i can take a $2 coin, walk up to a counter with two $1 items, and perform the expected transaction
I think we, as a general community, need to start taking this little moment more seriously.
This, right here? This is asking for consent. It’s a legal necessity, yes, but it is also you, the reader, actively consenting to see adult content; and in doing so, saying that you are of an age to see it, and that you’re emotionally capable of handling it.
You find the content you find behind this warning disgusting, horrifying, upsetting, triggering? You consented. You said you could handle it, and you were able to back out at any time. You take responsibility for yourself when you click through this, and so long as the creator used warnings and tags correctly, you bear full responsibility for its impact on you.
“Children are going to lie about their age” is probably true, but that’s the problem of them and the people who are responsible for them, not the people that they lie to.
If you’re not prepared to see adult content, created by and for adults, don’t fucking click through this. And if you do, for all that’s holy, don’t blame anyone else for it.
Like, the Flint water crisis, right? I just read an estimate that it would take $55 million to bring clean water back to Flint. That sounds like a lot of money until you consider that’s less than a tenth of a billion dollars. Jeff Bezos is worth $118 billion. For less than .05% of his net worth, Jeff Bezos could bring water back to an entire town. At the most money I have ever had in my bank account, .05% of it could buy me like a burger. And not even a particularly nice one.
And let’s say, yeah, the ultra-rich are soulless monsters devoid of empathy or altruism. For .05% of his net wealth, Jeff Bezos could completely turn his public image around. Instead of being the asshole who exploits his workers, suddenly he’s the unlikely hero who saved an entire town.
Like
How do you have the power to become a hero at practically no personal cost and just
I am not trying to erase their past battles for equality, but if your advocacy doesn’t include people of color then your advocacy does nothing but add to the alienation of people of color that’s not even my opinion that’s literally what I’ve learned from listening to Black women and activists
within the same system, white women will benefit and be protected while women of color will not. that cannot be ignored.
trump is racist. his policies are racist. that also cannot be ignored. his beliefs, his actions, and his current position of president of our fucking country puts women of color and people of color in danger. showing support of that, even by showing up for a traditional photo op with him, shows disregard for everyone who is not like them.
feminism that only benefits white women just simply isn’t good enough. advocacy that only benefits white women isn’t enough. I’m not trying to erase their past efforts for equality, I simply expect better by this point and I’m disappointed.
that’s why I’m upset about this team going to the White House
straight boys are weak and pathetic, queer girls walk into the ladies changing room and see ten women naked, do they stare? do they say something inappropriate? do they make them uncomfortable? no because they have the common fucking sense to recognise when a situation is sexual and that people deserve the most basic level of respect to not be harassed, yet here we are banning shorts and low cut tops in school because straight boys are weak and pathetic
okay i made this post this morning and it has since had eighty two thousand notes, it’s been featured on reddit, facebook, twitter i’ve been sent multiple death threats and messages that i don’t even want to describe
and i have to apologise
i’ve seen the error of my ways
straight boys are not ’weak and pathetic’
straight boys are weak, pathetic and fucking annoying
what I love about buying clothes is how nothing ever fits! wait hang on, what I love about buying clothes is the expense and inconvenience! uh, no, what I love about buying clothes is the crappy materials and shoddy workmanship!
look I’ll come in again and start over
[insert discourse about pockets]
…there’s discourse about pockets? How? Are there people who are against pockets? Are pockets problematic?
pockets, aphobic and possibly terfy??
Noooooooooooooooooo I thought I was safe here!
You fools, what have you started?
(I’m not joking or exaggerating, it was pockets on dog sweaters that made me angry enough to become an Internet Feminist)
Okay. Okay.
So the thing is that pockets used to be big for everybody in Western Europe (and specifically England is where a lot of this is sourced) – they were large pouches worn on a belt (think the kind of purse a cutpurse would cut if a cutpurse could cut purses). Men wore these on belts outside their clothes, women wore them under their overdresses on a belt; the pockets could be accessed through slits in the overdress near the hips. These types of pockets were huge, large enough to carry snacks and money and oranges and workbags.
There were a couple of problems with this (from an upper-class, high society perspective). One: Nice Young Ladies Shouldn’t Grab At Their Crotches In Public What Will People Think? Two: My Daughter Or Wife May Be Planning On Running Away And Her Pockets Are Full Of Secrets (this is a plot point in the 1740 novel Pamela, in which the titular character has a change of clothes hidden in her pocket under her pillow to escape from her abusive master).
The both problems became less of a problem in the early Regency era, when the dresses shifted from being big poofy things with a wide hip to a slim, Roman-era-inspired gauzy dress like this:
You see that little bag that looks like a medallion? That’s what started a lot of the shit that was to follow. That’s a recticule and it was basically an purse that was so fashionable that it made the whole concept of purses fashionable.
Anyway, back to a chat about privacy real quick: did you know that the concept of a post office used to be controversial because women could receive correspondence that their parents or spouse didn’t know about? There was not a hell of a lot of privacy for women in this era – a very rich woman might have a desk that she could lock, but women basically didn’t own very much or have rights to own very much so if a woman was married or lived with her parents her shit was their shit and they could do with it what they liked. Enter pockets – large bags worn constantly on the person and put under a pillow at night. Got a secret love-letter? Put it in your pocket. Saving a few coins to run away? Pocket. There’s a thesis that I can’t for the life of me find online but that I read in college called “Tye’d about my middle next to my smock: The cultural context of women’s pockets” by Yolanda Van der Krol that discusses the importance of having this private space where you could keep a bit of yourself hidden.
Which brings us again to recticules. Not only were the small, the were worn outside of the clothes and therefore were less private (it would have been much stranger to put a recticule under your pillow than a pocket – if only because being under clothes prevented pockets from getting as dirty). Recticules were “hold a couple of coins” small. They were “maybe a needle case and scissors, but not yarn that’s for sure” small.
They also came into fashion right as men’s clothing was finally settling into the three-piece suit as the standard that would last for the next three hundred-ish years. As breeches and ruffled shirts were going out recticules were coming in – as were slacks and coats and vests each with their own set of pockets for a unique purpose. In the Victorian era a full suit might have as many as seventeen pockets dedicated to things like watches and snuff-boxes and wallets and pen-knifes. Between the Regency Era and the first World War women’s clothing lost its large pockets and went through a variety of purses and small pockets sewn into dresses to fit with the changing styles (surprise surprise, the Victorians were the first to introduce “fake” pockets on women’s clothing, small flaps of fabric meant to be mostly decorative). Meanwhile men’s clothing settled into the pants (though pockets in pants became more popular post-regency), shirt, vest, tie (cravat during regency, ties as we know them later), coat, and hat style that would remain standard business wear until basically now (we have largely ditched the vest in casual environments and the hat altogether). And that outfit has a fuckload of pockets. Even in the most sedate coat-and-slacks look today you’ve got a breast pocket, an inside coat pocket, two pockets on the front of the coat and four pockets on the pants (if you add a vest and a dress shirt with pockets you’ve got even more). That is an embarrassment of pockets!
Because what happened after WWI that people basically stopped making their own clothes and started buying ready-made clothes. And at that point it had become conventional for women to carry purses. And to have small pockets. And to wear tighter clothes.
AND WE NEVER CAME THE FUCK BACK FROM THAT.
Designers and manufacturers excuse the lack of pockets on women’s clothing today by saying “well, women carry purses, don’t they? they don’t need pockets.” There’s a rather infamous quote by Christian Dior just post WWII saying “men have pockets to keep things in, women for decoration.” That attitude still holds. Having too many pockets “ruins the line” of a piece of clothing – a dress with pockets is a beautiful, difficult-to-find thing (it’s getting better in the last five years). You can get “mom jeans” with pockets but it’s harder to find skinny jeans with pockets (though the men’s skinny jeans have pockets).
When you DO have pockets they’re smaller. When I first got angry about this I compared my husband’s pockets to mine by trying to put my large women’s wallet in them and found that it wouldn’t fit completely inside of a single pocket that I owned and it was overwhelmed and lost in all but the smallest of his pockets. Oh, look, I found the pictures:
This is extremely potato quality but top to bottom (women’s clothing on the left, men’s on the right) we’ve got the back pocket on a pair of slacks, the outside pocket on a fleece sweater, the back pocket on a pair of jeans, the front pocket on a pair of jeans, and the largest pocket of my jacket compared to the smallest pocket of his jacket. The photos where the wallet is on top of his clothing is where you couldn’t even see the wallet in the picture because it was buried so deeply in the pocket. I didn’t include the front pocket on the slacks because my slacks didn’t have a front pocket.
ANYWAY.
Ahem.
So what started all of this was a pair of dog jackets and a pair of jeans. I’d purchased a pair of jeans and was upset to have discovered that the pockets on the front were fake (infuriating). I happened upon some dog jackets in a store – there were “girl” and “boy” jackets. The girl dog jacket had a fake pocket. The boy dog jacket had a real pocket.
Anyway I bought the “boy” dog jacket for my female dog, bought a men’s wallet (which is much smaller but doesn’t have an awesome unicorn skeleton on it) and wrote up my very first angry blog about the patriarchy.
I’ve been something of a grind on the subject of pockets ever since.
(And to anyone who is going to drop in with “just wear men’s clothing” thank you for the helpful suggestion, I find men’s sweaters and jackets quite comfortable but I have yet to find a pair of men’s pants that fits my hips, waist, and thighs simultaneously and doesn’t have an uncomfortably low crotch that chafes my thighs. Also I’ve tried that shit and as it turns out there are plenty of employers who are happy to write you up for not meeting dress code because your clothing is “sloppy or ill-fitting for an office environment.” The boss is perfectly happy when I come into the office with half my head shaved and a skater minidress over skull-patterned tights with platform boots but can’t hang when I put on a suit.)
Thank you for sitting through another session of Yelling with Alli.
GIVE WOMEN’S CLOTHING POCKETS YOU FUCKING COWARDS.
@ms-demeanor I did not know this history and it makes me EVEN ANGRIER THAN I ALREADY WAS on the subject of pockets in women’s clothing.
hot take: hrt, gender therapy and trans surgeries should be free
if cis people don’t have to pay to have a body that doesn’t make them dysphoric, neither should trans people
So by that logic does that mean that I should get anti-depressants and all the other pills for my mental issues for free because the people who don’t suffer from them don’t have to pay to have them?
Latin has this word, sic. Or, if we want to be more diacritically accurate, sīc. That shows that the i is long, so it’s pronounced like “seek” and not like “sick.”
You might recognize this word from Latin sayings like “sic semper tyrannis” or “sic transit gloria mundi.” You might recognize it as what you put in parentheses when you want to be pass-agg about someone’s mistakes when you’re quoting them: “Then he texted me, ‘I want to touch you’re (sic) butt.’”
It means, “thus,” which sounds pretty hoity-toity in this modren era, so maybe think of it as meaning “in this way,” or “just like that.” As in, “just like that, to all tyrants, forever,” an allegedly cool thing to say after shooting a President and leaping off a balcony and shattering your leg. “Everyone should do it this way.”
Anyway, Classical Latin somewhat lacked an affirmative particle, though you might see the word ita, a synonym of sic, used in that way. By Medieval Times, however, sic was holding down this role. Which is to say, it came to mean yes.
Ego: Num edisti totam pitam?
Tu, pudendus: Sic.
Me: Did you eat all the pizza?
You, shameful: That’s the way it is./Yes.
This was pretty well established by the time Latin evolved into its various bastard children, the Romance languages, and you can see this by the words for yes in these languages.
In Spanish, Italian, Asturian, Catalan, Corsican, Galician, Friulian, and others, you say si for yes. In Portugese, you say sim. In French, you say si to mean yes when you’re contradicting a negative assertion (”You don’t like donkey sausage like all of us, the inhabitants of France, eat all the time?” “Yes, I do!”). In Romanian, you say da, but that’s because they’re on some Slavic shit. P.S. there are possibly more Romance languages than you’re aware of.
But:
There was still influence in some areas by the conquered Gaulish tribes on the language of their conquerors. We don’t really have anything of Gaulish language left, but we can reverse engineer some things from their descendants. You see, the Celts that we think of now as the people of the British Isles were Gaulish, originally (in the sense that anyone’s originally from anywhere, I guess) from central and western Europe. So we can look at, for example, Old Irish, where they said tó to mean yes, or Welsh, where they say do to mean yes or indeed, and we can see that they derive from the Proto-Indo-European (the big mother language at whose teat very many languages both modern and ancient did suckle) word *tod, meaning “this” or “that.” (The asterisk indicates that this is a reconstructed word and we don’t know exactly what it would have been but we have a pretty damn good idea.)
So if you were fucking Ambiorix or whoever and Quintus Titurius Sabinus was like, “Yo, did you eat all the pizza?” you would do that Drake smile and point thing under your big beefy Gaulish mustache and say, “This.” Then you would have him surrounded and killed.
Apparently Latin(ish) speakers in the area thought this was a very dope way of expressing themselves. “Why should I say ‘in that way’ like those idiots in Italy and Spain when I could say ‘this’ like all these cool mustache boys in Gaul?” So they started copying the expression, but in their own language. (That’s called a calque, by the way. When you borrow an expression from another language but translate it into your own. If you care about that kind of shit.)
The Latin word for “this” is “hoc,” so a bunch of people started saying “hoc” to mean yes. In the southern parts of what was once Gaul, “hoc” makes the relatively minor adjustment to òc, while in the more northerly areas they think, “Hmm, just saying ‘this’ isn’t cool enough. What if we said ‘this that’ to mean ‘yes.’” (This is not exactly what happened but it is basically what happened, please just fucking roll with it, this shit is long enough already.)
So they combined hoc with ille, which means “that” (but also comes to just mean “he”: compare Spanish el, Italian il, French le, and so on) to make o-il, which becomes oïl. This difference between the north and south (i.e. saying oc or oil) comes to be so emblematic of the differences between the two languages/dialects that the languages from the north are called langues d’oil and the ones from the south are called langues d’oc. In fact, the latter language is now officially called “Occitan,” which is a made-up word (to a slightly greater degree than that to which all words are made-up words) that basically means “Oc-ish.” They speak Occitan in southern France and Catalonia and Monaco and some other places.
The oil languages include a pretty beefy number of languages and dialects with some pretty amazing names like Walloon, and also one with a much more basic name: French. Perhaps you’ve heard of it, n’est-ce pas?
Yeah, eventually Francophones drop the -l from oil and start saying it as oui. If you’ve ever wondered why French yes is different from other Romance yeses, well, now you know.
I guess what I’m getting at is that when you reblog a post you like and tag it with “this,” or affirm a thing a friend said by nodding and saying “Yeah, that”: you’re not new
this is all amazing, but I’m now waiting for people to start reblogging posts with the additional comment “SIC”.
Steel Phoenix Studios 
