Weekend bargains on Separation Street. This is very lovely.
Merri Creek after the thunderstorm.
My housemate and I were sitting quietly in the house and it struck me that the fridge was making an inordinate amount of noise. This could be quite disturbing if you had a mental illness. Remember this scene from Requiem For A Dream?
And then I started thinking about how it’s a bit strange that we put things in the fridge, I mean, we take it for granted that everyone has a fridge, even feral vegie-growing left-wing people have one. But we don’t really need fridges, if you could grow your own food and give up dairy, you wouldn’t need to put things in cold storage. It’s just another example of how everything’s so convenient these days, and there’s something a bit sterile about it. It kind of reminds me of the people in the space ship in the kid/adult movie Wall-E, zooming around on their chairs, eating their liquefied meals. I wonder if we will ever look back on fridges and think, yeah, those were the days, imagine us, thinking that we could sustain that kind of lifestyle.
Here’s some high-brow High Street graffiti. Although what it’s trying to elucidate I’m not entirely sure. Probably it’s trying to persuade us of the general importance of elucidation.
Right across from that, they are digging up the road to put in disability-accessible platform stops, which is good, although it won’t actually be accessible until it gets low-floor trams.
My friends and I went to a gig last week, of a band we absolutely love; soulful, lyrical music – the singer, in particular, has a great energy. But that night you could tell he was feeling sore, didn’t really want to be there. When called back for an encore, he said, ‘you cunts, you made me come back on,’ in a genuinely irritated rather than joking tone. I recoiled a bit: it’s a harsh word, and I was surprised to hear it come out of his mouth. I figured everyone says dumb stuff sometimes.
This story came up over dinner last night and things got a bit awkward, because my friend’s new boyfriend, whom she really wanted us to get along with (and we did, we really liked him) said he thought that people should say the word more often, to remove the stigma. A woman’s vagina is a beautiful thing, he said, and should be celebrated.
Poor guy, it was just him and the three of us girls, and I don’t think anyone agreed with him. We all found the word ‘cunt’ a bit hard to take because it makes a vile swear word out of our precious bits. It doesn’t have to be that way, he argued: if nobody got offended, the word would be deprived of its power. But if you accept that women’s sexuality is still often ignored or stigmatised, then the word ‘cunt’, used to mean base and nasty, does cut a bit.
As a teenager, for example, I felt that my own incipient sexual desires were shameful and needed to be hidden (Here’s Emily Maguire’s beautiful, down-to-earth piece about teenage girls’ sexuality from a few years ago). It’s a bit sad, isn’t it? I’m not saying all girls felt the same. Guys probably feel awkward about their sex drive too, but it’s different. We knew about guys masturbating and walking around with erections, in fact, I think my grade five teacher taught us about it in sex education, but girls’ sexuality was never discussed, at home, at school, or amongst my friends. We did, however, learn to put a condom on.
The prevalent myth is that men are sex-hungry testosterone fiends, unable to resist their bestial sexuality (hello Bettina Arndt). Women, on the other hand, are more emotional than physical, and besides, their orgasms are ‘complicated’. The corollary is that it’s normal for women not to enjoy sex, because sex is really for men. This doesn’t represent reality, but has an impact nonetheless.
How many women put up with bad sex, thinking that’s just the way it is or that the problem’s with them? How often is pleasing a woman just treated as an optional extra, and how frequently do we hear what a female orgasm consists of, and how to make it happen? And are men really these physical creatures, who never have sex for intimacy?
Women’s sexuality gives us power, in a way, but it’s also often used against us. Public figures, for example, have to strike a fine balance between being not sexy enough (frumpy and tiresome) or too sexy (unreliable, frivolous). Gillard, for example, is incessantly criticised for her unsatisfactory hairstyle, earlobes, and fashion. Sometimes it’s fun to gossip: I remember giggling about Gillard’s earlobes when she was on TV the night Rudd got elected. But it doesn’t feel good to have my petty loungeroom gossip continually replicated in the media. (Kate Ellis, on the other hand, recently attracted criticism for looking too hot, in coloured high heels on the front page of Sunday Life. But why can’t a powerful figure look like that?)
In this context, I don’t see how using the word ‘cunt’ as an insult is an effective way of redressing sexual inequality. It’s like saying you’re going to address racism by calling black people ‘niggers’. Sure, it’d be different if there really was a movement of women who wanted to reclaim the word ‘cunt’ and turn it into a positive (here’s an interesting NY Times article about the idea). Although, that said, I think I’d still feel a bit queasy about it: for me the word is so misogynistic as to be beyond redemption, and reclaiming it seems like a bit of a trite way of solving a deeper problem. Now I understand how the Slutwalk critics felt.
‘No fucking way man.’ (OK, I cheated, the licorice allsorts jocks were in the men’s underwear section, which I was in all honesty perusing for the sole purpose of seeing whether there were some really, really bad undies. Yes, I was a bit bored).
Girls Dress Up Set: ‘Great for Developing Your Child’s Imagination’. Yeah, really extending them.
Piles and piles of soldiers. Because, you know, that’s what we want to inspire our boys to do when they grow up.
Boy playing with trucks.
Teaching girls how to be ‘little mommies’?
This is actually a dart gun.
This packet features a picture of a young boy with ammunition strapped onto him. Only $15.
More pretty stuff for the girls.
And here, little boys with guns. Awesome!
No honey you can’t have a gun but you can have…um… a princess teapot!
Quick! We need some engineers to fix our public transport infrastructure!
Ever seen a female drummer? They’re pretty awesome.
These barbies looked entombed. But I think that’s just the flash.
This girl is very cute, I have to admit. She gets a pink and purple tricycle.
‘I thought it was alright. The start was hard to watch, I would have changed chanels but i was folding laundry and the remote was like 2m away. When the indipendants rocked up in the one ute it picked up nicly and I will proboly watch it next week to see if I like it again. Its not great TV but its alright to fold laundry too and thats alright by todays standerds.’ : Christopher, commenter at The Drum on At Home With Julia.
Hehe.
I’m usually reluctant to hold comedy to the same standards of civility as more earnest endeavours. As viewers, it’s in our interest that comedians walk provocatively close to the line – that’s part of what makes them funny – so of course, they’ll occasionally step over it. In my experience, the best comedy is daring and startling, shedding light on situations which are so subtly ridiculous that laughing at them makes you feel like you’re part of an in joke.
At Home With Julia does not do this. I have to admit that I didn’t take an objective mind to it. I think it’s pretty lame and obvious, if not irresponsible, to make a show about Julia’s home life – seriously, can you really not think of anything less obvious? Can you imagine a show depicting John Howard in his PJs making sexual advances to Jeanette?
Some say the show will be good for Julia because it ‘humanises’ her. Well, aside from the fact that it actually makes her look like an ignorant twerp who can’t even pronounce Barack Obama’s name right, these continual demands for a warm and personal Julia are getting a bit old. How about we just judge her on how she governs? Um… oh… well, maybe…
I’m such a hedonist I was prepared to let go of my feminist misgivings if it was actually funny. As Christopher points out, some of the actors’ mannerisms were spot-on, and there were a few jokes of an ‘ok to iron the laundry to quality. But in general, the plot, dialogue and jokes couldn’t have been more unimaginative. Julia as a kind of political incarnation of Kath and Kim? For whom serious political negotiations involves having the independents over to dinner? Tim Mathieson as a downtrodden house hubby, striving to get in shape and frustrated because Julia can’t get home for ‘Date Night’?
Can you imagine the writers coming up with their ideas? ‘Yeah, I think this will make a really good plot and stuff, because like, you know, Tim’s a hairdresser, and Julia’s a woman in power! So we can, like, show the reversed gender roles.’ I feel sorry for Mathieson. As Annabel Crabb so succinctly argues here, Gillard’s not the only victim of sexism. Why do people find it so hard to accept the idea that a guy can be both ‘masculine’ and a hairdresser and housekeeper? Perhaps the writers were trying to poke fun of gender stereotypes, rather than reinforce them, but that’s not clear.
In the end, Tim does what Julia couldn’t or wouldn’t do: get tough and angry with the independants, a confrontation that finally convinces them to back down on an imports issue, and accept him as a ‘good bloke’. He saves the day by reasserting his manliness: as an aggressive saviour.
I randomly dropped lol onto the end of that title because it seems that’s what you do these days, regardless of whether something’s funny or not.
Its about the songz
An extract from rapper Trey Songz song, which is actually called LOL 🙂
‘Shorty just text me, says she wanna sex me/LOL smiley face, LOL smiley face/Shorty sent a twitpic/saying come and get this/LOL smiley face, LOL smiley face’.
It’s about the modern-day booty call, referring to Twitter, Blackberry, Myspace, and of course, sexting (omg I love that word). Aside from the fact that it probably sexualises teenage girls, if they’re not sexualised enough already, it’s also vacuous and inane, and also slightly disturbs me from a gender perspective in a way I can’t quite articulate. But then, what can you expect from a musician who changes his last name to ‘songs’ with a Z?
Wtf is ‘lol’. where is it from.
Internet-derived shortened forms such as LOL have around as long as, well, the internet. They started in the 80s, amongst nerdy cliques using online gaming and BBS (precursor to online forums) and proliferated as electronic communications (email, texting, social networking, blogs), became more widely used.
Grammatically, they are abbreviations (soz, devo), abberant abbreviations (4get, sum1) and initialisms (LOL, WTF?). As they creep their way into our speech, they are also pronounced as words rather than individual letters, becoming acronyms (lol, asap).
They save time typing, as well as saving space with texts and Twitter, which limit the amount of character they can use. But internet slang isn’t merely pragmatic: like other forms of slang, it shows that you’re a member of an in-group and excludes outsiders.
Leet, a form of speech that originated in BBS in the 1980s, is derived from the term elite, and gave rise to forms of modern internet slang such as ‘powned’ (showing domination over someone in a video game or argument, or a successful hacking) and adding Z to words (Songz!). It was used to defeat filters and to create unique passwords, encryptions, and user names. Using Leet gave you elite access to a community, demonstrated your online savvy, and prevented newbies from knowing what was going on.
In March this year, the word LOL was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, along with IMHO (‘in my humble opinion’), TMI (‘too much information’) and BFF (‘best friends for ever). In their note of explanation, the Oxford researchers note that these initialisms connote something slightly different than the phrase they stand for:
‘The intention is usually to signal an informal, gossipy mode of expression, and perhaps parody the level of unreflective enthusiasm or overstatement that can sometimes be used in online discourse, while at the same time making oneself an ‘insider’ au fait with forms of expression associated with the latest technology.’
In other words, these initialisms are more than a mere substitution for their lengthier forms. How many people actually laugh when they use the word LOL? Not many, I suspect. It doesn’t have the warmness of a laugh IRL (in real life), or the human connection. It connotes something more playful, detached and ironic. Like ‘liking’ something on Facebook or doing a status-update, the importance is in the self-reporting. To an extent, the truthfulness of that state is irrelevant; hence the irony *winks*.
And they’re fun. When I use these words, it’s definitely in a jokey, self-mocking kind of way, although I wonder whether young people, for whom it’s more normal to use those words, say them more naturally and with less self-consciousness. Permit me to go through a catalogue of some of my favourites, which unsurprisingly, reference some of my favourite states: angst, confusion, life-hating, making fun of stuff, wilful ignorance, love, and sex.
Initialisms: WTF, which is said with cheeky irreverence, and possibly disdain, in response to something judged to be so random, weird or stupid that it’s not worthy of a sensible response. FML: Fuck My Life – speaks for itself. CBF: Can’t be fucked. ILY–I love you.
They are becoming acronyms too. My friend told me a story about how when she was busting her kid for taking her car to Mildura without permission, her kid bleated at her, ‘illy mum, illy’. What about LOL? When spoken, is it pronounced Lol or Lole or L-O-L? Does it need caps? Who cares? The beautiful thing about emergent language is that you get to decide for yourself.
Abbreviations: devo, which means devastated, but in a lighter and often sarcastic kind of way, for example, you’d might profess to being ‘devo’ if your mum didn’t let you go to a party, but not if a member of your family died. Defs (definitely), totes (totally), for shiz (for sure) and soz. Again, soz has that slightly ingenuine, teasing kind of feel, because if you were really, earnestly sorry, you’d probably take time to write the word.
The Oxford dictionary has actually recently added the word ‘to heart’, an emotion-derived verb-cum-noun, these kind of switcheroos being quite common in the grammatically subversive world of internet slang. In terms of portmanteaus (two words smooshed together), there’s the ‘interweb’ or ‘interwebby thing’, which is used to parody inexperienced users. And sexting. Everyone’s so worried about sexting, but the way I see it, it’s just another medium through which teenagers experiment sexually and making bad decisions, which has been their specialty since time immemorial.
Why are borings always trying to ruin my fun. lol. Fail
So, as you can imagine, there are some people blaming internet slang (blame the youth! the ‘puters!) for the decline of the English language.
Here’s a hyperbolic John Humphreys in the Daily Mail, back in 2007: ‘It is the relentless onward march of the texters, the SMS (Short Message Service) [I love how they feel the need to spell that out!] vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours eight hundred years ago. They are destroying it, pillaging our punctuation, savaging our sentences, raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped.’
And a slightly more nuanced, but still righteous, criticism from Will Self: ‘I’m still of an age – and a bent – where I can’t help finding the bowlderisation of texting quite insufferable. I’d rather fiddle with my phone for precious seconds than neglect an apostrophe; I’d rather insert a word laboriously keyed out than resort to predictive texting for a – acceptable to some – synonym.’ Hello: bowlderisation? WTF?
To an extent, these anxieties reflect a deeper discomfort with the instantaneous world of online communication, where speed and quantity trumps quality, perhaps at the expense of deep-thinking and creative abilities. These shortened forms are used because they save time and space, allowing fast-paced, and potentially less well-thought out, communication. But they are ambiguous, and if substituted for more precise terms, could lead to a loss of meaning.
Perhaps this doesn’t matter as such with one-on-one communication, where the words take their meaning from their context and the relationships between communicators. But as writers, we strive to be understood by a wide target audience. We’re looking for the most evocative and perfect forms of expression, and most standard English words can’t be substituted by these shortened forms.
But this is missing the point a bit, because internet slang words aren’t just cheapened forms of their derivative; they take their own unique meanings. They’re a choice, rather than a substitute, and they expand, rather than restrict, the linguistic choices available to us. And because they’re emergent language, they’re not bound by strict grammar rules, they allow people to play and be creative.
I’ll be totes devo if I fail my exam. lol
Will kids forget how to use standard English, and therefore suffer in their exams and job applications? In 2003, Laccetti and Molski commented, in their essay The Lost Art of Writing: ‘Unfortunately for these students, their bosses will not be ‘lol’ when they read a report that lacks proper punctuation and grammar, has numerous misspellings, various made-up words, and silly acronyms.’ You can almost hear the pomposity dripping off those words.
But studies so far have found no basis for fears that using text speak or internet slang impacts on children’s literacy, spelling or grammar ability. Sali Taliamente and Derek Denis’s 2008 study found that using shortened words in text messages doesn’t ruin teenagers’ ability to communicate – they simply pick and choose from formal and colloquial language. Another study had more mixed results, finding no correlation between text speak and low literacy rates, although some teenagers reported it was interfering with their ability to remember proper words.
It’s worth remembering that people have been complaining about the degradation of the English language for years. It’s worth noting that people have been complaining about the decline of the English language and trying to get people to forsake their slang and dialects and speak ‘properly’, which usually equates to the language of the rich, well-educated classes. Language, in other words, is an instrument of social control, and slang deprives these classes of power by undermining their control and legitimacy.
And there’s nothing that new about abbreviations, although they do seem to be getting more common in the internet age. In the Victorian era, emblematic poetry combined letters, numbers and logograms. This is Charles C Bombaugh, from Gleaning from the Harvest Fields of Literature, in 1867: ‘He says he love U2 XS/UR virtuous and Y’s/In XL NC U XL/All others in his I’s.’ For those who didn’t get it: ‘he says he loves you to excess, you are virtuous and wise, in excellency you excel, all others in his eyes’. Gen Y suitors would do well to heed the beauty of the expression in their amorous text messages. From the 1950s: YY UR YY UB/ ICUR YY 4 Me (Two wise you are, two wise you be, I see you are two wise for me).
The Oxford English Dictionary researchers revealed some unexpected historical perspectives to modern initalisms: the first quotation from OMG was from a personal letter in 1917 and LOL in 1960 meant ‘little old lady’.
finally, IMHO, internet slang is totally FTW
Be alert but not alarmed: If you love language, the most important thing is to be critical and analytical about the words we use, and aware of their potential to shape our attitudes and culture. But don’t be afraid to try new things.
I leave you with a killer subcontinental acronym, LSHMTUAFIMC: Laughing so much my turban unravels and falls in my curry!
And finally, this (soz!)
xoxoxoxoxoxoxox (normal to do hugs and kisses these days, so don’t get the wrong idea)
In the words of Jonathan Franzen when he told that boring story about birds at the beginning of his keynote speech, this story ‘doesn’t really do anything.’ But anyway, it entertained me for the morning.
‘Stay in the lines!’ a woman yelled at two people riding side-by-side along Canning St. They were blocking her way and riding outside the bike lane boundaries.
‘We’re talking, ok, get over it!’ he yelled back angrily.
‘Get over yourself and your lycs [lycra!]’ she snarled.
‘Just ride safely!’ he said righteously.
She finally passed them, riding up into the Carlton gardens.
‘Illegal riding, good one!’ said the guy sarcastically.
She turned back at them, smiled wildly and whooped, shouting something incomprehensible.
That’s right. She actually whooped. When was the last time you heard one of them?
Trying to understand carbon pricing is overwhelming – the more you learn, the more questions you have. So after some light internet research, my head’s swimming with questions both profound and inane: If Australia only contributes 1.5% of the global emissions, how will our actions make a difference? Why, apart from looking after the grandkids, do we feel such loyalty to our species? What would a world affected by runaway climate change actually be like? What’s trade-exposed mean? How many zeros in a billion?
As an inner-Melbourne leftie, I’m thoroughly versed in the pro–carbon price arguments, but light on detail. I could tell you, for example, that it’s not really a carbon tax; it’s a price on carbon that will become a trading scheme in 2015. On the other hand, I couldn’t begin to explain to you how a trading scheme works differently from a tax, or which is better. There’s another reason for avoiding the word tax, too. People don’t like the word because it makes them think they’ll have to make personal sacrifices.
In reality, compensation and tax cuts mean that most people don’t lose out at all, many come out on top, and people who can afford it (like me) still don’t pay much. In some respects, this aspect of the scheme is something that irks me a bit too, because it reinforces a ‘have your cake and eat it too’ attitude, whereas I suspect that one day we’ll have to actually curtail our consumption.
How does this scheme differ from the ETS proposed in 2007? The consensus seems to be it’s better, but not by much. Yet the Greens and environment groups have almost unanimously been uncritically supportive of the scheme: no doubt it was a choice between that and nothing. Still, some question whether this scheme, with its exemptions and compensation for polluters and the omission of petrol, is so weak as to be completely ineffective.
Even if the scheme does work, Australia can’t stop climate change by itself – we’re only responsible for 1.5% of global emissions. But it’s hoped that we will inspire the biggest polluters – China, India, and the US, to adopt similar policies. At first glance, this seems overly optimistic – since when did a country like China care what we did? Yet some policy leaders in China and India saythat they are paying attention. And what else can we do? If we are to resolve what Garnaut calls the ‘prisoners dilemma’, where each country waits for others to bear the cost of climate change mitigation, countries will need to cooperate and share the responsibility, and someone needs to start.
To an extent, other countries already have. China, for example, has made huge investments in renewable energy and concrete commitments to decouple carbon emissions from economic growth, and has developed a plan to cap total energy use by 2015. The European Union, one of the few places with an emissions trading scheme, will next year impose a 15% tax on Qantas simply because Australia doesn’t have a carbon tax. So the pro-carbon tax people argue that if we don’t adopt a tax, we will be left behind or face penalties.
The current resistance toward a carbon tax is partly explained by the difficulty of actually imagining a climate-change affected future radically different from the status quo. It is an invisible, complicated, slightly uncertain threat, and the carbon price is a difficult-to-understand answer to that question which doesn’t convince, particularly given people’s lack of faith in the government. It doesn’t help that politicians and lobby groups on both sides distort the issues, sometimes by necessary simplification but often deliberately, to serve their own interests.
So basically, if you’re looking for a climate change guru, don’t follow me. To an extent, my support for the carbon price is an act of faith, based on a judgement that supporters – the Greens, most economists, most scientists, environmentalists – are more likely to share my values, and thus represent my interests, than opposers – Tony Abbott, a few economists, and even fewer scientists. More fundamentally, I hate the idea that humans are so intellectually myopic and have such a narrow conception of self-interest that we’ll risk the world simply because we’re waiting for someone else to pay.
A version of this article was originally published at gelp.com.au
As I enter my late twenties, the wedding invitations are flooding in. Clearly, while marriage rates have declined over the decades, and people are getting married later, many still value marriage: most of my friends either plan or hope to get married eventually. In 2009, 120,118 marriages were registered, representing a steady increase since 2001.
Studies suggest most people don’t believe the institution is outdated. Historically, marriage was an unequal arrangement – the woman was given away by her father, often in exchange for money, becoming the property of her husband. It was only twenty years ago that the High Court overturned a ruling that gave husbands immunity from being convicted of raping their wives.
For this reason, some of the traditional aspects of marriage leave me cold – the bride walking solo down the aisle for the guests’ appraisal, being ‘given away’ by her father, and taking her husband’s surname. But many people still choose to adopt these timeworn rituals, finding meaning and beauty in them, and most no longer see them as sexist.
If marriage can become less sexist, can it also become less heterosexist? I’m still not convinced of the inherent value of having the government certify my relationship, but I like that I have the choice. This is not the case for same sex couples.
In 2004, the Howard government legislated to restrict marriage to a union between a man and a woman, restricting states’ ability to legislate for same-sex marriage. This is not the first time the Australian government has controlled the ability of people from certain marginised groups to marry; in the past, it was convicts and Aboriginals.
On 13 August I went to the Equal Love Rally in Melbourne, a gathering of over 1000 people calling for same-sex marriage rights as part of a national campaign. It was amazing to see so teenagers there; this would have been unlikely when in teenage days.
Speaking at the rally, Greens MP Adam Bandt mentioned that he’d said to independent MP Bob Katter, who’s vehemently against same-sex marriage: ‘If you don’t support gay marriage, don’t marry a bloke.’ In other words, if you’re not into something but it doesn’t affect you, you shouldn’t be able to stop other people doing it – basic libertarian argument. Bandt had moved a motion calling for lower house MPs to report to Parliament on their constituents’ views on same-sex marriage laws.
A few days later, at the Don’t Meddle With Marriage Rally in Canberra, a rally against gay marriage organised by right-wing Christian groups, Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce said, ‘We know that the best protection for those girls is that they get themselves into a secure relationship with a loving husband, and I want that to happen for them.’ Aside from harking back to the old-fashioned view of husbands as ‘protectors’, the notion that letting gay people get married somehow threatens heterosexuals is ridiculous.
A week later, when a selection of 30 lower house MPs did report back to the Parliament in accordance with Bandt’s motion, most reported that their constituents were opposed to gay marriage. It’s unclear how reliable these surveys were, given that polls show support for gay marriage at around 60%, although it’s true that support and opposition are concentrated in particular geographical areas (and electorates).
But attitudes towards homosexuality change, and more people come out, almost everyone has a friend, relative, or work colleague who’s gay. For this reason, it seems recognition of same-sex marriage is inevitable – the only question is when.
Finnish Whaler 