Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Up Front: That's Inappropriate!, in reply to Andre Alessi,
Hell, we've already gotten as far as Temperance.
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Up Front: That's Inappropriate!, in reply to JackElder,
I was very disturbed to note that they thought that alongside names like “Justice”, “Chardonnay” and “Crystal”, names such as “Chiara” and “Kwame” were similarly sniggersome … not so much if you’re Italian or Kenyan, of course, but We Are Still So Very White Around Here. Ahem.
…Crystal? Really? That’s setting the bar a little low. So is Justice. Simple extrapolation from current trends. Fortitude, now, then you’d be getting somewhere.
This all reminds me of one of my favourite sites ever. After some of the examples there, Chardonnay seems positively benign.
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Indeed. “Amethyst”, as merely a coloured variety of quartz, is less precious – but that can’t be it, otherwise “Jade” would be a more problematic name than “Diamond” (on which, see the Boomtown Rats song).
I went to school with a girl called Crystal Rock (or, as it appeared on the daily rolls, Rock, Crystal). True story.
I think the "acceptable" gem names are short - Jade, Ruby, Pearl, Opal, Beryl, Crystal, Jewel, etc. - and have sounds that we associate with women's names - Jade has the "ay" sound common to a lot of first names, many women's names end in "ee" sounds, Ruby pairs with names like Susie or Becky (or Lucy), the -l endings pair with names like Rachel or Sheryl.
But words like "Amethyst", "Diamond", or "Emerald" are long and fussy and don't sound like women's names, at least not English ones. "Sapphire" is the only long gem name I can think of that is vaguely name-acceptable, and it ends in a vowel-heavy syllable, where none of the other three do. There aren't a lot of common women's names that don't end in vowels, -l, or -r. Men's names often end in consonants (Donald, Gerald, etc.) (Another true story: the "original" version of "Frodo", based on the Scandinavian languages Tolkein studied, would be "Froda"; Tolkein changed it because it sounded too girly in English.)
Logical follow-through to all this: someone really needs to name a son Emerald and a daughter Tourmaline or Aquamarine (pairs with Clementine, with which I am sadly burdened.)
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1. They aren't any more crazy than they used to be.
If every generation actually got as much crazier as its parents' generation alleged, starting with the first recorded compaint of this type (Socrates, I believe), by now society should have decayed into such a state of anarchistic, hedonistic immorality that civilisation itself should have collapsed. And yet here we all are. Odd, isn't it?
(Along these lines, I have heard that a fun game to play when the topic of how young people these days binge drink so much more than previous generations comes up is to read Austen's 'Mansfield Park' and tote up how many drinks people are mentioned as partaking of per day of plot. Apparently it's staggeringly high.)
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What you shouldn’t do is have male friends, and be the sort of person who feels more comfortable around men than women. Being comfortable around boys, socialising with them, making them laugh, having the same interests – that’s what will make you a slut.
In other words, it's because talking to and spending time with men actually means you're making yourself sexually available, because it's not possible that you could just have similar interests. Eugh.
The last time the three of us got together, we ended up discussing some of the things my teachers had said to me, and whether or not they were Appropriate.
I had one teacher who lent me most of Diana Gabaldon's books. When I was fourteen. I don't think it was inappropriate, because I would have got the books out of the public library if she hadn't, but it occured later that everyone else might have not had quite the same view.
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Hard News: New Old Left?, in reply to Sacha,
“The governor-general is a good man and I didn’t say anything that implied he wasn’t a good man or that he wasn’t a New Zealander.
“‘Is he even a New Zealander’ is a cheeky way of starting a conversation about who might be next."
....I. I don't even.
(I know, I know, feeding the troll, but the total lack of ability to connect one statement with the next is.....astounding.)
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Busytown: A Classical Education: Chapter…, in reply to sally jones,
Is ‘Sacha’ a Russian name meaning great leader?
As Sacha says, "Sasha" is a nickname for Alexander, much as "Natasha" is short for "Natalia", "Vasha" for "Ivan", and so on. Shortening names + -sha is a Slavic language diminutive pattern. But Alexander does mean "defender of men" (though in Greek, not Russian - alexo, defend, + andros, men) and Alexander the Great was pretty much the prototypical great leader, so...yes?
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Hard News: New Old Left?, in reply to B Jones,
I meant more the idea of having explicitly joint leadership which must always be one man/one woman - that's still quite peculiar to the Greens.As Kyle says, it's a little arbitrary. Humanity doesn't divide up neatly along those lines.
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You only got “I” wrong – it’s I-yay not I-way.
The version I learned in Wellington in the early nineties was most definitely -way after words starting with vowels, not -yay. Ialectalday ifferenceday, aybemay?
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Gender-shared leadership is the future of political parties IMO. The Greens figured that out already.
I find the concept an interesting take on leadership, but I somehow doubt it's going to be "the future of political parties". Two reasons: co-leadership is hard, especially when it comes to questions like "who gets to be PM?", and the gender essentialism implied by requiring one woman and one man is...a bit strange.