(no subject)

this weekend I chose to stay home studying for an exam rather than go to a convention with guests I wanted to see.
nice sensible responsible decision.
which would make a whole lot more sense if I hadn't spent the time thus far sleeping and/or hiding under a blanket.

dear self: actual study in the study hours would help.
no, really.

is that really the word they want?

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But I don't go saying this stuff directly to people. I don't know where the line is between 'needs saying' and 'background irritation'. It's just one word, in one quote, which made sense in context, in an annoying kind of way.


But you add it all together and you get language where the insults are about making bad words out of neuroatypical, disabled or queer.

I could really live without that, you know?



I tried once reworking insults for a future SF setting, reworking the swear words so they made sense in context. If you take out the religion swears as totally irrelevant, and the sex swears because sex isn't a bad thing, and the sexual orientation swears because everyone can do who they want, and the race swears because race is just neutral, and the disability swears because there isn't any disability any more (or there is and nobody puts moral weight on it), you very nearly run out of swears. You're left with words for body parts or body fluids or excrement. And a PG rating for language. And a language only suitable for utopia.

Which, you know, I could live with.

Lois McMaster Bujold - Cryoburn

I read this as an ebook. I'll buy it on paper as soon as I see it, but I got linked to all the Vorkosigan books as legal free ebooks and couldn't resist. (read them. you'll want to buy them.)

I liked it well enough, but felt distanced from almost all of it. I just now figured out why. ( Read more... )

Explaining further involves the spoiler in the very last line of the book. Don't read if you haven't read the last line.

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