Today I Learned #4: Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

[Gori the Grey]

Yeah, it's tough. The sound of c'n is how many people actually pronounce can, in informal chat. It would be most natural to the ear. But, as a piece of writing, c'n really, really calls attention to itself. So it's not at all natural. Even the omitted g in participles. If you go writin' it out that way, it calls attention to itself, whereas, spoken, the very thing about it is its unobtrusiveness; you're marking* an omission.

One trick is to do it over extended stretches. Then it stops calling attention to itself, and just becomes that character's way of saying writin'

*or markin'

 

[Valka D'Ur]

True. I just had to get used to it in Cherryh's writing.

Waaaay back in 1999 I went on a fanfic binge - writing, not reading. I wrote 3 binders full of stories and poems based on the show The Crow: Stairway to Heaven. Something about the characters and the actors just demanded to be written about and it's amazing how a subtle facial gesture or tone of voice prompted me to ask myself why they made that gesture or spoke in that exact tone. There's a story in that!

So I wrote. And wrote. And wrote. One of the poems is 7 PAGES LONG. (I wrote it in a steno pad, so it's probably shorter using normal pages)

One thing about these characters is that most of them dropped their "g"s. So I dropped the "g"s when writing their dialogue. I had to learn new slang words, some of which I don't understand to this day. But I got most of the context. These characters don't speak like university professors, so I didn't write them that way.


Another situation of getting used to different ways of writing is learning lolcat speak. I'd spent so many years typing for students who needed their assignments to have perfect spelling, grammar, and punctuation that I still notice every error people make.

But to make better Cheezburger captions, I had to get over the issue of "teh". "Teh" is perfectly normal lolcat grammar. It's like learning a new kind of English... and in fact, there is a Lolcat Bible and if memory serves, someone started a Lolcat Shakespeare:

"2B or nawt 2B... dat's a reely gud kweschun..."

Someone in my friends circle over at Cheezburger translated the entire Star Trek episode "The Trouble With Tribbles" into lolspeak - complete with kitten-themed commercials.

 

[Narz]

Til : the more money spent on an engagement ring the more likely the couple is to later divorce.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Til : the more money spent on an engagement ring the more likely the couple is to later divorce.

Anecdote: We skipped an engagement ring altogether and have been married over 50 years.

 

[Takhisis]

You Communist hippies, attacking both the wedding industry and the divorce industry.

 

[Sarin]

You Communist hippies, attacking both the wedding industry and the divorce industry.

You forgot jewellery industry....

 

[Takhisis]

Actually, I was counting it as part of the wedding industry.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Actually, I was counting it as part of the wedding industry.

The Wedding Industrial Complex?

 

[Arakhor]

The marital-industrial complex, surely?

 

[Takhisis]

Somebody's been watching too many marital arts films.

 

[Broken_Erika]

I wonder if there has ever been a marital martial arts film.......

 

[r16]

crouching tiger whatever .

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I wonder if there has ever been a marital martial arts film.......

There was an episode of Highlander in which two married Immortals got into a fight (they weren't trying to kill each other).

 

[r16]

silly me , ı forgot some tumblr post ı had read months back . Before 1967 or 68 every Kung Fu movie was "marital" because only the housewives in Hong Kong were free to go to movies during the day and they loved all those love triangle stuff where the men were proven to be true because they had mastered martial arts .

 

[Kyriakos]

It seems like the ancient era, the time when mini-computers (mini next to what predated them) were a product.

 

[Gori the Grey]

I wonder if there has ever been a marital martial arts film.......

Mr. and Mrs. Smith? I haven't seen it, but the trailers and the online plot synopsis suggest that it might fill the bill.

 

[Takhisis]

^Oh yeah, Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Watch it, it has good action scenes and there's chemistry between the two leads.
It's still a completely stupid film, but it works because it is conscious of it.

 

[Gorbles]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1674220826424406022

The myth that men hunt while women stay at home is entirely wrong

An analysis of foraging societies from around the world has found that women hunt in the vast majority of those looked at, confirming that the idea of gender division in providing food is a myth

www.newscientist.com

Didn't really know what thread to put this in!

 

[tjs282]

Didn't @Samson post something along these lines in the Newsworthy Science thread a week or two back?

 

[Samson]

Didn't @Samson post something along these lines in the Newsworthy Science thread a week or two back?

I posted this last year, different work, similar results.