FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
20d ago
Wikipedia claims that "jealousy" has always been distinct from "envy", and notes that the original root of the word is the biblical "zeal" which at the time meant "tolerating no unfaithfulness". Another claimed root is the word "gelus" which likewise meant "possessive and suspicious".
FtttG
20d ago
"Arguing in bad faith" means arguing dishonestly and using arguments you don't really believe, in which the goal is to frustrate or antagonise your interlocutor rather than engage in earnest truth-seeking.
Based on the way the phrase is used on social media, you could be forgiven for thinking it means "you believe something that I don't" or "you expressed a non-woke opinion".
FtttG
20d ago
An extremely niche one I've complained about before is members of the rationalist community using rationalist lingo in contexts in which it is obviously inappropriate, as part of some kind of weird cargo-cult approach to in-group membership. I once saw a guy saying that he had an "irrational prior" on believing X over Y.
If it's irrational, it's not a prior. Stop it.
FtttG
20d ago
When I was in college, I noticed a lot of people using "excessive" to mean "a great deal". It means "too much". That one seems to have fallen out of favour, thankfully.
FtttG
20d ago
If the average person uses a word to mean X, then the word means X, surely?
DESCRIPTIVISTS, BEGONE
Many common expressions only make sense if "jealous" has a distinct meaning from "envious". "To guard sth jealously" — how can you "guard" something if someone else has it? Likewise "a jealous husband".
FtttG
21d ago
Not that I recall, no. I went on two dates with a doctor a few years ago, but I don't remember her mentioning anything about a car accident.
FtttG
21d ago
In this case it's a colleague of mine in her fifties. We have a rota in which each department is responsible for buying milk for the office each week, and my colleague (who we'll call T) was offering to do it on behalf of our team next week. I don't think any passive-aggression was intended or implied, which makes the choice of punctuation all the more baffling.
FtttG
21d ago
Less than a hundred pages from the end of The Story of a New Name. All Napoli men are bastards.
FtttG
21d ago
The female version of my real name is significantly more common in Ireland than the male, and is so common in the broader Anglosphere that I'm sure many Brits and Americans would actually be surprised to learn that it's an Irish name, whereas my name is practically unheard of outside of Ireland. As a consequence, I routinely get emails addressed "Hi [female version of my name]", even if they're direct replies to emails I sent them in which my name is clearly indicated in the From field, the email signature, and the profile photo is of a tall, bearded man wearing a shirt and tie.
This is bad enough when it's Brits or Americans misgendering me: it's inexcusable when my fellow Irish do it.
For some reason, overuse of ellipses is as big a giveaway of someone's age as overuse of em-dashes is for ChatGPT.
Many people I know over the age of fifty seem constitutionally incapable of writing "I'll buy some milk on Monday" or "I'll buy some milk on Monday.", instead feeling this weird compulsion to jazz it up with "I'll buy some milk on Monday..."
I'm far from the first person to notice this peculiar generational touchstone. I have no idea what this is intended to convey but it creeps me out.
Even worse is those people who haven't realised that an ellipsis contains three full stops, no more, no less, so you end up with even weirder constructions like "I'll buy some milk on Monday.." or "I'll buy some milk on Monday............."
There's another, more recent misuse of "literally" that really annoys me: when people use it to "clarify" a statement that no one could possibly interpret in a figurative sense, essentially using it as synonymous with "simply".
Yeah so you literally just export it as a CSV and open it in Excel.
Oh, I do that literally, do I? Thanks for clarifying, for a moment I thought this was all a big extended metaphor.
In the case of nerds specifically, I think the simplest explanation is that they are high-systemisers who are fascinated by abstract systems with complex (yet consistent and legible) rules. The world of interpersonal relationships with its frustratingly arbitrary and definitely inconsistent ("lookin' good, Susan") ruleset is confusing and scary for them.
If you're an intelligent high-systemiser, this means pursuing a career in physics or computer science; if you're not particularly intelligent, you instead get into D&D, MtG or trainspotting.
FtttG
23d ago
In the mind of just about every self-identified feminist woman I've interacted with in the past decade and a half.
In the mind of the contributors to the Shitty Media Men list.
FtttG
25d ago
While I agree with you that no reasonable person would characterise Robert as a rapist, I'm curious if his actions would qualify as such under that absurd "affirmative consent" framework of a few years ago.
FtttG
25d ago
That scandal inspired one of the most memorably titled articles in Wikipedia history.
I liked "Cat Person", and though I could understand why it was interpreted in that light, upon first reading I didn't read it as a #MeToo story at all, but rather an incisive examination of the dynamics and awkwardness of modern dating. God knows I've been on my fair share of awkward dates like those described in the story. Neither character struck me as the "villain" (until Robert arguably pulls a face-heel turn at the end): rather, they're both clumsy and inexperienced, and no-strings-attached courtship makes it all too easy for one partner to just ghost the other at the first sign of trouble or inconvenience. The murky circumstances of its inspiration should not detract from how skilfully it's composed and the precision of its observations.
I dunno. If I was in Nowicki's shoes, I'd be furious at Roupenian for recasting (blackwashing?) my ex-boyfriend to whom I harboured no ill will as some kind of fumbling misogynistic creep whose dick doesn't work. In fact, technically speaking I have been in Nowicki's shoes: when I was eighteen, an ex of mine asked me to read a short story she'd written. This "short story" was simply her account of the years preceding and following our relationship: changing the names of the "characters" was the extent of the creative invention and poetic license she'd put into it. On the one hand I was grateful that she didn't invent shitty things I'd done to make me out to be a worse guy than I am; on the other hand I was like, when your current boyfriend urged you to draw inspiration from your personal experiences, I presume he meant to use them as a jumping-off point for a fictional story, not to simply transcribe them as-is. Unlike "Cat Person" it couldn't even claim to have been written well, and I'm enormously grateful it was never (to the best of my knowledge) published anywhere.
Roupenian's collection You Know You Want This is worth checking out:
Controversy around the inspiration for its most well-known story aside, I received Kristen Roupenian's collection You Know You Want This a few Christmases ago and enjoyed it quite a lot. Every story is short enough to be read in one sitting, her spare, terse style means that the stories never drag, and there were several stories I enjoyed quite a lot and none that I actively disliked. The stories are "dark" in the sense that they deal frankly with BDSM and weird sexual fetishes, but they're more like campfire stories or high-class /r/nosleep posts (made explicit in one story which veers into outright supernatural horror) — there's nothing here that's grounded or realistic enough to be truly disturbing or unsettling. As an understated slice-of-life examination of modern dating culture which is never really trying to shock or scare the reader, "Cat Person" is actually the outlier here.
FtttG
26d ago
Since it was just @FtttG saying this (from the UK)
I live in Ireland.
I was under the impression UK progressives had entirely forgotten about the Kirk thing
In fairness, my colleagues were only talking about it the day after. I don't think I've heard his name mentioned around the office since.
FtttG
26d ago
Depending how you define body count, I'm probably somewhere between one and three dozen?
How many people have you had PiV or PiA sex with?
FtttG
26d ago
I agree that if you're pursuing some activity for your own amusement, it can sap the fun out of it to be constantly trying to "optimise" it and so on. But outside of that narrow sphere, people do need to do things they don't necessarily want to do. If everyone just did what they felt like all the time, society would collapse.
The Merriam-Webster article you linked cites no sources for its claim that the two words have always been used interchangeably, but quotes multiple scholars who argued that the two terms are not synonymous.
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