calling holmes/watson readers

I encourage anyone who has read Sherlock Holmes slash fiction at all widely to respond to this discussion post at cox_and_co (filtered to community members, but it's worthwhile to join if you've any interest, even currently inactive, in Holmes slash). potatofiend is writing a paper on Holmes slash for presentation at an academic conference and could no doubt use all the interested reader opinions she can get; they always like you to quote other people for that.

ETA: I've reproduced my thoughts here for accessibility/posterity. ( On common holmesslash tropes, personal canon, unreliable-narrator!Watson, Mary, Holmes & Watson's sexual orientation and sexual experience, mostly. )

sneakers of the day

"Bandgeek" by Blowfish and the new All Star Light by Converse (which comes in several peppy easter m&m colour combinations as well as the traditional black/white/cream, and I kind of want some).

the associate justice had a pet peeve

...jokey stories about how Chief Justice Warren Burger used to misspell homicide as "homocide" and Associate Justice Harry Blackmun (whose papers were recently released) used to circle the misspelling angrily when commenting on the Chief Justice's draft opinions.

(This story warms the cockles of my heart.)

I used to be a prescriptivist (nicknamed "Grammar Cop" by my extended family from an early age for my fearless interruptions in virtually any conversation with anyone to correct their usage) until I read a couple of books on basic sociolinguistics a few years ago - entirely for fun - and had a renaissance of opinion.

(I still harbour certain prescriptivist pet peeves, though I try to weed them out as I notice them if they don't have a defensible basis like overwhelming majority usage or etymology. "Potential ambiguity" is not, NB, usually as defensible a basis as it first appears, if you're inured to prescriptivist use of it since it is the most common justification; read Language Log for a while if you don't believe me.)

Linguists are rarely prescriptivists: looking at language through a scientific lens tends, I observe, to make prescriptivism look silly. I particularly enjoyed a few Language Log posts on the prescriptivist rants of the style "Word X doesn't mean Y, it means Z!": starting with today's "Fulsome use of the Dictionary" by Geoffrey K. Pullum, and here are a few more linked from the latest post: Cullen Murphy Draws the Line and At a Loss for Lexicons by Mark Liberman, and 0 for 3 on Grammar... and Sidney Goldberg on NYT Grammar: 0 for 3 by Geoffrey K. Pullum.

sneakers of the day

First, the "Chelsea SE" by DC - a cute combination of puffy skate sneaks with preppy print. Then the Ecko Red "Phortress", with sparkly embroidery/graffiti/whatever.

semantics of racial epithets: RaceFail09 in microcosm

This post at Language Log discusses a philosophical paper on the semantics of racial epithets ("The S. of R.E." by Christopher Hom, available online in its entirety via the link) which included the following illustrative anecdote as a footnote:

For example, a white, Arkansas teacher who was exasperated over the poor behaviour of her sixth grade class told the students, all of whom were black: "I think you're trying to make me think you're a bunch of poor, dumb n-----s, and I don't think that." The students told their parents about the remark, and she was promptly fired by the school district. Interestingly, she was reinstated after a petition of support was presented to the school board by the students at her school. For more details, see "Black Students Forgive Teacher's Mistaken Slur", New York Times (October 17, 1988).

One of the first things I notice is that the teacher - the white person - is genuinely mistaken: she doesn't realise what she has said. I'm fairly certain that it didn't remotely occur to that foot-in-mouthing teacher that her utterance begs the question of the existence of "n-----s" as distinct from black people. It assumes that they exist, that they are undesirable, and that good (or should I say... articluate?) black people also exist who are not dumb or (impoverished/pitiable? It's not clear which is intended). In paraphrase, then, she said to that roomful of black kids, "It seems like you're trying to convince me you are the bad, dumb, lazy kind of black people, but I'm not fooled - I still believe that you're the good, worthwhile kind of black people underneath!" (She probably meant to say, and in fact thought she said, something like "You're acting just like the stereotype of black people as naturally savage and dumb, but I know you're just being assholes" - which isn't unproblematic, but is at least slightly better than what she said.)

This is not a bad characterisation of [part of] what happened in RaceFail09. The expected response in both cases was "Why, thank you, Whitey! I'm so inspired by your faith in me in spite of my undeserving bad behaviour!" In RaceFail09 at least - I can't speak for the Arkansas teacher - there was a lot of shock going around that instead the response was essentially, "You're fired."

In the original EB-Avalon's Willow round especially, a racial slur was mistakenly delivered, EB was fired, and she responded initially with regret, an admission of wrong, an apology, and a promise to try not to carelessly deliver racial slurs in future. (Maybe the teacher did try to make it all about her hurt feelings instead of apologising for having accidentally offended people, which is the popular response to being called out on racism, though it wasn't EB's first move. But since her credit was good enough with her students that they campaigned on her behalf, I'm guessing she probably regretted offending them.) In fact, after her apology EB was at first, er, re-hired: a lot of people expressed their appreciation for her reply to AW's open letter, both to her directly and elsewhere in the discussion.

If RaceFail09 is anything to go by, though, I have to guess that once she was re-hired, the Arkansas teacher was dogged for months by fanmail from white supremacists, the local newspapers were deluged with incoherent and angry defenses of her full of deliberate racist slurs by offended white people, and a bunch of her personal friends made a lot of noise in public, about how if they were dumb enough to fail to grasp that her point was actually exactly the opposite of a racist slur, then they obviously were poor/dumb/[insert a long string of increasingly-offensive stereotypes of black people here]. I can only hope that, unlike EB, the teacher told her friends to shut up because they were just making themselves look bad. (Also, probably by the time a few months had passed the incident was referred to at the Junior League or wherever as "that time when poor, slim, blonde Miss Smith was attacked by that crazy mob of ungrateful non-white people with pitchforks and wearing scary masks.")