Yeah, after but a semester at University, Joyce is clearly still operating within a moral schema informed by her Reactionary Christian upbringing.
It is one in which *any* deviation from a predesignated Path of Morality automatically means letting EVIL itself get a foothold in her soul.
Same basic principle with Becky and her fear of the prospect of not being able to call herself a “Lesbian”, as though it works like the Vegan Police from Scott Pilgrim or something.
Regardless of their differing stances on whether souls or gods exist, neither of them have *really* done away with their indoctrination but have merely repurposed it.
Yeah, that’s gonna take some time. One semester after ~17 years of heavy conditioning would be an awfully short turnaround time for the kind of seismic shift in mindset we’re talking about.
All things considered, she’s doing pretty okay, I think.
I have accepted that I will always be wrong, because the human default settings suck. However, I have also accepted that I will always work to be better than I am now, and the way I am now is better than I was before.
While any noun can be verbed, it can then no longer be adjectivized, only adverbed. You can justice, but only justice socially. It’s a structural thing.
think of it as a compound word, it’s not that “justice” is verbed and “social” then would be the adverb, or vice versa, “social justice” is the whole verb (“you’ve been social justiced”), you can hyphenate it if that helps
we do that with other compound nouns of this type, i could definitely see “red tape” being used as a verb as is (“they’re red taping the whole process”)
also remember speakers make the language, not the other way around, grammar rules are descriptive not prescriptive
this, languages are never really separate from the cultures who speak them
heck there are many instances in the real world where culture and countries beside each other use very majorly the same words and grammar but ardently confirm they speak different languages on account of social and political differences which are not always intelligible to outsiders
for instance the Serbo-Croatian language splitting up into Bosnian, Montenegrin, Croatian and Serbian after the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, on account of their speakers having very different and fiercely incompatible ideas on government and civics
My minor philosophic quibble is this: Justice is a noun, but *goodness* and personal just-ness are verbs/action-oriented nouns. Because you do need a standard to aspire to – which is what Justice ultimately is. But goodness is about virtue, which is about aspiring towards that goal and evaluating progress made.
That’s independent from whether we actually know what Justice *is*, mind. Presumably our understanding of that standard must evolve as we, too, learn to be better and learn more about ourselves and our world.
That’s the phrase you’re looking for I think. And it won’t get you in semantic arguments, because ally is both a verb and a noun, and people will take it more how you mean it.
(I hadn’t ever heard “social justice is a verb”, but “ally is a verb” many times.)
Joyce’s is gonna be real upset one day when she dies and discovers that not only IS there a God, but it’s David Willis and he put the entire archive of this comic on a public website where anyone can prove differently.
like there’s “hip”, and then there’s being informed on issues of social justice and how they affect the people we love and care about
from what I reckon it ain’t *quite* the same ballgame as keeping up with what youth are into today?
given what I’ve learned from the kids i help at my school’s Coding Club, they don’t even say “hip” anymore, and seem rather obsessed with these videos about singing toilets XD
hehehehe yee, is a given on a multicultural frontier, especially the internet itself
many a diplomat and translator know that human languages/dialects are under no circumstances separate from the cultures which have informed their development over time and vice versa.
Oh, I’ve felt that, Joyce. Not with a sibling, but the mental gears grinding together as the old perception rams bow first into the iceberg of the new reality.
(I was gonna quote 1984 in reply, and maybe Ecclesiastes, about how “there is nothing new under the sun,” and how the present reflects the past as it has ‘always been’, even if the past seemed to tell us something different yesterday than it tells us today… …but then I realized commenting under the influence of migraine is likely not a smooth move…)
…So I’ll just go back to bed and keep mumbling.
Mumble, mumble, mumble…
Yes. Kids these days definitely use words like “cool” and “hip”. Joyce very much has her finger on the pulse of modern youth culture. I know this because I’m an adult over 30 who hasn’t hung out with anyone under 25 in years.
For what it’s worth, Joyce, if I had siblings, being excitedly referred to as their new brother would have delighted me when I first came out as trans. It certainly felt new and exciting to me!
I’m not trans myself but it does sound like a fun way of reconciling a person’s pre-transition past with their new presentation and existence. If they’re cool with it of course.
Hey Becky, I wonder if Joyce would be acting less insecure about your connection with her sister now if you hadn’t been smugging in her face for an hour or more.
I mean… I don’t think Becky was rubbing anything into Joyce’s face? She walked up, said hi, asked Joss about her life things Becky knew about (such as HRT) and otherwise was just. you know. Hanging out. I don’t remember any point where Becky said “haha, your sister likes me better, and thinks you are less trustworthy, neener neener!!!”.
Hm. I’m really having trouble reading her as smug in those strips, given that during most of her interactions with Jocelyn (and a bit later, Jocelyn & Joe) Joyce is completely off-panel and they’re having an entirely unrelated conversation – it’s kinda hard to show someone be smug towards someone who’s literally not visible for the reader. (When Joyce finally has a reaction shot, it’s towards something her sister says about Dina.)
Like, you specifically mention the trustworthy bit: it’s Joss who says that about Becky, who replies with a somewhat jokey “no I’m not”. Is that the ‘smugging’?
Strangely uncharitable read.
But what would they argue about? It’s not like he’s necessarily wrong about anything he says, he just frames his science factoids in the way that seems to make him and everyone else the most unhappy. He doesn’t need arguments, he needs a therapist to ask “how is that attitude working out for you?”
One of the things that I miss from Dina is her having her own views challenged. It’d be nice to have Dina have to find out some of her own takes on science were things she needed to contemplate.
Like she legit took the effort to revise her T-shirts from “RARR” to “HOMPK” to reflect up to date scientific consensus on what dinosaurs sounded like, so wish granted?
If the dinosaurs went extinct, explain why there were half a dozen of them picking at some roadkill outside this morning. (They all flew out of the way as cars came by, don’t worry they’re fine.)
I’m just SAYING, I never see any birds when the government shuts down
(Birds Aren’t Real is my favorite stupid conspiracy, I remember when the vast majority of people knew it was a joke. I hope it’s still most people lol.)
“Birds aren’t dinosaurs and evolving into them would just mean they’re not anymore.”
“Please explain your scientific definition of the word ‘dinosaur’ that includes all the creatures conventionally referred to as dinosaurs, but doesn’t include birds.”
Probably something more like that.
(The biologist Steven Jay Gould spent decades studying fish, and concluded there was no reasonable scientific definition of the word “fish”, although that was no reason to stop using it.)
As much as I love arguing that whales really are fish, this is all fundamentally a clash between scientific terminology and common English usage. Terms that were defined before our current scientific understanding get weird when we try to apply them using it.
I feel like that’s a pretty good thing to argue with him about. Like, science is meant to be about the joy of new discovery and Brock thinks it’s his job to find that joy and destroy it.
i mean, at least she’s putting in effort/it’s good that she’s trying as opposed to like, not actually ‘approving’ and just forcing herself to seem tolerant/accepting versus ppl who would also dismissively be like “Oh it’s just a phase’
Dude, a friendly reminder from a friendly fellow science teacher. Surely you prefer a society with an overwhelming need for an illusion of order. The alternative would be to experience evolution, dirt-on-your-hands, on a corn field.
A few years ago, I was working in a school and had a they/them pin on (generally not really out to students at work, but there have been some places). Anyway, I said something to a student who resonded, “Yes, ma’am.” Then she glanced at my pin, and was like, “Or, uh, sir? Sorry, I don’t know what word…” And I said, “It’s okay, no one does.”
After high school, I just called everyone vaguely teacherish “Professor”. It’s been decades now, and I still do. Even with the teacherish friends I hug and hang out with sometimes. Dunno. It’s just how I do.
Would be nice if I could get folks to call me “Doc'”, when they’d rather say “ma’am” or “sir”, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen.
Sometimes I just go by “The Notorious” [initials] but maybe that’s problematic too…
Hmm… 🤔
People of my age are referred to as Sage or Crone (same title, different gender) in the religion I used to practice. It was a mark that having survived to this age should have conferred some wisdom, whether it had or not.
We don’t really use ma’am and sir here, but instead for some reason school kids have a convention of calling female teachers “miss” (even if their title is “Mrs” or “Ms”). Male teachers don’t really have an equivalent, sometimes they get “sir” but it feels weirdly formal and hierarchical, and “mister” is just too weird, so usually you just use like Mr Surname unless you forgot it. Anyway where I’m going with that is I had an online acquaintance who at the time was presenting as non-binary whose students called her mx (pronounced “mix”), which was also her title instead of miss.
Yeah, Mx. is the common/standard nonbinary title now. It doesn’t feel like it would work as a ma’a/sir replacement, and I personally don’t care for it as a title at all, so I don’t use it for myself.
Lotta folks call me “Mix”. It’s OK. Most of my work is in Spanish, so I just get used to adding a “ə” syllable of indeterminate vowel at the end of words (or using the default masculine) when referring to myself and my name, so that folks can “read” me however they perceive me. Like Hannah Gadsby says: “perpetually gender-suprised”.
Most folks are pretty cool about it all. The older folks just call me, “mi amor,” just as a term of affection, although I try to dissuade them from the fancier terms like “su merced”.
It’s a tricky thing, trying not to let gender or perceptions of age or class or social status get in the way of making a real connection with people whom I want to serve and help.
I don’t do a ton in Spanish, but I do sometimes do the “e” ending for myself– my mom’s side has Colombian heritage, so sometimes it comes up for occasional terms.
Currently substitute teaching, and I do get younger kids asking me if I’m a boy or a girl. And sometimes adults, if around, react like they’re being rude, but “confusing for small children” is actually pretty gender affirming for me.
I recently started a volunteer role where I definitely assumed I’ll need to be read as a cis woman, though, but it’s kinda like you said– I want to be able to help, and my identities might make this harder; it’s just a few hours a month, so I’m willing to deal with it.
One time last year, when I was working full time with the same group of kids, one asked me– and this was a couple of weeks into the school year– and I just said, “No,” but we were on our way to Music so there wasn’t a follow-up, and then it never came up again.
Often I just don’t answer, or I say vaguely incomprehensible things (“Oh, you know,” “Who’s to say”).
This is one difficulty I have in adapting: lots of people have tried to coin new words in this space, and they (the words) are all awful, and none ever gain enough traction to dominate the others and become safe to use.
(Reading science fiction makes it worse. Some authors come up with words for use by species that have three or more physical sexes, and/or which evolve through all their sexes over their lifetimes, etc., and that (usually) ignores how members of those species may vary in their internal life. And these words are some of the worst. Almost as bad as time-travel grammar.)
I mean, some of those words are deliberately the worst, it the author’s also trying to make a point that different species’ languages wouldn’t be particularly pronounceable in mouths that evolved on different worlds.
One of my students solved this by calling everyone, including his profs, “bestie”… but most students say Doctor or Professor. I suppose for K-12 you could go with teacher (which was really common when I was volunteering at a summer migrant program).
“Teacher” used like that seems to happen the most when working with English language learners, and then with some of the lower elementary age kids. It doesn’t really fit the space of what’s being asked (sir/ma’am alternative), but I’d definitely take it when working in a school.
Before moving to the South I’d never really encountered sir/ma’am!
Folks can just say, “Yes!” or “Can I help you?” or “Pardon me” without the sir/ma’am which I still find a little weird even after two decades. (And I’m afraid I didn’t teach my children to use them either… maybe it will eventually die out…)
Oh yeah, I fully support just leaving it out. I’ve only ever lived in Michigan, and the example I started with happened in Michigan. It doesn’t happen as consistently as it seems to in the South; some people use it sometimes, some use it all the time, and I would say most don’t use it most of the time.
Here in Little Egypt, people tend to just leave out the gendered address. Most of the time it’s come up in my life, the person in question was either not from around here or just so far up their own ass that not being addressed as “Sir/Ma’am” was Disrespect™ of the highest order. And then you’ve got the ones who hate being called “ma’am” because it “makes them feel old”(?), but they never had an alternative to give besides their name, so you’d have teachers expecting to be addressed as “Mrs. Breakfast” or whatever, every single time you talked to them, which is fucking ridiculous.
Actually the more I think of it hip was used in the 90s to denote someone who was out of touch and trying too hard much like Joyce here (see “hipster” which is a 90s term in its current usage).
The closest we’ve seen to him teaching was when he tried to bait the class into making presentations on the false premise of “what’s the most evolved kind of life?”
Professor Brock remains my favorite of the professors we’ve seen so far. Also Joyce, it’s good to acknowledge that your past views were not so good, and that you’ve changed them as you’ve come to understand things better. Growing and changing as a person over time is a good thing.
Polarized thinking exists in all times and all political camps as long as there are immature, insecure people terrified of being seen to make any mistakes. I think what you’re describing is just children making their voices heard more widely.
we also been pushing the notion that folks, especially younger folks, should speak up and advocate for themselves. So some of it is folks trying to find their voice.
This is definitely a narrative I see far in complaints about the left than in actual practice. I’m sure it happens, but I suspect the complaints are far out of proportion.
That’s Polly/Blackbird, from a comic called Flipside. She’s a cool badass with a magical metal ball she uses Magneto-style to beat the shit out of people. She’s also painfully gay for an overpowered swordswoman called Bernadette.
Joyce is going to need to come to terms with who she used to be if she wants to be able to move forward. If she keeps trying to pretend that version of her never existed, she’s always going to be overcompensating in the other direction.
She doesn’t need to dwell on it, but she needs to accept that she used to act and think one way and she has changed (and will continue changing). I had some pretty lousy opinions in my younger days, but I’ve grown and I realize now that those were lousy opinions and I try to be better than that. But I don’t pretend that I never, ever thought them or was always who I am now.
Okay, but if you let other people know you had those opinions, you’re gonna get treated like you still have them. I guess that’s handy for figuring out which friends are worth keeping in your life, at least.
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Joyce and so many others want so bad to think they’ve already arrived where they need to be.
But consider, that if everyone has already arrived at where they need to be, how could we as a society get anywhere?
In any case, Social Justice is a verb, not a noun
I think it’s more she’s terrified of being wrong about anything. She has to learn to forgive herself.
Yeah, after but a semester at University, Joyce is clearly still operating within a moral schema informed by her Reactionary Christian upbringing.
It is one in which *any* deviation from a predesignated Path of Morality automatically means letting EVIL itself get a foothold in her soul.
Same basic principle with Becky and her fear of the prospect of not being able to call herself a “Lesbian”, as though it works like the Vegan Police from Scott Pilgrim or something.
Regardless of their differing stances on whether souls or gods exist, neither of them have *really* done away with their indoctrination but have merely repurposed it.
Yeah, that’s gonna take some time. One semester after ~17 years of heavy conditioning would be an awfully short turnaround time for the kind of seismic shift in mindset we’re talking about.
All things considered, she’s doing pretty okay, I think.
I have just accepted that I will always be wrong because I will always be out of date on the latest.
I have accepted that I will always be wrong, because the human default settings suck. However, I have also accepted that I will always work to be better than I am now, and the way I am now is better than I was before.
No, technically it’s a noun phrase “Social” is adjectival and “justice” is nominative. No verbs present.
People use “is a verb” to convey that something should be action-oriented. It’s not actually strictly about parts of speech.
The journey is the destination! B)
*plays “Creeping Shadows” by Shiro Sagisu on hacked muzak*
Right? I was going to ask how that could be a verb. I know NGPZ was trying to make a point, but I don’t see how to get there.
Justice isn’t where we currently are, but what we DO and the direction we go.
Justice is our *continued* collective effort to make the world a better place.
DOING what we do for justice’s sake is upholding the principle, which is the very thing itself.
While any noun can be verbed, it can then no longer be adjectivized, only adverbed. You can justice, but only justice socially. It’s a structural thing.
“Let the idea choose the words, not the other way around.”
— George Orwell
“Verbing weirds language.”
— Calvin
think of it as a compound word, it’s not that “justice” is verbed and “social” then would be the adverb, or vice versa, “social justice” is the whole verb (“you’ve been social justiced”), you can hyphenate it if that helps
we do that with other compound nouns of this type, i could definitely see “red tape” being used as a verb as is (“they’re red taping the whole process”)
also remember speakers make the language, not the other way around, grammar rules are descriptive not prescriptive
this, languages are never really separate from the cultures who speak them
heck there are many instances in the real world where culture and countries beside each other use very majorly the same words and grammar but ardently confirm they speak different languages on account of social and political differences which are not always intelligible to outsiders
for instance the Serbo-Croatian language splitting up into Bosnian, Montenegrin, Croatian and Serbian after the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, on account of their speakers having very different and fiercely incompatible ideas on government and civics
That said, social justice isn’t really used as a verb, and it’s definitely not *not* a noun. The phrasing used makes more sense figuratively.
My minor philosophic quibble is this: Justice is a noun, but *goodness* and personal just-ness are verbs/action-oriented nouns. Because you do need a standard to aspire to – which is what Justice ultimately is. But goodness is about virtue, which is about aspiring towards that goal and evaluating progress made.
That’s independent from whether we actually know what Justice *is*, mind. Presumably our understanding of that standard must evolve as we, too, learn to be better and learn more about ourselves and our world.
If everyone is already where they need to be, why would we as a society want to get anywhere? We’d be leaving the best place.
“Ally is a verb.”
That’s the phrase you’re looking for I think. And it won’t get you in semantic arguments, because ally is both a verb and a noun, and people will take it more how you mean it.
(I hadn’t ever heard “social justice is a verb”, but “ally is a verb” many times.)
Yep, she pulls all right.
Better than pulling alt-right.
Either way she might need to check her tire alignment to ensure she’s moving in the direction she steers.
Joyce’s is gonna be real upset one day when she dies and discovers that not only IS there a God, but it’s David Willis and he put the entire archive of this comic on a public website where anyone can prove differently.
I don’t remember why I made this, but I think it’s what DOA characters see when they die.
10/10 image.
Also, an obligatory “I understood that reference.gif”
Indeed. Very neat stuff.
Doubleplus good+1! Who cares that “NewSpeak” is almost 80 years old at this point?
re: alt-text,
either that’s supposed to reference 4chan or Twitter has once again gotten even worse
dare I guess? 👀
She’s deleting old tweets so that nobody can ever prove she was Problematic(tm) and Engage In Discourse with her.
Yo’, forget social media… I need everything I SAY to auto-delete after two DAYS.
(Psst. Joyce. It’s a trick question. “Hip” enough will always be a moving goalpost…)
like there’s “hip”, and then there’s being informed on issues of social justice and how they affect the people we love and care about
from what I reckon it ain’t *quite* the same ballgame as keeping up with what youth are into today?
given what I’ve learned from the kids i help at my school’s Coding Club, they don’t even say “hip” anymore, and seem rather obsessed with these videos about singing toilets XD
Well, yeah, true.
Not everyone we love uses language the same way, so we do adapt from context to context… 🤔
Love / respect / care about / want to treat justly…
hehehehe yee, is a given on a multicultural frontier, especially the internet itself
many a diplomat and translator know that human languages/dialects are under no circumstances separate from the cultures which have informed their development over time and vice versa.
Oh, I’ve felt that, Joyce. Not with a sibling, but the mental gears grinding together as the old perception rams bow first into the iceberg of the new reality.
(I was gonna quote 1984 in reply, and maybe Ecclesiastes, about how “there is nothing new under the sun,” and how the present reflects the past as it has ‘always been’, even if the past seemed to tell us something different yesterday than it tells us today… …but then I realized commenting under the influence of migraine is likely not a smooth move…)
…So I’ll just go back to bed and keep mumbling.
Mumble, mumble, mumble…
“All of this has happened before, and it will happen again.”
– Marcus Aurelius, “Battlestar Galactica”
Last panel Joyce is channeling a bit of Dorothy there, methinks.
Yes. Kids these days definitely use words like “cool” and “hip”. Joyce very much has her finger on the pulse of modern youth culture. I know this because I’m an adult over 30 who hasn’t hung out with anyone under 25 in years.
She’s groovy to the max, dude.
Time is an illusion maaaaaaaan.
But suffering is also an illusion. So show up next Tuesday.
Time is a myth concocted by the manufacturers of Space.
Time keeps on slippin’ slippin’ slippin’ into the future.
Gonna fly like an eagle
Into the sea
Etc. etc. etc.
Lunch time, doubly so.
For what it’s worth, Joyce, if I had siblings, being excitedly referred to as their new brother would have delighted me when I first came out as trans. It certainly felt new and exciting to me!
I’m not trans myself but it does sound like a fun way of reconciling a person’s pre-transition past with their new presentation and existence. If they’re cool with it of course.
Hey Becky, I wonder if Joyce would be acting less insecure about your connection with her sister now if you hadn’t been smugging in her face for an hour or more.
Specifically smugging about how Joyce’s sister likes her better and thinks Joyce is less trustworthy. Not sure how that got cut off.
I mean… I don’t think Becky was rubbing anything into Joyce’s face? She walked up, said hi, asked Joss about her life things Becky knew about (such as HRT) and otherwise was just. you know. Hanging out. I don’t remember any point where Becky said “haha, your sister likes me better, and thinks you are less trustworthy, neener neener!!!”.
I don’t know what comic you read but it was not one published on this website
That’s how Becky handles everything, it’s not unique to Jocelyne.
Again that is not a thing happened.
Hm. I’m really having trouble reading her as smug in those strips, given that during most of her interactions with Jocelyn (and a bit later, Jocelyn & Joe) Joyce is completely off-panel and they’re having an entirely unrelated conversation – it’s kinda hard to show someone be smug towards someone who’s literally not visible for the reader. (When Joyce finally has a reaction shot, it’s towards something her sister says about Dina.)
Like, you specifically mention the trustworthy bit: it’s Joss who says that about Becky, who replies with a somewhat jokey “no I’m not”. Is that the ‘smugging’?
Strangely uncharitable read.
Some people here have an habit to be very uncharitable towards certain characters, Becky being one of those. It’s weird.
That is not a thing that happened. Please don’t make stuff up.
I mean, it’s not like there’s a web comic that’s documenting her every word or anything.
Dumbing of Age Book Fifteen: I Am Cool and Hip and Know All the Correct Things to Say in All the Correct Ways, and You Can’t Prove Any Differently!
Subtext: Ah, yes, I understand.
I didn’t mislabel
Nobody saw me mislabel
You can’t prove anything
Einstein made some great speeches about the illusions of time and consciousness. Brock, you are not Einstein.
No, no, this is brilliant. I should make a poster of it for my physics classroom.
Everytime Professor Brock appears, I want to see him and Dina get into an argument.
But what would they argue about? It’s not like he’s necessarily wrong about anything he says, he just frames his science factoids in the way that seems to make him and everyone else the most unhappy. He doesn’t need arguments, he needs a therapist to ask “how is that attitude working out for you?”
I now wish to see a bonus strip if Professor Brock at a therapist’s office
Seconded
Of all the characters who need therapy, we only get Prof Brock. I love it.
“MY NAME’S NOT RIIIICK!!!!!” XD
One of the things that I miss from Dina is her having her own views challenged. It’d be nice to have Dina have to find out some of her own takes on science were things she needed to contemplate.
Like she legit took the effort to revise her T-shirts from “RARR” to “HOMPK” to reflect up to date scientific consensus on what dinosaurs sounded like, so wish granted?
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/04-hompk/growl/
“No, dinosaurs actually did go extinct by most measures.”
“LIES! MADNESS!”
If the dinosaurs went extinct, explain why there were half a dozen of them picking at some roadkill outside this morning. (They all flew out of the way as cars came by, don’t worry they’re fine.)
those were government drones obviously
Birds aren’t real™
Government drones are tasty then.
I had a nice drone/dinosaur stew yesterday.
I’m just SAYING, I never see any birds when the government shuts down
(Birds Aren’t Real is my favorite stupid conspiracy, I remember when the vast majority of people knew it was a joke. I hope it’s still most people lol.)
“Birds aren’t dinosaurs and evolving into them would just mean they’re not anymore.”
“YOU FILTHY LIAR.”
Something like that.
“Birds aren’t dinosaurs and evolving into them would just mean they’re not anymore.”
“Please explain your scientific definition of the word ‘dinosaur’ that includes all the creatures conventionally referred to as dinosaurs, but doesn’t include birds.”
Probably something more like that.
(The biologist Steven Jay Gould spent decades studying fish, and concluded there was no reasonable scientific definition of the word “fish”, although that was no reason to stop using it.)
As much as I love arguing that whales really are fish, this is all fundamentally a clash between scientific terminology and common English usage. Terms that were defined before our current scientific understanding get weird when we try to apply them using it.
I feel like that’s a pretty good thing to argue with him about. Like, science is meant to be about the joy of new discovery and Brock thinks it’s his job to find that joy and destroy it.
More behavior from Joyce that I hate because it reminds me of me.
i mean, at least she’s putting in effort/it’s good that she’s trying as opposed to like, not actually ‘approving’ and just forcing herself to seem tolerant/accepting versus ppl who would also dismissively be like “Oh it’s just a phase’
“I could be doing worse” is a bar you can lower forever.
You’re doing great, Joyce! I think Joss will understand you meant ‘new to me’.
Y’know, once she’s done trolling you, as is her right as the eldest sister.
Speaking as an eldest brother, the word you were looking for was duty, not right.
Dude, a friendly reminder from a friendly fellow science teacher. Surely you prefer a society with an overwhelming need for an illusion of order. The alternative would be to experience evolution, dirt-on-your-hands, on a corn field.
Hail Eris! We shall banish thee and thy acquiescence to the Curse of Greyface.
IUnderstoodThatReference.png
A corn field is already a form of manmade order, try a wildland instead…
Wishing him into a swamp won’t scare him, he already has to deal with first year students.
Don’t worry, Joyce. Most of us are in the same boat of having no clue at all how to speak about it. It changes between each individual…
A few years ago, I was working in a school and had a they/them pin on (generally not really out to students at work, but there have been some places). Anyway, I said something to a student who resonded, “Yes, ma’am.” Then she glanced at my pin, and was like, “Or, uh, sir? Sorry, I don’t know what word…” And I said, “It’s okay, no one does.”
Do you know any words that could be an equivalent to ma’am/sir? Like maybe ma’amsir? or Mage? or Miggs?
Chat.
San? Senpai? Sama?…
Like most people, I’m not Japanese, and so I’d feel weird using their suffixes.
Yes, that makes sense.
I just like languages of all types. And borrow from them all the time. That’s just me, though.
You know, I would take mage.
O Wise And Mighty Enchanter, even
After high school, I just called everyone vaguely teacherish “Professor”. It’s been decades now, and I still do. Even with the teacherish friends I hug and hang out with sometimes. Dunno. It’s just how I do.
Would be nice if I could get folks to call me “Doc'”, when they’d rather say “ma’am” or “sir”, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen.
Sometimes I just go by “The Notorious” [initials] but maybe that’s problematic too…
Hmm… 🤔
People of my age are referred to as Sage or Crone (same title, different gender) in the religion I used to practice. It was a mark that having survived to this age should have conferred some wisdom, whether it had or not.
I like the quantum state title sir-or-madam. It covers the possibility space in between masculine and feminine, if not the whole spectrum of genders.
Myrrh?
(M/ir)
We don’t really use ma’am and sir here, but instead for some reason school kids have a convention of calling female teachers “miss” (even if their title is “Mrs” or “Ms”). Male teachers don’t really have an equivalent, sometimes they get “sir” but it feels weirdly formal and hierarchical, and “mister” is just too weird, so usually you just use like Mr Surname unless you forgot it. Anyway where I’m going with that is I had an online acquaintance who at the time was presenting as non-binary whose students called her mx (pronounced “mix”), which was also her title instead of miss.
Yeah, Mx. is the common/standard nonbinary title now. It doesn’t feel like it would work as a ma’a/sir replacement, and I personally don’t care for it as a title at all, so I don’t use it for myself.
Lotta folks call me “Mix”. It’s OK. Most of my work is in Spanish, so I just get used to adding a “ə” syllable of indeterminate vowel at the end of words (or using the default masculine) when referring to myself and my name, so that folks can “read” me however they perceive me. Like Hannah Gadsby says: “perpetually gender-suprised”.
Most folks are pretty cool about it all. The older folks just call me, “mi amor,” just as a term of affection, although I try to dissuade them from the fancier terms like “su merced”.
It’s a tricky thing, trying not to let gender or perceptions of age or class or social status get in the way of making a real connection with people whom I want to serve and help.
I don’t do a ton in Spanish, but I do sometimes do the “e” ending for myself– my mom’s side has Colombian heritage, so sometimes it comes up for occasional terms.
Currently substitute teaching, and I do get younger kids asking me if I’m a boy or a girl. And sometimes adults, if around, react like they’re being rude, but “confusing for small children” is actually pretty gender affirming for me.
I recently started a volunteer role where I definitely assumed I’ll need to be read as a cis woman, though, but it’s kinda like you said– I want to be able to help, and my identities might make this harder; it’s just a few hours a month, so I’m willing to deal with it.
Yup. I hear ya.
How do you reply to that question?
I usually answer, “Both. Thanks for asking!” With a big smile. Usually works out OK.
One time last year, when I was working full time with the same group of kids, one asked me– and this was a couple of weeks into the school year– and I just said, “No,” but we were on our way to Music so there wasn’t a follow-up, and then it never came up again.
Often I just don’t answer, or I say vaguely incomprehensible things (“Oh, you know,” “Who’s to say”).
Good answer! 🙂
Boss. I like students snapping to attention and hollering, “YES BOSS!”
Do you ever tell them you are having a failure to communicate?
There’s a webcomic I read upon occaision that originates from Venezuela that has a gender neutral Married person honorific: Seño.
I prefer “themperor” in my day-to-day
This is one difficulty I have in adapting: lots of people have tried to coin new words in this space, and they (the words) are all awful, and none ever gain enough traction to dominate the others and become safe to use.
(Reading science fiction makes it worse. Some authors come up with words for use by species that have three or more physical sexes, and/or which evolve through all their sexes over their lifetimes, etc., and that (usually) ignores how members of those species may vary in their internal life. And these words are some of the worst. Almost as bad as time-travel grammar.)
I mean, some of those words are deliberately the worst, it the author’s also trying to make a point that different species’ languages wouldn’t be particularly pronounceable in mouths that evolved on different worlds.
One of my students solved this by calling everyone, including his profs, “bestie”… but most students say Doctor or Professor. I suppose for K-12 you could go with teacher (which was really common when I was volunteering at a summer migrant program).
“Teacher” used like that seems to happen the most when working with English language learners, and then with some of the lower elementary age kids. It doesn’t really fit the space of what’s being asked (sir/ma’am alternative), but I’d definitely take it when working in a school.
Before moving to the South I’d never really encountered sir/ma’am!
Folks can just say, “Yes!” or “Can I help you?” or “Pardon me” without the sir/ma’am which I still find a little weird even after two decades. (And I’m afraid I didn’t teach my children to use them either… maybe it will eventually die out…)
Oh yeah, I fully support just leaving it out. I’ve only ever lived in Michigan, and the example I started with happened in Michigan. It doesn’t happen as consistently as it seems to in the South; some people use it sometimes, some use it all the time, and I would say most don’t use it most of the time.
Here in Little Egypt, people tend to just leave out the gendered address. Most of the time it’s come up in my life, the person in question was either not from around here or just so far up their own ass that not being addressed as “Sir/Ma’am” was Disrespect™ of the highest order. And then you’ve got the ones who hate being called “ma’am” because it “makes them feel old”(?), but they never had an alternative to give besides their name, so you’d have teachers expecting to be addressed as “Mrs. Breakfast” or whatever, every single time you talked to them, which is fucking ridiculous.
What’s going to make it weird is Dorothy will be making out with Jocelyn, and she calls her Joyce in front of Joyce.
Ooh, I like it.
youtried.png
You ain’t exactly charismatic, Joyce, you don’t roll nat20s 24/7.
“If you’re so cool and hip, go impress that bobbysoxer”
I wonder what would happen if this prof suddenly changed to be a philosophy one/class
Wow, I didn’t think anyone had been “hip” since the nineties.
To quote Alex Keaton:
“I’m hip.
I’m cool.
I’m a happening fool.”
Trends are cyclic. The 80s came back, so the 90s are bound to get their turn eventually.
The ’90s never left, yo’!
Gen X here: if we used “hip” it was ironically along with other slang from our parents’ generation like groovy. Not 90s slang.
Actually the more I think of it hip was used in the 90s to denote someone who was out of touch and trying too hard much like Joyce here (see “hipster” which is a 90s term in its current usage).
I fucking love Brock. He’s so realistic to how some up-their-own-ass college professors speak.
“PROFESSOR! LAVA! HOOOOT!”
Joyce is demonstrating perfectly why I find interacting with people online who have a strong sense of morality but loose morals irritating.
This is about just about every fandom teen to ever exist.
I4d tell you to calm the fuck down, but easier said than done
Professor Brock is going to have Arby’s for lunch.
as much as time is oh so abstract to him, he better put whatever he got in the oven at 350 for at least 15 minutes
there’s a reason why they insist on all those extra toppings X-X
So, does this dipshit actually teach them anything, or does he barf pointless one-liners for the entire class period?
The closest we’ve seen to him teaching was when he tried to bait the class into making presentations on the false premise of “what’s the most evolved kind of life?”
like, from what I can tell this is but an introductory level class he’s teaching?
thus I don’t expect any of his lessons here to be much from the very get go XD
I’ve had a few professors like that…
Sounds worthless and immoral.
Joe, give her a shoulder rub, she is tying her brain into a pretzel right now, help her chill out
Professor Brock remains my favorite of the professors we’ve seen so far. Also Joyce, it’s good to acknowledge that your past views were not so good, and that you’ve changed them as you’ve come to understand things better. Growing and changing as a person over time is a good thing.
I give props to Alex a bit more just because she’s so enthusiastic but Amber is a student she only traumatizes.
Does Willis deliberately make Professor Brock look like Dr. Scott in Back to the Future, or am I getting too online?
Dr. Brock mentions his ‘slight’ resemblance to Emmett Brown back on Feb 9 2021.
Leslie’s personal life is a wreck and she’s let her students get dragged into that too much, but otherwise she’s been good as a teacher.
Bragging voice: I’m so cool and hip that I already know the best I can ever hope for is “she tries.”
Poor Joyce
Honestly auto-deleting all social media posts after two weeks is probably a good practice no matter what.
The left HAS gotten a bit mind-policey about some terms, Joyce. I feel you.
Polarized thinking exists in all times and all political camps as long as there are immature, insecure people terrified of being seen to make any mistakes. I think what you’re describing is just children making their voices heard more widely.
we also been pushing the notion that folks, especially younger folks, should speak up and advocate for themselves. So some of it is folks trying to find their voice.
Which terms?
Not trying to play forum police, but I thought culture war complaints about ”the left” were at least in bad form here.
It usually works out bad, but I think complaints about “eating our own” and the like are acceptable?
Is there a rulebook somewhere around here I can check?
This is definitely a narrative I see far in complaints about the left than in actual practice. I’m sure it happens, but I suspect the complaints are far out of proportion.
“You’re Trying” gold star for Joyce.
“I deleted all those Facebook posts! You have no evidence against me!”
Hey wait a minute, Becky’s covering the side of her mouth that’s facing Dina, instead of the one facing other people. The goober.
Who is the girls with the tear tattoo in your profile?
That’s Polly/Blackbird, from a comic called Flipside. She’s a cool badass with a magical metal ball she uses Magneto-style to beat the shit out of people. She’s also painfully gay for an overpowered swordswoman called Bernadette.
When will Jocelyn and Carla meet?
I fully believe Jocelyn will suggest Carla’s billionaire parents…may not be ethical.
Joyce is going to need to come to terms with who she used to be if she wants to be able to move forward. If she keeps trying to pretend that version of her never existed, she’s always going to be overcompensating in the other direction.
She doesn’t need to dwell on it, but she needs to accept that she used to act and think one way and she has changed (and will continue changing). I had some pretty lousy opinions in my younger days, but I’ve grown and I realize now that those were lousy opinions and I try to be better than that. But I don’t pretend that I never, ever thought them or was always who I am now.
Okay, but if you let other people know you had those opinions, you’re gonna get treated like you still have them. I guess that’s handy for figuring out which friends are worth keeping in your life, at least.
I deal with my homophobic fundamentalist past this way.
“I used to be a real stupid asshole as a teenager. I’m better now. Hopefully.”