ivyontheholodeck

goggles-mcgee

Harley Quinn who recently kidnapped Bruce Wayne and texted Scarecrow to meet her: "Alright Brucie Boy, you're probably wondering why I kidnapped you, and don't worry! It's not for anything "villainous" or the like. You might not remember it but I remember me and you being in med school together along with Crane and I thought we could form a club since we never got to start one in school since you dipped in the middle of the year!"

Scarecrow who just walked in: "That's seriously why we're here? I thought you needed my help. You said it was urgent."

Harley holding up a tote bag: "It is urgent! I made t-shirts and I need to know if they fit!"

Bruce who honestly just wanted a nap: "Let's just see the shirts Quinzel."

Scarecrow: You're actually going along with this!?"

Bruce raising a brow and looking down at the rooes that are binding him to a chair: "I don't have much of a choice..."

Scarecrow: "...Fair point. Okay Harley show us the shirts."

Harley pulls out a crop top shirt proudly, it's half red, half black that has 'OFFICIAL FUCK FREUD CLUB' on the chest: "I got em personalized! Bruce gets a black turtleneck because he was the soft goth boy in med school and he's still a little goth baby. John you get a flannel that has the sayin' on the back! Aren't they cute?"

Bruce remembering how much he hated Freud and having to listen to his methods and ideas in school, and how he, Harley, and John would shit talk him in their study group: "Okay I actually love this idea and the shirts."

Scarecrow trying to hide how touched he is: "You got me flannel?"

the-bi-bilingual

Scarecrow, after 3 hours of group bitching: I still cant believe you're willing to do this- Harleen and I are Super Villains now!

Bruce, having been untied and drinking the Irish coffee Harly brought out: A) I have never had any sense of self preservation-

Harley: Which we remember vividly!

Bruce: -and B) I run a multimillion dollar company while having at least 5 kids; you dont know how much chaos I have to put up with on a daily basis. This is a vacation by comparison.

Harley: Wait - what do you mean by "at least" 5 kids???

canon-adjacent

Bruce: I do not adopt these children. They adopt me.

Harley: Okay you have to be bullshitting me.

Bruce: One day a blonde one named Stephanie just showed up at my house with my middle child saying they were dating, they broke up like a month later but she hasn’t left yet.

Harley: ...honey I’m pretty sure that’s a home invasion-

Bruce: I mean my butler did give her a room and I offered to adopt her, but she refused that...however she’s still there and stealing my coffee every week so I don’t know.

Harley: ...why-

Bruce: Her Father’s Cluemaster.

Harley: Oh FUCK that guy. Yeah, give that poor sweetie some hugs and a college education, stat.

Harley: *pulls out a massive fucking psychology textbook*

Harley: In the meantime let’s talk about your rampant abandonment issues and repressed desire for a family!

Bruce: Oh christ not again.

Scarecrow: Finally! Time to get to the fun part!

sindri42

Harley knows full well that Bruce is Batman but enjoys the game too much to ruin it by saying anything out loud.

Scarecrow still has no idea, and does not notice the striking similarity between the array of orphans at Wayne Manor and the costumed children running around the city with weapons every night.

gallusrostromegalus

copperbadge

TIL that the English word “Lord” in the sense of the head of an estate comes from an Old English word of Germanic origins, hlāfweard, later hlāford, later lord.

Normally I wouldn’t remark on my romps through etymology, but “hlafweard” is a compound of hlaf, or loaf, and weard, which means guardian (see also Ward or Warden, etc). Meaning that when you call someone a lord you are calling him an esteemed keeper of the bread.

HEY THERE BREADBOX PETER WIMSEY. LOAF GUARD PALPATINE. BREAD CLIP VETINARI.

Lady also derives from hlaf, but in this case hlafdige or bread kneader. She makes the bread, he monitors it. Women have to do all the work as usual.

Now, the reason I was looking this up was that I wanted to develop a gender-neutral analogue to lord/lady; there are analogues already out there naturally, but the Shivadh must be different and anyway I didn’t like the ones I’d seen suggested online.

Given that the origins of Lord and Lady aren’t all that strongly gendered anyway (they’re about what the person does, not what their gender is), I decided that if a woman is a bread-kneader and a man is a bread-guarder, a nonbinary person should be A BREAD EATER, which would be Hlafetan.

Thus I present to you the gender-neutral analogue to Lord or Lady: Ledan.

i'll be adopting that thx

kaijuerotica

romanceyourdemons

so much love for characters who are desperately unsure whether they’re a good person, a redeemable person, a person worth saving, but are absolutely certain that they’re a grade a hottie

kazliin

poetdreaming

Good morning

gallusrostromegalus

theradioghost

dead metaphors are really interesting honestly and specifically i’m interested in when they become malapropisms

like, the concept being, people are familiar with the phrase and what people use it to mean metaphorically, but it’s not common knowledge anymore what the metaphor was in literal reference to. people still say “toe the line” but don’t necessarily conjure up the image of people standing at the starting line of a race, forbidden from crossing over it. people still say “the cat is out of the bag” without necessarily knowing it’s a sailors’ expression referring to a whip being brought out for punishment. some metaphors are so dead we don’t even know where they come from; like, there are ideas about what “by hook or by crook” references, but no one is entirely sure. nobody knows what the whole nine yards are.

and then you throw in a malaprop or a mondegreen or two, where because people don’t know what the actual words of the expression refer to, they’re liable to replace them with similar sounding words (see “lack toast and tolerant”). so we can literally go from a phrase referencing a common, everyday part of life to a set of unfixed, contextless sounds with a completely different meaning. that’s fascinating. what an interesting piece of the way language and culture are living, changing, coevolving things.

maybe part of the reason we can’t figure out where some phrases come from is that over time the words themselves have changed! one of the theories about “the whole nine yards” is that it’s a variant of “the whole ball of wax,” which some people further theorize was originally “the whole bailiwick,” meaning just “the whole area”! the addition of “nine yards” might be related to “dressed to the nines,” which might reference the fucking Greek muses! language is so weird and cool! (and I only know any idioms in two languages!)

the point is. I just came across the words “nip it in the butt” in a piece of published, professional fiction, and now I can’t stop giggling.

whetstonefires

someone put ‘within a hare’s breath’ in an AO3 tag and it stopped me cold. because you’re leaving the general sense of the idiom and its physical phonemes almost intact, and yet replacing the actual words and metaphor with something completely unrelated.

a hare’s breath is small in a completely different way than a hair’s breadth and works very differently as a unit of distance.

and yet the general idea of ‘small, close, tiny gap, no barrier, a near thing, almost’ remains intact, and if you didn’t know what had happened there you would never figure it out.

elodieunderglass

My 3-year-old attends a nursery with a colony of miner bees that is extremely active in the garden in spring and autumn. Miner bees are so called because they make small industrious burrows in the ground, and make a big fuss of doing so. The miner bees are harmless but tremendously nosy and officious: they are constantly examining the children and trying to chase them away from the holes, with as much effectiveness as you can expect. They won’t sting - but they swarm and buzz around and it makes you flinch. The nursery owner refuses (quite rightly) to delete the colony, and children are instructed by staff to be aware of the bees, but to remain neutral.

I suddenly listened a bit closer and realised that the child calls them “minder bees.”

“Minder bees?”

“Yes - because you have to mind der bees.”

What a completely different framing. Suddenly you hear a small child growing up with instruction from people with West Country accents, and the vague idea they have of the British idiom of “minding:” there is “don’t mind the bees” (don’t be bothered by the bees) and “mind the bees” (be aware of the bees) and “childminders” (nursery staff who look after children.) here is a child who does not know about mining, apart from being clear on what is mine or yours. But the child knows that Minding is a kind of caring: simultaneously looking after, and being/not being annoyed by. Here is a child who is clearly instructed frequently to mind der bees.

And the bees on their part definitely mind. They are minding the children, but they don’t really mind the children being there. They are very minder bees.

If left to themselves and the children, perhaps, that’s what they would become.

ink-phoenix

palipunk

Massive fuck you to everyone who is talking about Palestinians as if we’re already all dead and sharing more solidarity with our corpses than us living. “We will never forget the beautiful Palestinian people-“ how about you stop “making peace” with Palestinian extermination. My people are not going to be forgotten because we are going to live. Palestinians have already survived one genocide and have been surviving one ever since.

Do not ever let the idea that all Palestinians are going to die exist in your mind. Mourn the dead, fight like hell for the living.

ivyontheholodeck

boudicca

sometimes it's not even "he would not fucking say that". sometimes it's "he would not fucking say that. nobody would ever fucking say that. nobody talks like that. have you ever spoken to another human being"

pluckyredhead

amongthesebarrencrags

Please. Help.

The girl I'm dating and I both think that we sleep on the left side of the bed. I'm coming to terms with the fact that she may be a psychopath and I don't know what's real anymore.

Which option has the sides of the bed correctly labelled?

#1

#2

Neither #1 nor #2 but a secret third thing

paperjoshi

"left" and "right" are both relative terms determined relative to a person. The correct answers are port and starboard.

beemovieerotica

the headboard is the stern

paperjoshi

Yeah this one seems pretty straightforward. I'm sure there's some exceptions, but every depiction I can think of, including IRL race car beds, agrees.

roach-works

i spent too long on this and regret nothing

amongthesebarrencrags

Nor should you, this is glorious

You're going to be amazing (Taylor's Version)

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Please. Help.