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coffee-n-bagels-comic-universe · 3 years

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Inside Jokes and References in the Full Bios

Mainly for @spacelizardtrashboys and @kuruumiya

Also: Any time strikethrough text is used it's because it's meant to be secret information, for example on the small bios any time 'Lucifarian' truly isn't their last name their is strikethrough test after saying that it's not their real name. This is to say that no matter what is written or if it's strikethrough text or not, it is there for a reason.

Damien - Bio In-Jokes and References:

The Quote for him refers back to his 'King of Hell' gimmick, as does his middle name, Rex means king.

He's protective, like a dad, but also way too overprotective over the gimmicks for the girls. He's an old, old school guy so he enjoys card games with the boys.

He's supposed to sound like a young Hugh Laurie, mainly because if I heard a young Hugh Laurie say Damien's bio quote I wouldn't be able to take him seriously.

His main finisher (Seventh Circle) refers back to (a) him being the king of hell and (b) the seventh circle is for violence, and well, he's a wrestler, that's a pretty violent job.

He calls fans both 'peasants' and his 'loyal subjects' because he's like an asshole-ish king who'd quickly be dethroned if they rebelled.

Vickie - Bio In-Jokes and References:

The Quote for her refers back to her gimmick along with the old saying 'pride comes before the fall'.

She's called 'Victoria' because of both (a) it meaning victory and (b) the fact that Queen Victoria ruled back when Britain had an empire, then the empire fell (as in pride [Vickie] before a fall)

Both Her and Damien are born in August and are the only two to share a birth month as they are Father and Daughter (non-kayfabe, as in they share DNA)

She's raised Christian as back when she was growing up England was a lot more Christian than when she became an adult so she got lax in her beliefs

Her personality is supposed to make her come across as a vain, rich, arse of a person, yet deep down she's still redeemable, she's got a long way to go before she actually redeems herself though

She's the type of person who makes sure EVERY little detail of her matches and promos are PERFECT to the point that she will control what other people do or say, down to the moment it's said/done and the way it's said/done

She only likes the other D.O.D (Daughters of Darkness) members because she has only made enemies in the short while they've been in the company, she especially dislikes George 'The Animal' Steele because of his very messy style going against her 'everything should be perfect' views

She's the leader, the brain and the mouth because of her control over the group, if she let them have more control, there might be less arguments about her amount of control

Her named moves are also references to both her gimmick and other things. Beheader is named because of the Tudor monarchs of England having kind of a thing for killing people in this way (ex. Henry VIII).

Lineage Ender is named that because if she ever botches that one specific move (it'll make sense in context/ she does it during a training scene) it could end either her own Lineage or the person she's doing it to.

Lion's den is called that because she traps them in a near-inescapable crucifix pin, and normally if someone goes into a den of Lions, they aren't escaping in one piece.

Family Pride is named that because not only is her gimmick the sin of pride, but she's got pride in her family and she's her dad's 'pride and joy' because she's his only child.

Wish for this (her main finishing move) is called that because it's an inside joke of "you're gonna 'wish for this' to be over soon"

As she's Damien's blood daughter, a 'prodigal son' joke seemed somewhat appropriate.

Billie - Bio In-Jokes and References:

Her quote is a reference to the Guerreros and the whole 'Latin lover' trope

She was born in February because of Valentine's day, hence why her birthday is two days before the 14th

She's 1/2 Cuban (just in general - both Mexican and Cuban culture is interesting to me) But she's 1/2 Cuban in case I ever need to write for Razor Ramon, I can get away with making the joke of 'my Cuban accent's better than yours'.

Her casual style is 'Suggestive' because how else is Lust supposed to dress.

She dislikes Hulk Hogan because she finds him incredibly annoying and she dislikes Jesse Ventura because she dislikes his fashion choices.

I imagine her uncle Hugo looks like Luis Guzman and her dad's like Raul Julia. Try to imagine those two wrestling as a luchador tag team.

Her mother was basically a valet to her dad, which was usually Billie's role before she was part of the D.O.D.

Her move name references are all song references: Love me Tender - Elvis' song of the same name, Personal Aphrodite - a reference to / joke on 'Personal Jesus', Sexual Healing - Marvin Gaye's song of the same name.

Also, I hope to eventually use the joke 'The Babe, the babe with the power,' 'What power?' 'Power of voodoo' 'Who do?' 'You do' 'Do what?' 'Remind me of the babe' because of one of her commentary nicknames being 'The Babe'

P.G - Bio In-Jokes and References:

Her quote is in reference to her being greed and (right at the start of the story) her thoughts on money actually being able to buy her happiness

her surname 'Voronin' means crow, and well, crows like shiny things, like money

she wears 'fancy but simple' clothing because if she bought designer clothes she'd be in debt, but she still wants to look like she has more money than everyone else

she's cowardly in a Jimmy Hart way, she'll piss someone off during a promo and run away once she feels like she's in danger

she's a showman because she's more show than work, meaning she works exceptionally quick matches.

Her moves are basically jokes on the fact that she is greed, such as Gold-digger and Diamond Ring. However, Money Maker is also a joke on the fact that it's a facebuster and usually an actor's face is called their 'money maker'

She hates Hulk Hogan and Sgt slaughter because of how patriotic they are

Kirby - Bio In-Jokes and References:

Her quote is a reference to (a) the fact that she's Gluttony, (b) her being the only one who wears a mask constantly and (c) her basically being the group's scare tactic against people who think they can push them around.

I am planning on eventually making her a part of the machines, maybe as a valet, maybe as a wrestler, not 100% sure as of right now

Her mother is the Norwegian-Scottish one and her father is the Irish-Welsh one

She is the tallest (not the heaviest, that's Damien) but she's still 9 inches shorter than André.

She's willing to bleed hardway, but hates blading

She hates Big John Studd because of his disrespect, she hates Hulk Hogan because she thinks he's obnoxiously 'American', she dislikes Lord Alfred Hayes and Dynamite Kid because they are so insistent on calling her '1/4 Icelandic' whenever she talks about being 1/4 Norwegian. She hates Brutus Beefcake because he's just 'so, so much' energy-wise.

She's always been tall, always shorter than André though, she was 5'6" when she was 12, which is still taller than Sam, P.G and Eli.

Kirby's the best at using folk tales and mythology references in her promos and still keeping them dark and scary.

Her speaking voice is Jessica Hynes, but I imagine her singing voice (which will be important later) to be that of Deee-lite's Lady Miss Kier. On that note, I will be putting up a post on this part of the fic's canon.

Feeding Frenzy is meant to look similar to Roddy's wild punches, hence the 'frenzy' part of the name.

Organ grinder is named because it's meant to look really hard (like she's putting all her force and weight into it) as if she's grinding her opponents organs

Hungry for Blood is an in-joke of during her toughest matches she seems hungry to give the fans the sight of blood

Consummation is a joke of 'the match will soon be over, the match will soon be concluded, or consummated' not the sex-based meaning of that word.

Number of the beast, which is 666, is a reference to the 619, and is a modified 619 basically.

Vampire's Bite is a reference to her sitout jawbreaker looking like she could possibly bite someone's neck, like a vampire, as she performs the move

I didn't want to call her chops, chops, so I made a joke of 'oh it's chopping, like a butcher's knife'

Overfeeding is another basic gluttony reference. Cheshire Grin is a facelock-based joke. Let Them Eat Cake is a butt=cake joke

The ogress is a thinly-veiled way of the commentary team calling her ugly, because why else would she be the only one in a mask

Holly - Bio In-Jokes and References:

Her quote is written that way because I always wanted her to sound like she comes from New Jersey

She's very cuddly towards the rest of the D.O.D and thus gets called a teddy bear by the others

She's Pansexual because she doesn't care what your gender is, she loves people just being themselves

She's the only ginger because I've never seen a ginger wrestler from New Jersey

She was raised Catholic but lost her faith upon realising how bad gay people are treated by the church (Holly literally just goes "Y'all it is 1984, how are y'all gonna reject people based on who they love?")

Holly's very much the person who'll ask permission to cut a promo on someone but won't tell them how harsh she's going to be

She's the group's mom friend (mum friend?)

Before she started travelling with another member of the group (Holly travels with Sam a lot) she would accidentally no-show events

She does accidentally give incredibly stiff shots

Holly likes Gorilla Monsoon because their friendship is very much a weird pseudo-dad-daughter friendship, so basically, she's using him as her new dad

Her voice is Angie Harmon because I think Harmon sounds like a badass from New Jersey

Naptime, Dirt Nap and Lullaby are jokes of 'I'm gonna knock you out'

Eli - Bio In-Jokes and References:

Her quote is a joke of 'this is why she doesn't do a lot of promos'

She's the most likely to be on one of those 'too hot for TV' blooper reels from her promos

Both she and Sam hate people taller than them

Sam - Bio In-Jokes and References:

Her quote is a reference to the fact that her tattoos are her 'masterpiece'

she dresses athletically because she's always ready for a fight, especially because she's usually the one picking fights

She likes Lou because he's like a crazy uncle to her and she likes George Steele because, unlike Vickie, she likes the wild man side of his gimmick

She's voiced by Melissa Etheridge because she's still feminine but is the most masculine sounding

#Lucifarians #Wrestling Family #wrestling fic #original character

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fire-fira · 4 years

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Nonbinary Awareness Week Day 4: Visibility For The Invisible

What are my identities besides nonbinary?:

Mixed-race Native-- Cherokee and Lenape on my bio-mom’s side, Oglala Lakota on my bio-dad’s side, and Irish, Scottish, Norse, Egyptian, and German.

Neurodivergent-- allistic hyperlexic and dysgeographic

Abuse survivor

Currently 34 (born in ‘86)

Aro/ace

How do my other identities intersect with my nonbinarity?:

In terms of my gender, part of how I understand it is through my racial identity. I can’t really separate it out, especially not when knowing that my Native ancestors had space for people like me and realizing that is part of what helped me feel safer in being open about who I am.

There’s also the fact that my personal style in terms of how I present myself is a careful balance between trying to be read accurately as my gender (difficult as that is) while also trying to be read as ‘not white’ as possible. Yes I’m mixed, yes I’m white-passing, but I don’t like being assumed to be ‘just white’ because it makes me feel like who I am is getting bleached from me so others can find me more ‘palatable’. It makes my skin crawl. (And considering my hell-beast bio-mother pretty much tried all my life to make me as not Native as possible, the idea makes me feel sick.)

A big part of me knowing who and what I am as early as I did (age 4) is thanks to the fact that I’m hyperlexic and that part of how my hyperlexia was expressed back then was through logic and an understanding of ‘If I do x, then y will happen’ (over everything from the possibility of death by getting hit by a car if I stepped into a street too soon, to abstract concepts like the idea that I’d be locked in an asylum and never let out if I told anyone I wasn’t a girl or a boy-- this is the kind of crap I thought about even when I was 4). I was way too damn smart for my own good as a little kid, but it served me well in that I was able to figure out what I was not long after my memories first started up (my 4th birthday, it was like I hadn’t existed before and then someone threw a switch and just-- BOOM-- instant awareness and no memory of anything before and no recognition of where I was, it was weird AF), and knowing what I was that early on gave me the sort of stability I needed to know that if I existed then others had to.

I was going to say that my dysgeographica hasn’t impacted my gender, but thinking about it I can think of one way it did. Since it’s so easy for me to get lost and turned around, I learned early on how to let go and trust that I’d either find my way or that someone I was with would be able to get me to where I was going. In a way, that kind of took some of the stress off of trying to find an answer for what my gender was as a kid.

As for being an abuse survivor... OOF. There are a lot of awful things I lived through (primarily emotional/mental abuse and neglect-- I’ll spare everyone details because it’s heavy as hell) but the worst of it did give me some perspective. Me hiding who I am was miserable as hell, and while being nonbinary can be nerve-wracking in some crowds, being able to look back on my personal hell and the fact that I survived gives me a confidence I don’t think I’d have otherwise. Nothing that life can throw at me will ever be as bad as that. People can be as hostile and ridiculous as they want, but they can never make me be closeted about being nonbinary again.

Yay being 34. (Tbh I used to think-- probably because of the abuse-- I wouldn’t live to see 30. But guess what? I’M STILL ALIVE AND KICKING AND I DON’T PLAN ON GOING ANYWHERE FOR A LONG DAMN TIME. HA-FREAKING-HA.) For most of my life there were no terms for my gender and as a kid I didn’t dare say what I was. To my knowledge (before I found out otherwise later) I was the only nonbinary person I knew and didn’t meet another enby until I was 25. (At least one of the people I was friends with back in high school has turned out to be an enby, but I don’t think they came out until their late 20s.) The ‘90s sucked for having any examples of anyone nonbinary-- both in real life and in fiction. I gravitated toward fiction and clung to whatever characters I found that resonated with me. The one advantage that being so isolated has given me is that it helped me stay in spaces where I felt out of place in circumstances where a lot of other people would have just left, so I was able to get what I needed or do what I needed to.

For a long time-- up until my early-to-mid-20s in fact-- I didn’t realize that my aro/ace-ness and nonbinary-ness weren’t a package deal. (Which is kind of funny in a ‘wtf, where is the logic?’ way because my aro/ace-ness was never an issue for me. I have an uncle on my bio-dad’s side who’s ace and might be aro but idk, so my aro/ace-ness was always brushed off by my family as being ‘genetic’ and therefore not something to be concerned about, but I was absolutely convinced that if anyone knew I was nonbinary then bad things would happen. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) Because I was so isolated for most of my life, I was under the mistaken assumption that they were all kind of tied together. Thank gods for education. So as a result for a long time how I understood my gender also hinged on my orientation (and dear gods, I know using that word makes me sound old af, but it’s less wordy than to get into the whole tangled mess of how sexual and romantic attraction aren’t the same thing and don’t always ‘line up’ for people, yada yada yada). These days I see all three parts as distinct and vaguely interlinked in my case, but no one part of my nonbinary/aro/ace-ness would magically stop existing if one of the other parts changed.

Why do I think my specific experience is less visible than other experiences?:

Let me put it this way: the line-up of being a hyperlexic and dysgeographic aro/ace mixed-race Native abuse-survivor isn’t exactly a common experience. There aren’t many people who have issues of being de-legitimized on the fronts of their gender, their racial identity, their sexuality and romantic orientation, and their neurodivergency all at once. Or having those things pinging off each other used as a way to call into question their mental faculties.

Even as specific as my identity is, because of how liminal my identities are and my past history of abuse I have to remind myself that I can take up space in areas that apply to me. I am so used to being on the edge of accepted existence, even despite the fact that it’s been 14 years since I was taken out of my personal hell, that I have to occasionally remind myself that I’m not taking attention away from those who need to be heard when I’m one of those people.

There are times I haven’t spoken because I’m in an aro/ace space, or a nonbinary space, or an indigenous space, and what I have going on at a given time involves one of the other aspects of my identity. And thing is, if you won’t ever speak up then you won’t ever be heard or seen. That’s something I’m working on, and this entry for Nonbinary Awareness Week is just one step in that.

What’s something about my experience I would like other people to know?:

You don’t always have to have the answers.

It’s okay to sit back and trust that things will happen as they need to happen if something gets to be too much. You’ll figure yourself out more easily if you let yourself just have things come to you as they will.

It hurts sometimes and that sucks, but things can’t improve if you don’t put yourself out there when you’re ready to. The people who matter most will accept you and love you for who you are, not what they think you are.

Multiple seemingly contradictory things can be true about you all at once, and that’s okay.

It’s okay to stand your ground and be honest about who you are.

Even if you feel isolated and closed off, disadvantaged and backed into a corner, educating yourself and doing the work to decolonize your mind and dismantle internalized prejudices will help immensely.

If you think you’re the only one-- in whatever way-- I guarantee you that you’re not. You just have to give yourself time, make the effort to learn, and allow yourself the opportunity to meet others.

---

[Day 1]

[Day 2]

[Day 3]

#NBWeek #Nonbinary Awareness Week #NonbinaryAwarenessWeek #nonbinary #non-binary #my life #long post

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onekisstotakewithme · 7 years

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Answer Some Questions and tag 10 followers you’d like to know better

I was tagged by the absolutely awesome people @a-mi-zivi AND @minikate--24-05 (I am doubly lucky, yes?)

Nicknames: Boy, do I have a lot of those. To my family I am Jeanie Weens, Shmelky (pls don’t ask), or three pound chicken. To my old school friends, I am probie, the triplet, bio unit #3, Ally, and Patricia (again don’t ask). And on here, I am (in no particular order) twin peanut, A, frog friend/wife, and pumpkin doughnut- oh and three pound pumpkin. I actually really like being called Ally, but no one does it. It’s depressing.

Star Sign: Gemini!

MBTI Type: INFJ (at least that is what it was the last time)

Height: five-foot-two (short bean)

Birth date: June 5

Favorite Bands: I don’t think I have a favourite band. Fall Out Boy? Genesis? I mostly love just individual singers, so.... Can I start listing those? I’m (a little ashamed to admit it) a Taylor Swift fan, I love Phil Collins, Dodie, and any kind of Disney music, or soundtrack, or musicals.

Song Stuck in my Head: Say No To This from Hamilton

Last Show I Watched: Unless we’re talking about how I skipped through “Something Blue” to re-watch certain scenes, then it was M*A*S*H

Other Blogs: Tried to keep more blogs, figured that maintaining this dumpster fire was enough.

When I Created This Blog: November of 2013 (I made it to keep up with Downton Abbey, which is funny to me now because Downton Who? I don’t know them)

What I Post About: everything and anything; all six hundred of my closest fandoms, and mental illness/self care, plus writing references, and stuff to do with my writing... did I mention that it’s everything?

Following: 522, at least one from every fandom I’m in. Usually more.

Followers: More than 500 but i don’t know how many are porn blogs and I don’t want to know; usually I block them right away but not all the time...

Favorite Color: green. blue. the colour of her eyes.

Average Hours of Sleep: 6-9 hours of sleep, unless I’n in insomniac mode, because then it’s 3-5 at most. And the most I’ll sleep is like 12 hours in the throes of mental illness.

Lucky Number: 15 (my former basketball number, one of “the numbers” from lost, and my former address).... 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42.

And 24 but I am not going to explain that one.

Instruments: I learned piano for five years, and by the end wanted nothing to do with it. And now... well. I just sing. The voice is an instrument right?

How Many Blankets I Sleep With: Sheets, plus two comforters, and that’s year-round. I am a cold bean.

Dream Job: I want to be a writer, a published writer, but since I have had that hammered out of my head by two journalist parents, I’d like to work in law enforcement and be able to help people.

Dream Trip: Either going to Disney with unlimited days/money (I know I just went), or going to meet all of my friends from here, especially England for a special someone... and Spain for another someone of a different specialty. Plus Scotland and Paris because of my roots.

Favorite Food: Pork Provencal, which my father is kickass at making, pizza, and most kinds of sweets/ice cream/baked goods. I am literal trash for candy as well, and fruit is good. I’m not too picky, but I’m not really a fish person.

Nationality: Canadian by birth, Scottish/Polish/Ukrainian/Czechoslovakian/Irish/American by heritage. (Yes I know I’m a mutt)

Honestly, anyone who wants to do this can do this, I’m easy. This is just a big ol’ session of fun facts about me.

#personal #tag meme #thanks for the tag #have fun learning about my life

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purplestarkatz93 · 7 years

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My FT questions answers

So regarding my previous post here are my answers to my Fairy Tail Questionnaire.

1. How did you first heard about Fairy Tail?

From my friend Beth. I saw how much she liked it and when she suggested that I check it out I did. I have been hooked ever since. And it’s become my favorite anime of all time, because I never have been more emotionally invested in an anime before.

2. Do read the manga, watch the anime, or both?

I do both. Haven’t been watching the anime lately, but I’ve been keeping up with the manga now. BUT I HATE SPOILERS, SO DON’T TELL ME ANYTHING UNTIL THE TRANSLATION COMES OUT!

3. Who are your favorite character(s)?

I really love all of them, but my top 3 are:

Levy McGarden, I like her because she’s a fellow bookworm, she’s cute, intelligent, and really needs to be the focus more often. Pantherlily. I love how he can go from this big creature, yet can change back into this small cute thing. He’s bad ass and adorable. I call him Badorable. And really my absolute favorite character is Gajeel Redfox. I could really talk for hours on why he’s my favorite, but to sum up I like him because he’s a complex character.

A Complex character, also known as a Dynamic character or a Round character displays the following characteristics:

He or she undergoes an important change as the plot unfolds.

The changes he or she experiences occur because of his or her actions or experiences in the story.

Changes in the character may be good or bad.

The character is highly developed and complex, meaning they have a variety of traits and different sides to their personality.

Some of their character traits may create conflict in the character.

He or she displays strengths, weaknesses, and a full range of emotions.

He or she has significant interactions with other characters.

He or she advances the plot or develops a major theme in the text.

Gajeel has done most of those things on that list.

And to be honest when he first appeared I really didn’t hate him. Yes what he did was wrong, especially regarding Team Shadowgear, but I had this small feeling, ever since I found out that he was a Dragon Slayer that he was going to be an ally to Fairy Tail, never expected him to join though. I’m so glad he did!

4. What is a character or characters that you absolutely hate? And not even love to hate, you wish they were never in the story to begin with.

Future Rogue. That bastard kill Future Lucy, and I will never forgive him for that. Even if he apologized. Seriously I cried so hard when I watched that part in the anime.

5. Do you own any FT merchandise?

The first 20 volumes of the manga, a Capricorn key charm, Natsu plush, Lily plush, small Happy loaf plush or Tsum Tsum, a Mirajane keychain, a Gajeel keychain, a notebook, exceed bracelet, a FT symbol keychain, a wallet, and 2 T-shirts.

I think that’s it.

6. What is your favorite opening?

I have 3.

Snow Fairy ( the first and probably the most recognizable)

https://youtu.be/T2dy-atGDyg

Rock City Boy ( Fun fact the singer is actually American, but he lived most of his life in Japan)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX3v651Ip8E

I wish ( I like this one because it’s the only one where I think I could do a cover of it. It’s in my vocal range)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTDpmFv4Ovc

Honorable mention goes to the 1st movie’s opening 200 Miles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br0zVupkx-c

7. What is your favorite ending?

Be as One

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n5em5vZoaQ

You, He, Me, and She

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=470d_pi1F3w

8. What is your favorite character song?

Well, since Gajeel is my favorite character, my fave character song, is his song My Iron Blues. It’s awesome, fun to sway to, has female back up singers, and I like his singing very much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdS93Qp9H84

Also for you Yuri on Ice fans, this the same guy who sings You Only Live Once

You’re welcome for that random piece of trivia.

9.What is your favorite instrumental track?

Any version of the main theme.

Original https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6kb96YWXMA

Slow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Loi4bYzXvAw

Piano https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk2jYmZerD8

Metal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiT8Ct0cQzM

Tenroujima https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=At_zB-pK3JQ

I also like Dragon Slayer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJoKUq8j1Ns

Natsu’s theme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhevjjbvWmw

Lucy’s theme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L26TQP7Qe9I

Happy’s theme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAIFonqW4SY

One thing I love about FT’s music is the Celtic feel to it. My family is Irish and Scottish, so it makes me think of my heritage.

10. What are your FT ships?

I ship:

Nalu (Natsu x Lucy)

Gruvia (Gray x Juvia)

Jerza (Jellal x Erza)

Elfgreen (Elfman x Evergreen)

Laxana (Laxus x Cana)

RoWen (Romeo x Wendy)

LoRies (Loke x Aries)

Albis (Alzack x Bisca)

Rerry (Ren x Sherry)

Cappy (Carla x Happy)

Kinbara (Erik x Kinana)

StingYu (Sting x Yukino)

But my OTP for the series is Gajevy (Gajeel x Levy, which is canon now! YAY! )

11. What is an unpopular opinion you have aka something that you do that is not normal to the FT fandom?

I’m a NaLu fan that does not hate Lisanna at all. I hate how so many Nalu fans hate her just because she “gets in the way of NaLu”.

That’s one thing that bothers me with any fandom. When people hate on a character just because they get in they way of their precious OTP.

I’ve said it before, but I think that is a stupid reason to hate a character. If the only reason you hate a character is because they ruin a ship for you, kindly go back into your small corner of the world, where you can bitch and complain all you want like the immature brat that you are.

The rest of us adults, are going to ship what we want, and respect each other’s choices, and not hate on character solely for that purpose.

Lisanna did nothing wrong, and all those fan fics that portray her as this bitchy chick who “steals” Natsu from Lucy and makes Lucy all depressed and shit makes me want to gouge my eyes out every time I read one.

I respect the fact that some people don’t ship NaLu, I respect the fact that I don’t ship NaLi.

NOW CAN WE PLEASE ALL JUST GET ALONG AND BE NAKAMA LIKE WE’RE SUPPOSED TO BE?!

12. Do you draw/write FT fan art or fan fiction?

Yes, check out my DA here http://purplekatz93.deviantart.com/gallery/42409453/Fairy-Tail

Maybe I’ll post stuff here soon, old and new.

13. What is one thing about FT that pisses you off?

So many unanswered questions, for example WHERE THE HELL IS LAXUS’S MOTHER AND GRANDMOTHER?! I KNOW HOW BABIES ARE MADE SO HOW THE HELL CAN IVAN AND LAXUS EXIST WITHOUT A MOTHER?!

At least we know about Makarov’s mom now.

And we do know more of the dragon slayers’ past, but I still have my headcanons about their biological parents, or at least Gajeel and Wendy’s. Like how Metalicana and Grandeeny found them. Let me know if you want to hear them. Bear in mind they are quite depressing.Don’t have any for Sting and Rouge. And as for Natsu, well I did have one, but that went out the window and I think you know why.

14. If you could put the FT cast into another show what would it be and why?

It’s a weird choice but I chose Scrubs. I could just see it. Natsu=JD (It be funny to see Natsu have all those crazy daydreams, wouldn’t it?) Lucy=Elliot (If Natsu and Lucy did live in another universe, I think they would be an on again off again couple until they were ready to be with each other.) Juvia=Carla (Putting Carla as Carla would be too obvious, and I know it doesn’t exactly match up, but I have this headcanon that Juvia can speak Spanish, because Juvia;s name is the Japanese spelling for the Spanish word rain or lluvia) Gray=Turk (I know it doesn’t really fit, but had to keep him and Juvia together.) Laxus= Dr,Cox (Can you just imagine how funny it be if Laxus did a Cox rant?) Cana=Jordan (I feel a relationship between Laxus and Cana would be like the one Jordan has with Dr.Cox) Gajeel=Janitor (One of the best characters in the show, and it be funny to see Gajeel prank Natsu) Levy=Lady (She’s the Janitor’s girlfriend and later wife in Season 8) Hades= Dr. Kelso (Hades is evil but a recent chapter in the Tartarus arc showed that he kind of still has a heart, so that’s why I picked him)

Freed=Ted (I just think it be funny)

Loke=The Todd (both are bit of playboys and be funny to see Loke question his sexuality) I do have others, but they’re only characters that appeared in one or two seasons so I’m not going to bother.

15. What are some musicals you put the FT cast in? (I only put this question in cause I’m a theatre geek)

Shrek the musical

Disney’s Beauty and the Beast

Hairspray

Barbie as the Princess and the Pauper

Barbie as the Island Princess

Barbie and the Diamond Castle

If you want I can tell you who I would have play each part. Some I’m still figuring out, so not all roles have been cast yet.

16. Do you cosplay or plan on cosplaying any of the characters?

I cosplay as Mira(no pictures available) and Levy which I do have pictures of on my DeviantART account. Let me know if you want to see it.

I’m gonna post it on here soon.

Now all I need is a Gajeel.

17. What are your favorite arcs?

Phantom Lord, Fighting Festival, Edolas, Tenrou Island, Key of the Starry Sky, Grand Magic Games, and Alvarez. What do they all have in common? There is focus on Gajeel in all of them. Some more than others.

18. If you could join any guild what would it be?

Fairy Tail, duh.

19. Have any FCs?

Yes, Valerie Saline who you can learn more about here http://purplekatz93.deviantart.com/art/Fairy-Tail-OC-Bio-361202036\

http://purplekatz93.deviantart.com/art/Valerie-FT-OC-1-353209499

I even made an Edo version of her

http://purplekatz93.deviantart.com/art/Edo-Valerie-FT-OC-1-353209586

Then my next gen kids

Mckenna and Iggy (NaLu kids)http://purplekatz93.deviantart.com/art/NaLu-Kids-360992943

http://purplekatz93.deviantart.com/art/Mckenna-Dragneel-Bio-362665020

http://purplekatz93.deviantart.com/art/Chibi-McKenna-and-Iggy-397665037

Nieve, Brendan, and Tally (Gruvia kids) http://purplekatz93.deviantart.com/art/Gruvia-Kids-360992503

http://purplekatz93.deviantart.com/art/Nieve-Fullbuster-Bio-362674059

http://purplekatz93.deviantart.com/art/Chibi-Nieve-Brendan-and-Tally-397665310

Conor and Olivia (Gajevy kids, they’re the older siblings of the canon Gajevy twins. Although they’re born years later when Conor and Olivia are much older. In my FT future they were a surprise aka they were not planned. BTW do they have names? I keep trying to look it up, but come up with nothing. The FT wiki literally has nothing about the light novel they debut in http://fairytail.wikia.com/wiki/Fairy_Tail_3:_Trouble_Twins

Actually they have barely anything about the light novels expect for like the first one.) http://purplekatz93.deviantart.com/art/GaLe-Kids-360992447

http://purplekatz93.deviantart.com/art/Conor-Redfox-Bio-362676935

http://purplekatz93.deviantart.com/art/Olivia-Redfox-Bio-362678246

http://purplekatz93.deviantart.com/art/Chibi-Conor-and-Olivia-397664556

Matthew and Sarah (Jerza kids) http://purplekatz93.deviantart.com/art/Jerza-Kids-361673144

http://purplekatz93.deviantart.com/art/Chibi-Jerza-Kids-397664727

If you’re wondering why they look nothing like Jellal and Erza, it’s because they’re adopted.

20. If you were a wizard what kind of magic would you use?

Singing magic, like a Siren. I would sing and hypnotize people and when there out of it, attack them.

21. What is a magic item you would like to have?

A light pen http://fairytail.wikia.com/wiki/Light_Pen It be fun to draw/write in thin air.

22. Did you enjoy this questionnaire?

I sure did, seeing how I created it.

Oh and let me take this opportunity to talk about something else FT related.

I have the Todd Haberkorn (the Eng VA of Natsu 3 times at different cons)

Here’s proof http://purplekatz93.deviantart.com/art/I-TOLD-YOU-SO-463572927

And here’s some autographs he gave me I don’t have a picture of the third one up yet

http://purplekatz93.deviantart.com/art/Todd-Haberkorn-Autograph-463573351

http://purplekatz93.deviantart.com/art/2nd-Todd-Haberkorn-autograph-555102329

Okay that’s all.

And please don’t mad at me for my answers.

#fairy tail #my thoughts #nalu #gruvia #jerza #gajevy #not gonna tag all the ships #that would take forever #Please be kind #respect my opinions #i'll respect yours

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vocalfriespod · 4 years

Text

Between Iraq and a Hard Place Transcript

Carrie Gillon: Hi and welcome to the Vocal Fries podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination.

Megan Figueroa: I’m Megan Figueroa.

Carrie Gillon: And I’m Carrie Gillon.

Megan Figueroa: [Squeals] Carrie!

Carrie Gillon: Yes, Megan?

Megan Figueroa: We have a fun, fun mug that I’m so proud of. It’s like, okay, I’m gonna launch it on Saturday. We’ll do the intro for the episode on Monday, and I get to talk about how proud I am of this darn mug. [Laughter]

Carrie Gillon: I’m proud that you chose the color options that I suggested.

Megan Figueroa: Yes! Well, I fought with photoshop for a while about it, but…

Carrie Gillon: Oh, yeah. I’m sure it was a nightmare.

Megan Figueroa: Yes.

Carrie Gillon: This is why I’m like “I hope you wanna do it because I can’t design worth shit.”

Megan Figueroa: In case someone out there did not see our Twitter yesterday on Saturday, we launched a mug. You just have to see it. I don’t wanna ruin it for you.

Carrie Gillon: Well, okay. How do they find it then?

Megan Figueroa: Um, oh, shit. I guess I don’t wanna force you to go to that one tweet. So, there will be a link to it in our Vocal Fries Twitter bio. It’s real cute, makes a great gift for yourself or loved ones or enemies. I dunno. [Laughter] Please buy it for your enemies.

Carrie Gillon: We now have some ads. So, if you are a patron, we’re gonna start putting up all our episodes on patreon.com. If you’re at the $3.00 or $5.00 level, then you get free access to this podcast going forward. So, if you want to have ad-free episodes – www.patreon.com/vocalfriespod. Someone did say something to the effect, “Oh, you guys should talk about the Fiona Hill situation.”

Megan Figueroa: Yes!

Carrie Gillon: And I thought, “We probably should do a real episode on it.” But we can at least talk a little bit about this because it just happened this week.

Megan Figueroa: Yes. Which also, speaking of a real episode on it, anyone who’s listening right now and is like “I know exactly who you should talk to” or whatever –

Carrie Gillon: Or you are the person to talk to.

Megan Figueroa: Or you are that person. Let us know. Because Carrie tries really hard to teach me about the limited information she has on British accents and classism and regionalism. But she can only do so much.

Carrie Gillon: Right. Yeah. Because it’s definitely not my lived experience.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah, so Fiona Hill was – what is her role?

Carrie Gillon: Yeah, okay. She was an intelligence analyst under Bush and Obama. Then, Trump appointed her as Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs on the National Security Council.

Megan Figueroa: Okay. Then, she resigned in July of this year.

Carrie Gillon: She resigned in July because obviously –

Megan Figueroa: The phone call. The impeachment hearings and why we’re having these impeachment hearings, right?

Carrie Gillon: Well, the phone call happened after that. But it’s all part of that stuff, right, because Trump was trying to pressure Ukraine to do what he wanted blah blah blah. A lot of stuff there that we are not really the experts on. Anyway, that’s what she was. Yeah, she just had a – there was a hearing with her and some other dude, who had some amazing expressions. However –

Megan Figueroa: The real star…

Carrie Gillon: The real star, or the thing that we’re most interested in, is that – so she has a British accent, an English accent, and in the US it’s interpreted as being kind of posh because any British accent sounds posh to most Americans. But within –

Megan Figueroa: Problematic, but yes.

Carrie Gillon: Well, yes. Of course, all of these judgements are problematic in any direction, right? Anyway, she commented on this like “Yeah, people think that I have this posh accent. But really in the UK, my accent is very working class and Northern.” Those two things, especially in the ’80s when she was growing up, were seen to be very bad, right? She definitely does not have a posh accent within the UK. Yeah, it’s just an interesting clash of cultures.

Megan Figueroa: Clash of cultures and how important context is. And this – I mean, I think I said it last year when we kinda talked to each other about what our favorite episodes were or what we learned that we really just did not know before – it’s me learning that in /nuwaɹlɪnz/ – [laughs] in New Orleans.

Carrie Gillon: In Louisiana.

Megan Figueroa: In Louisiana, that French is disparaged. I was just like “How is this possible?” Where I am in the Southwest, French is thought of as a quote-unquote “posh” – or, you know, you only learn it –

Carrie Gillon: A fancy language.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah, you only learn it if you just have all these mental resources freed up and you’re like “I might as well learn French,” right? It doesn’t seem as practical. Whereas, Spanish in the Southwest is like, unless you’re non-latinx then it’s – I’ve talked about it before – it’s just, depending on who’s speaking it, it’s seen as good or bad.

For me to learn that French was actually something that was disparaged in the United States just blew my mind so having that context was really helpful for me. Having the context with Fiona Hill, I always forget the north and south thing. Northern –

Carrie Gillon: Yeah. That’s really huge in the UK, within England itself, right? There’s also the Welsh and the Scottish in that one island and then, obviously, there’s Irish and blah blah blah. But within just the English part, within England, yeah, there’s this huge north/south divide which, yeah, London is the seat of power blah blah blah so…

Megan Figueroa: And London’s in the south, which you have to remind me. [Laughter]

Carrie Gillon: Oh, boy. You should visit London. We should go visit Issa.

Megan Figueroa: Yes, Issa Wurie. No, that would be great. But, yeah, it’s just an important reminder that classism, regionalism, all of these things are always at play. That’s why we have job security here. [Laughter]

Carrie Gillon: “Job.”

Megan Figueroa: Yeah, I know, I was like “Should I say the word ‘job’ just to” – That’s a fake. That’s not real. That’s why we have side project security.

Carrie Gillon: Yes, yeah. We could talk about these things forever – forever.

Megan Figueroa: There’s posh of the worlds we haven’t even got – “posh” of the world? There’re parts of the world we haven’t even got to.

Carrie Gillon: Most. Most of the world.

Megan Figueroa: Yes.

Carrie Gillon: I mean, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, London and, like –

Megan Figueroa: And Ghana.

Carrie Gillon: And Ghana. I think that’s pretty much it.

Megan Figueroa: And Spain.

Carrie Gillon: Oh, and Spain. A little bit of Spain. But we haven’t really even delved deep into Spain, right? There is stuff to talk about in Spain.

Megan Figueroa: Oh, my god. Layers. An onion! [Laughter]

Carrie Gillon: So, yeah, this episode we talk to Zach Jaggers about different ways of pronouncing words that are more like the language we borrowed it from or less like the language we borrowed it from. It’s interesting. I learned some things.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah. I mean, I always say that there’s a lot of characteristics that we have that are all bundled into certain beliefs. How we pronounce some words is kinda bundled into our belief about the world. Zach tells us about that.

Carrie Gillon: Very cool.

[Background music]

Carrie Gillon: Today, we have Dr Zachary Jaggers who is a postdoctoral scholar of linguistics at the University of Oregon. Welcome, Zach!

Zach Jaggers: Thanks! Thanks for having me.

Megan Figueroa: So happy to talk with you today.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah, me too! You approached us, and I’m so glad that you did, because this work is really important and really interesting.

Megan Figueroa: As cool as Carrie and I are, we don’t know all the amazing people that are out there and that exist, obviously.

Carrie Gillon: No, how could we?

Megan Figueroa: So, please approach us with the amazing stuff you’re doing because 1.) we get to talk to you and learn things ourselves, 2.) your work gets out there, and 3.) we get to have a new friend. Thank you, Zach.

Zach Jaggers: Yeah, I know. I appreciate it. I love that there’s more of this kind of stuff going on too because I think that’s exactly it – getting it out there for a broader audience and just having more of these discussions and like, yeah, just a more relaxed kind of setting.

Megan Figueroa: Absolutely. Just imagine we’re over a tea or a beer or something – that kinda thing.

Carrie Gillon: I’m literally drinking tea right now.

Megan Figueroa: See? Exactly.

Zach Jaggers: Well, I saw on your website how like, I think one of you does knitting and one of you does cross-stitching. And I was like “I do crochet! Let’s just have a needle-crafters party.”

Carrie Gillon: Yeah, exactly!

Megan Figueroa: Everyone can imagine us doing that right now as it’s cold outside.

Carrie Gillon: I do actually want to learn crochet because, I dunno, it’s a new skill and it’s related, so that’s next on my list.

Megan Figueroa: And one hook. One hook.

Zach Jaggers: One of these days. One of these days.

Carrie Gillon: And one hook, yeah.

Megan Figueroa: I mean, different sizes depending on – but yeah. Anyway.

Carrie Gillon: Okay. You have an article – a journalistic article – which is nice because not very many linguists do this – so, awesome – with PBS called, “Your political views can predict how you pronounce certain words.” Maybe just tell us why you started working on that area.

Zach Jaggers: Yeah. I look particularly at loan words, so words that come into a language from another language, and this was following up, actually, on work by Lauren Hall-Lew and colleagues where they were looking at the variation of /ɪɹɑk/ versus /ɑɪɹæk/ and how it was pronounced by politicians in the US House of Representatives. They had found that democratic politicians were more likely to say /ɪɹɑk/, which is more like how that sounds in Arabic, the source language of this word. Whereas, Republicans were more likely to say /ɪɹæk/ or /ɑɪɹæk/.

I was really interested in that and just wanting to follow up on that, and so I wanted to just kind of look into what is under the hood of that, in a sense. Like, okay, if we just imagined this patterns with political identity – I’m not gonna tell you which party says it this way – you could probably predict which party says it which way. So, I was wanting to get at why is this happening in this way. I followed up on that, looking at people’s globalist and nationalist ideologies, but also other ideologies like their language contact receptiveness – how they feel about multilingualism and language contact and, also, their specific attitudes about Arabs, Arab-Americans, Islam particularly.

But then also because of these broader factors, like language contact receptiveness or globalism/nationalism, I was also predicting that this was gonna happen with other loanwords of less political charge too, so words from other languages across the board like Spanish, or German, or French – just any loanwords at all. Then, I found that same pattern that, in general, people who identified as either republican or politically conservative – I didn’t quite treat this as much of a partisan thing but more just like a gradient political continuum, a more multifaceted thing – tended to use less “source-like pronunciations,” is the term that like to use, so just pronunciations that sounded less like how it’s pronounced in its original language or where it comes from – how people who identify with this more as the source say it.

Whereas, people who identified more as democratic or as liberal tended to use more source-like pronunciations. I also like to use “less or more source-like,” I think, because if you think about /ɪɹɑk/ versus /ɑɪɹæk/, even the /ɪɹɑk/ pronunciation isn’t exactly how it’s pronounced in the source language, right? It’s not like you’re doing the flipped R in the middle or getting really into the phonetics – like the uvular stop at the end, you know? It’s not exactly like how it’s pronounced. Both of these are entirely pronounceable even within the confines of the English sound system, but one of these still sounds closer to how it’s pronounced by speakers of that language who identify more with that word and how it’s pronounced. That’s what I mean when I say, “more or less source-like.”

Megan Figueroa: Well, I like that too because then you’re getting away from this language that’s more or less “correct,” right?

Carrie Gillon: Right. Yes.

Zach Jaggers: Yeah. A lot of the discussion around this pronunciation variable, too, tends to get used in that way where people are like “This is the correct way to say it.” I also really like to reframe that discussion as “Let’s move away from thinking of this as correct and let’s really reframe this as thinking about who identifies with this word.” Then, that helps us think about how are they impacted, possibly, by the way this word is pronounced, or how might they be impacted by the way this word is pronounced, and what can that reflect.

That’s where I think thinking about this ideology of globalism/nationalism and getting a little into what that was – this was also a multifaceted questionnaire/survey that I did. The three main aspects that it was getting at was – 1.) was just the general kind of nationalism, which is someone’s hubris or pride in their country. Then, another was just the general interest in people or cultures or places that they might consider foreign or different from their country. The other facet of that is what I think of as this prescribed homogeneity – the idea that it’s like “We should all be one.” But what that can sometimes end up meaning is, “We should all be similar to each other. We should all be alike.”

There’s degrees of that where you can see like “We should all have similar ideologies” or “We should all have similar thoughts.” But sometimes that can also extend into demographics. This was all along a scale of seeing how people identify – to different extremes or, like, in the middle of these things – but also along these different facets. This was a multifaceted thing that I was trying to get at in terms of this ideology.

I think seeing that people who identified as more globalist rather than – like, more globalist or less nationalist – were using these more accommodating pronunciations, these more source-like pronunciations. I think that seems to be reflecting this kind of trying to be accommodating to people who identify with the source of these words and with the pronunciations of them. That’s at least what it seems to be reflecting.

Megan Figueroa: Underlying that, to me – I mean, this is me editorializing it – but the word “respect” comes to mind. You’re trying to respect that culture, that person, whatever it might be. Was your questionnaire open-ended, or was it like a check box, or like a Likert scale, 1 to 5? How did you get at nationalist or not nationalist – these kind of things? Because I’m wondering about – all these words that are coming to mind.

Zach Jaggers: Yeah, this was a Likert scale. This was a series of Likert scales, so getting at those different facets and then multiple statements of, like, Likert scale agreement. One of them would be, in terms of the assimilation – so the prescribed homogeneity I talked about – would be like “I think that” – hi. [Laughter] I’m waving at a cat walking by, okay?

Carrie Gillon: Yeah, that was Mu.

Zach Jaggers: I want you to be behind me so I can pet you.

Carrie Gillon: She would love it. [Laughter]

Zach Jaggers: So, thinking about the prescribed homogeneity part, one of the statements was something along the lines of “I believe that immigrants to the country should be expected to adopt American cultural practices.” That would be this idea that’s like “Foreign people should assimilate to cultural practices. We should have these shared values or practices” You can see that kind of analogizing to words, right? It’s like “I feel like people who are foreign who come into the country should assimilate in their practices to a way that feels less foreign and fits in more.”

You can see that also applying to words, right? Like “I feel that words that enter the language should assimilate to a pronunciation that fits in more and feels less foreign.” But, yeah, I also did a follow up perception survey getting at people’s – this was another rating survey, but getting a little bit more at people’s ratings of how they think of people, like a speaker, when they use more source-like or less source-like pronunciations of loan words. Very similar percepts where I think of more source-like pronunciations as more globally oriented as this person being more likely multilingual.

Also, there was this, kind of what we were getting at, which is this conflict where it was more pleasant in one sense but also – more along a humble/pretentious scale – more pretentious. It’s this I think that they’re open-minded and accommodating, but I think that they’re also pretentious or trying to be above it all, in a sense. I think that is a conflict that comes into play with this which is, I think, this decision that people seem to wrestle with which is “I am accommodating but who am I accommodating to? Am I accommodating to the borrowing language and this force to assimilate?” or if someone is a speaker of the borrowing language “Am I accommodating to this surrounding force around me to assimilate these words to the borrowing language? Or am I accommodating more to the people who identify with these words?” That’s what this ideology and where you fall on it is being reflected in your pronunciations.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah, I’ve definitely felt that in myself that I wanna pronounce it as close as possible to the original, but it does have this feeling of “I sound pretentious now.” People talk about it on Twitter, too, “Oh, you’re pretentious if you pronounce it whatever way.” Even, like, the /ɸoɪjɛɪ/, /ɸoɪjɹ̩/ difference, I say /ɸoɪjɛɪ/. I’m Canadian, so we pronounce it closer to the French. But I feel more pretentious here saying it that way.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah, you should’ve heard my inner dialogue just calling you pretentious when you said that. [Laughter] I’ve never heard you say that word, so I didn’t know you said it that way. But this is getting really complicated because there is some power structures going on here where I’m like “Oh” – well, we have an episode on this. I’m just thinking about French globally and, like, it’s fine. Then, I think about how we’re in the American southwest – Carrie and I are – and I’m like “Well, Spanish is under attack because racists.”

Zach Jaggers: Yeah. I think those power dynamics are definitely a thing. I think there’s a lot of factors that go into influencing how loanwords get pronounced and how they get adapted into the borrowing language. I think there’s just the sound system in general, right? I was talking about – like with /ɪɹɑk/ versus /ɑɪɹæk/ – and just how the sound system has an overriding factor in general in a lot of cases where you’re probably not gonna do that flipped R. Or if you do, that’s really saying something about how accommodating you’re wanting to be to the source language and people who identify with it, which is a statement in and of itself.

Or something about, like, we’ve also seen effects of how bilingual the community is where these loanwords are being used. If there’s a higher degree of bilingualism in that community, then you would expect maybe even some transcending of the constraints of the borrowing language system where there might even be some phonetic level incorporation of sounds that wouldn’t necessarily be considered allowed in the borrowing language. I think these power dynamics and the prestige dynamics also come into play a lot, even with the borrowing of words themselves too.

When we think about borrowing of words, oftentimes we’ll think of it just as the borrowing of a cultural concept or a cultural transmission or a conceptual transmission, right? If we are borrowing something – if we think of words that English and German share where it’s like this is just shared inheritance not even a borrowing at all. We think of “hound” versus “Hund.” This is something that’s not a loanword, but this is something that they still share, right, where the sound and the meaning are shared, right? Whereas, they both are shared from Proto-Germanic. In German, it used to mean just general “dog.” And in German, it still does. Whereas, in English it then shifted to become “hound.” It also shifted in meaning to mean a narrower kind of dog.

We also see loanwords between German and English where there’s these cultural transmissions that after that split historically, long after German and English became distinct languages, there were these cultural transmissions, like “kindergarten,” “zeitgeist,” “schadenfreude” –“schadenfreude,” you know, enjoying someone else’s pain. This is the kind of word where people were like “You know, I can say that. I don’t need this word from another language to say it,” but it’s appreciating like “Oh, this other language has this succinct word that I can use to express this idea. I’m gonna use that.” We also see cases where there’s a loanword from another language used in a borrowing language where it’s not because there was some kind of, quote – hand quotes. Sorry, I gesture a lot. [Laughs]

Megan Figueroa: No, it’s okay.

Zach Jaggers: I’m sure this is such a challenge with podcasting. I use my hands a lot when I talk.

Carrie Gillon: So do I. It’s fine.

Megan Figueroa: We all do. Or lots of us do – yeah.

Zach Jaggers: Hopefully my gestures are audible. [Laughter] So, when we think about how there’s not necessarily – hand quotes – “gaps” that are because of – that that is why a loanword came into another language. If you think about cases – even “salsa” could be considered something where it’s like we could’ve used “tomato sauce” or “dip” or something like that where it’s like, you know, it doesn’t necessarily accurately capture it, but it could have been not borrowed in to represent that concept.

Or if we think of cases like – so this is getting back into the prestige factor, so the French/Spanish asymmetry. Hang in there with me. Thinking about cases like, if we think of “veal” versus “horse.” “Veal” was borrowed into English from French, so this was right around the Norman conquest time when French was in really intense contact with English but also with a lot of prestige. Whereas, right now, in the US context, there’s a lot of contact with Spanish but not with a lot of prestige, right? We see a lot of this contact with French where “veal” gets borrowed in.

We also see, like, “pork” – and these are already now the long-adapted versions of them – but “pork” is the French etymological origin word for “pig,” gets borrowed in. Those are the French words for those animals, but those ended up getting used to represent the cooked versions of them. We also see “cuisine,” which is the word for “kitchen” in French. That gets used to represent food. We see this asymmetry of the older Proto-Germanic origin, the English words, they’re representing the labor-side versus the fancier side, in a sense. “Kitchen” is where the labor of preparing the food happens. Then, the farm animals are the English side. Whereas, the French side is where the animals are cooked and you’re eating them, and the “cuisine,” that’s where the cooked food is coming out and you’re enjoying the cooked food.

It’s like that asymmetry of these words that you have the exact parallels of, that asymmetry ends up getting semantically reflected in which language’s version of those words you’re using in a sense. We also see that in the pronunciations too. A lot of times people will say, – but you have these really old words too where you don’t see these variables at all in pronunciation. Or cases like “veal,” people don’t even know that that’s a French loanword. But you see these reflections of these ideologies and of this prestige around French still being reflected in the way that we use it historically, right?

You also even see that in the pronunciations too. In Old English, Old English couldn’t allow for the sound V – like, the voiced /v/ – to appear at the beginning of a word. But when there was this huge influx of loanwords from French, you then had all of these words with the /v/ sound – the V sound – at the beginning of the word. But because people were using all of these French loanwords and because they were, in that case, not even just using more source-like pronunciations of them within the confines of the English sound system but they were actually breaking the rules of English and being like “I’m going to pronounce these so French-like. I’m going to break those rules and maintain this V sound at the beginning of the word,” that carried on where these words are still pronounced with the V sound. And that totally changed the sound system of English.

The English sound system can have V at the beginning of the word now because of all of these French loanwords and because people pronouncing them in more source-like ways because of the prestige that was associated with them. It’s like, not only can you just pronounce these words more source-like as a reflection of your attitudes about the source language and the people associated with them, but you can even in some cases break the rules of the borrowing language if you associate the source language with that much prestige.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah. It has survived so long, these sound changes to the English language.

Zach Jaggers: Where you don’t even know it.

Megan Figueroa: Wow! I had no idea. I mean, if I would’ve thought about it, I would’ve probably realized that Old English shouldn’t have a V sound at the beginning.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah. I didn’t know that. But I didn’t know that we borrowed sounds from French. I just didn’t know about French at the beginning.

Megan Figueroa: Wow. That’s really cool. It speaks to, I mean, it just shows that if you examine language a little bit deeper, you’re gonna see all of these things that reflect how we think about people.

Carrie Gillon: Absolutely.

Zach Jaggers: Yeah, how social dynamics just really come through and get reflected historically. They manifest in language and just thinking about how they propagate in language. I think, coming back to just thinking about with new loanwords too is just raising that question of do people want to use more source-like pronunciations and what do we want that to reflect. Do people want that to reflect a kind of accommodation or openness?

Because when we think of how even if people aren’t thinking of, “Oh, I’m using this initial V sound as a way to signal openness to French speakers” anymore, it still does kind of in a way. It leaves English and French sounding a little bit more similar to each other. You’ll think about these – I’m thinking about these YouTube videos where – have you seen where someone who speaks two really different languages but then they’re asked, “How do you say this word in your language and this word in your other language?” And then they’re like “Oh, we have these two words in common even though” –

Megan Figueroa: Oh, I have seen those. Yeah.

Zach Jaggers: But you just see this and, like, they’re probably loanwords, right? But they have the sense of like “Oh, we have this shared linguistic thing in common. Yay! This is a fun friendship,” or something like that. It’s just like, when you have this linguistic thing in common, you have this shared sense with each other. Even if you aren’t actively thinking about that, just thinking about how are your propagating that for future accommodation.

Megan Figueroa: I’m thinking specifically, when you said that, of Spanish and Arabic. I’ve seen video where someone’s like “Almohada – Hello.” What? What? You guys are – Arabic? Yeah, no, you’re right. It’s never like – I mean, of course they probably wouldn’t be trying to find the most terrible people in the world to record – to do this – but every time they’re just like – it’s like an opening. Their world has opened a little bit. That’s what it feels like when you’re watching this. Those are quite lovely. I do like those.

Carrie Gillon: Let’s go back to the /ɪɹɑk/, /ɑɪɹæk/ saying. Is it the case that if you pronounce it, let’s say /ɑɪɹæk/, that you’re for sure a republican or for sure a nationalist?

Zach Jaggers: No, no. I think a lot of times people will want to read this as a generalization. It’s hard. When I do public-facing work, it’s hard to make this connection with people but also be like “Hey, you saw how in my article I used relative adjectives,” you know, “likelier than,” right? So, yeah, no, definitely not.

What I found was these were definitely relative likelihoods where, in terms of across these loanwords across the board, people who identified as more politically conservative or republican were likelier to use less source – like republications – than people who identified as democrats or as politically liberal. Actually, for most words, there was still more of a default of the more-adapted, less source-like pronunciations. People would be usually – across the board, across people – would be likelier to say something like /ɪɹæk/ or /ɑɪɹæk/ than they would be to say /ɪɹɑk/.

But if they identified as politically liberal or as democrat, they would be likelier to say /ɪɹɑk/ than other people. There was still a slightly higher likelihood that they would use more source-like pronunciations. Then, when I looked at the other predictors, the stronger predictor – I won’t get into the weeds of statistical comparison and stuff – but the better predictor was actually the globalist/nationalist alignment. That actually seemed to explain a lot of the pattern with politics. It was a better predictor whether they aligned as more globalist or nationalist whether they would use a more or less source-like pronunciation, which I think also helps get at, a little bit, trying to remove politics from this in a sense or at least thinking about how, if this is a better predictor than political identity, then maybe both of these pronunciations and also these ideologies are not necessarily the same as political identity in and of themselves.

There’s at least some room for thinking about some nuance in there and thinking a little bit more about maybe these pronunciations are reflecting how people think about these pronunciation’s impacts on people who identify with the source, you know – that that’s reflecting these ideologies a little bit more. I mean, maybe that’s a little too far-reaching or getting at my wanting to try to get away from the politics but thinking about what this data is saying about some of the nuances in there.

Megan Figueroa: I came of age – are you a US citizen? Did you grow up here?

Zach Jaggers: Yeah.

Megan Figueroa: I came of age right when George W. Bush was president and 9/11 happened, so what I heard over and over again – I’m trying to remember. I think he said /ɑɪɹæk/, right?

Zach Jaggers: Mm-hmm. I have some recordings of /ɑɪɹæk/ and also some of /ɪɹæk/.

[Recording of George W. Bush] My fellow citizens, at this hour American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm [ɪɹæk], to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.

[End recording]

Megan Figueroa: Yeah, so I was – but yeah.

Zach Jaggers: By Bush.

Megan Figueroa: So, /ɑɪɹæk/, /ɑɪɹæk/ over and over again. That’s how I thought that was said because I was, like, 13, 14, until I realized – and I feel like the rhetoric from him around that was like “We need to beat them. They are evil. We are not evil,” which is a very nationalist thing. When I started to get more nuanced into my understanding of the world, I was like “Oh, here comes other people.” And then Barack Obama comes, and they say /ɪɹɑk/.

[Recording Barack Obama]

As a candidate for president, I pledge to bring the war in [ɪɹɑk] to a responsible end.

[End recording]

I’m like “I’m gonna start saying it like that.” I made a conscious decision because I was like “He’s talking about it a certain way, and I’m noticing he’s saying it in a different way. I’m gonna pronounce it like him.” Did you have any experience with that?

Zach Jaggers: Well, yeah. I think that’s a big thing too is just recognizing that the pronunciations that you’ve heard around you definitely matter, right? I think there should be a huge asterisk that as much as this seems to, at the aggregate level, be predicted by people’s ideologies, that that doesn’t necessarily mean that every single person’s pronunciation of every single word is this very conscious decision saying something about their ideologies and definitely not saying something about, like, they surely fall along the extreme on all these ideological or political dimensions. There should be that huge asterisk there. What people heard pronounced around them definitely matters.

I think thinking about that – that’s kind of the past, right, what things they have heard influence them. But there is also the thinking about what this means moving forward. I think those ideologies also seem to influence people there too. I think that that is part of that is deciding like, okay, maybe now I’ve heard a different pronunciation, or maybe now, if I have this different ideology, do I want to be more attentive to looking up pronunciations or how these words are pronounced in their source languages and try to evaluate, is the pronunciation I’m using now the degree of accommodating the source pronunciation that I would like to apply? Or is there a degree further of accommodating that source pronunciation that I would like to apply further? That is a reflection of your ideology.

I should just claim that I also did – so Lauren Hall-Lew and colleagues’ study – they were looking at politicians. Those politicians were from lots of different regions. They controlled – they didn’t control – but they were able to account a little bit for those politician’s regional identities and their regional accent varieties. They did not find that to have a significant effect. It did not necessarily seem like their political identities were – that the effect that they saw was totally just because of political identity correlating with regional accent variety.

I had to take a different approach. I totally controlled for regions. I just ran this all in one place. By still finding this effect even when I was doing the study in one place, that was what was suggesting to me like “Okay. This effect is still real and not all just because of people’s regional accent.” But, caveat, I wasn’t looking at the whole country. Part of that study was as looking – and thinking about the moving forward component – I also did a study looking at how people treated new words.

I exposed people to fake words that they never heard before. I framed those words to people as like “This is a foreign word from a foreign language,” and they were just fake words. So, “sheenya” versus “sheeniya,” or “sloxy.” I exposed them to those words in a short story that they heard. Afterwards, then I had them read a sequel that then got them to say those words out loud again. Then, I could see, like, how well did you imitate the word that you heard? Then, I found the same effect where people who were more nationalist aligning than globalist aligning were more likely to stray from the pronunciation that they had heard. If they had heard, “sheeniya,” they were more likely to say, “sheenya” or vice versa. Also, if they had heard “sloxy,” they were more likely to say, “slosky.” Whereas, if they had been more globalist aligning, they tended to be more faithful to the pronunciation that they had heard before. At least in terms of, like, new words, there also seems to be that same effect.

When you’re stripping the effect of the pronunciations that they had heard before, that effect seems to hold. But we should still remember that the pronunciations that people have heard before do matter. We should still be careful about – just because you’re using this pronunciation, that definitely means all of these things about you.

Megan Figueroa: I say as a scientist, that’s a really fucking clever experiment. That was really good. Very cool.

Carrie Gillon: With Iraq, I feel like my pronunciation varies quite a bit from sentence to sentence. I even studied Arabic for two years, pre 9/11, so I knew how “Iraq” should be pronounced. But, yeah, even with all that background, I still sometimes say /ɪɹæk/. So, yes, obviously one pronunciation tells you nothing.

Zach Jaggers: Right. And audience is totally a thing too. I think also thinking about how these pronunciations are clearly charged given the whole pretentious judgement thing too, thinking about how who you’re speaking to matters, and especially thinking about – given all of the political charge just around everything lately, but also around this topic, around this speech feature – thinking about if you’re talking to different groups and not wanting to add a political charge element, is there a degree of accommodating that you wanna do there? Again, then also weighing that with how much are you accommodating people who might not be in the room, you know, that kind of – yeah.

Carrie Gillon: Right. I thought it was really interesting that you brought up Obama and /pɑkəstɑn/ as opposed to /pækɪstæn/.

[Recording of Barack Obama]

I am gravely concerned about the situation in [pɑkəstɑn].

[End recording]

I don’t hear that very often in the United States, that pronunciation. It’s very rare. It’s not that common in Canada either, but I think it’s a little bit more common to hear it, the /pɑkəstɑn/. He was even thanked for it, which I thought was very interesting. Should we maybe be trying to do this more often if it makes people feel better about their language or their country or whatever?

Zach Jaggers: Yeah, it’s a really complicated – I think definitely, like I said before, in terms of just how the pronunciations you’ve heard around you and how that plays a really big role and just how your sound system plays a really big role in the pronunciations you use, one element is just, like, to what degree are you considering a pronunciation more or less source-like. I think we should just be really careful in judging people’s pronunciations right off the bat, especially if we’re thinking about the intent there.

I think that’s one case where I think avoiding judging certain pronunciations as, like, would-be – just, in general, we should avoid judging certain pronunciations, especially given that we see that there are a lot of factors at play. I think that would be really crucial. But I think that this does balance a certain line, right, of also thinking about how pronunciations can reflect certain biases and also manifest and propagate those – thinking about that too. A lot of times, this tends to be on the perception-end that we want to try to encourage people to be more accommodating – accommodate being accepting of different people’s language varieties because they identify with those language varieties, right? We want to give them that space.

I think what this variable raises – what this linguistic variable, this phenomenon raises – is the question of “Does pronunciation come into play there a little bit?” There are other realms where thinking about language production also comes into play. When we think about ways that the language people uses seems to be a way of manifesting and propagating certain biases, right? That does tend to be the times when people, like, identify directly with a certain form of language and the usage of it.

I think even just, like, growing up as gay and hearing, “That’s so gay,” used as a pejorative, where I’m like “That’s something that I identify with,” right? Obviously, this analogy’s somewhat different. There’s those flags to raise. But this is a linguistic form that I identify with but it’s being used in a very different way than I would like to hear it used, frankly. Trying to advocate for, like, “Hey, it’d be nice if people didn’t use it that way,” is a hard thing to do.

But, also, I remember seeing articles – even articles citing linguists and quoting linguists – where linguists are like “You know, language changes. This meaning is changing. Some people are just using this in a way that means something different. So, we should just be careful in the way that we think about that and judge people about it.” And I get that, in some ways too, right? Or it’s like – because people are using this in ways that they don’t know, right? They don’t know the biases that this is getting at and they maybe do think of this in a different way.

I think this is – getting back to the pronunciation – a similar, at least analogous, in some ways where it’s like “What biases is this reflecting and propagating?” but still is there a way that we can kind of call out that and try to propagate some kind of accommodating space, some kind of space for – I think the way to reframe that discussion is thinking about how do people identify with this form of language and how might they be impacted by that.

I think, in terms of thinking about the use of something that someone really directly identifies with, like the use of “That’s so gay” in that way, is a very clear case of this is something that people are using that is discriminatory. There are ways that we can try to make people aware of that discriminatory nature of it, even then, without necessarily being judgmental of them because we recognize that they have been indoctrinated into this usage and because this is a reflection of the broader society that they have been around.

I think the pronunciations, too, especially pronunciations like someone’s name that someone really directly identifies with, right? We see this with names a lot of times too where people’s names, especially people from ethnic and linguistic minority backgrounds with names that get mispronounced a lot, where they personally identify with that, it would – Mary Bucholtz has a really good paper on this talking about how we can be attentive to students’ names and thinking about how to make sure that we try to pronounce them in the way that they want them to be pronounced. I think that that is a really crucial thing to be attentive to because they identify with those names and the pronunciation of them. Hearing them pronounced in a different way does feel marginalizing.

We can then move forward in thinking about does this apply to loanwords too – maybe to a lesser degree, maybe not – but also maybe mitigated by other factors like the sound system or factors like how long this loanword has been established in the borrowing language, so factors like that, but still asking ourselves, “Is there a degree to which we can accommodate a more source-like pronunciation of this word that gives space for people who identify with the source pronunciation of this word that feels less like this enforced assimilation?” It is a complicated variable where there is a lot of elements to think about, like how directly do people identify with the source pronunciation and what mitigating factors there are and how can we keep this from feeling super prescriptive and judgmental while still thinking about the biases that might be reflected and propagated in the use of less source-like pronunciations. But I think really framing this as thinking about the people who identify with the source is a good steppingstone.

Carrie Gillon: Well, to go to names, I do feel like proper names and place names, they’re closer than, say, /ɸoɪjɛɪ/. It feels less important to pronounce /ɸoɪjɛɪ/ the closer-to-French way. Although, again with names, it depends on what sounds are in that name how likely it is an English speaker’s gonna be able to pronounce it correctly. It’s tough. You should try. You should still try.

Megan Figueroa: Oh, yeah. Then there’s the whole – I’ve said this before on the show because my last name gives me problems with people who are like – so, maybe they’re overcorrecting. And I mean that – from the bottom of my heart I appreciate it. But I’ll say, “Yeah, my name is Megan Figueroa,” and they’re like “No, but how do you really say your last name?” And I was like “Oh, no, no, no.” That’s how I really say it sometimes. And it’s okay.

What you just said before, Zach, was beautiful and nuanced and I love it. I have so many thoughts, so many beautiful thoughts. But I’m thinking, yes, listen to the person. That might be the one thing to take away because, yes, language changes. We should not use that as an out because once we know that that language change is coming from a discriminatory place, we have the responsibility to take proper action and be like “Okay, oops. I’m sorry. I’m gonna do better next time.”

Zach Jaggers: Yeah. If it’s your own name, just like how, you know, there’ll be people who prefer to use different versions of their name, especially – so there’ll be lots of people who have Chinese names but who prefer to identify with Anglo names in the US because they don’t want to use Chinese names. But then, there’ll be people who are like “No, but really, I want to use your Chinese name,” and they’re like “Mmm, no. No, I would like you to use this name.” Listen to them.

I think there is space where this does come back around to loanwords too, but where it is also complicated because we do see there is discourse where we can see people who are latinx and who are like “Mmm, maybe don’t go so far in pronouncing your Spanish words with totally Spanish phonetics when you’re speaking English.” Especially if you’re white, you know.

Megan Figueroa: Well, yeah. Sometimes, that feels like mock Spanish, right?

Zach Jaggers: Yeah, exactly. So, broaching that territory, being attune to that or just trying to be attuned to that. There was also, when my article came out, someone on Twitter linked my article to another thing that had happened where the prime minister of Australia, he was at this Diwali, Deepawali, celebration event, and he was talking about celebrating diversity, and he was using the melting pot analogy, which is nuancedly complicated, but his melting pot that he used was an Indian dish. He pronounced it /gəˈɹam məsɑlə/. But people in the audience – so this is a totally South Asian Australian audience – and someone in the audience was like /ˈgɑɹəm məsɑlə/. They tried to prod him like “Mmm, could you change your pronunciation because that’s not how we say it?”

So, there is some degree to which even non-proper words are still something that people identify with and would like there to be some accommodation of those pronunciations too. But I think, yeah, thinking about the people who identify with them and what they want is something to be attuned to and to keep trying to be attuned to and the nuances thereof as well.

Carrie Gillon: I think in this case it’s because it’s a culturally significant thing. Whereas, /ɸoɪjɛɪ/ is not. I don’t think the French would care at all. [Laughs] Maybe I’m wrong. Please tell me if I’m wrong.

Megan Figueroa: Some of us don’t have foyers. I don’t have a foyer. Excuse me. [Laughter]

Carrie Gillon: Okay. This has been a really, really great conversation. Maybe, as the last question, how can we go about not being assholes about all of this?

Zach Jaggers: I think really this has all kind of just summed up is, like, not judging people, thinking about how there’s lots of factors that go into their pronunciations, but still at the same time thinking about how people might identify with the source, or as the source, especially with names, and thinking about how using more or less source-like pronunciations might be a manifestation of certain biases or attitudes about them, and how there’s still room to move forward, and thinking about the degree to which people want to accommodate to those people with their pronunciations.

Carrie Gillon: I was thinking, too, sometimes speaking up and saying, “Oh, it’s actually pronounced this way,” is really hard. Just a little effort on your part, after someone did something really hard. Even I actually did eventually correct one of my professors because he would always say /kæʀi/ because it’s spelled with an A, and in the UK, you make a distinction between /ɛ/ and /æ/. But I can’t do that before R. It has to be /kɛʀi/. I don’t have /kæʀi/. So, I finally corrected him. And, you know, I’ve got a bunch of privilege, [laughs] and it was still hard for me. So, yeah, if someone tells you, yes, definitely listen to them. He never fixed it. [Laughs] It’s all right. It doesn’t matter.

Megan Figueroa: Well, that was a sad ending to that story. [Laughter]

Carrie Gillon: My grandmother also pronounced it that way because she had a more British – even though she was born in Canada – she had a more British accent, slightly, because her dad was English. Yeah, it’s fine.

Megan Figueroa: You know who you are.

Carrie Gillon: For me, it’s not the end of the world. But, yeah, no. Okay. Well, thanks again so much for coming on the show, Zach. This was great!

Zach Jaggers: Yeah, thanks for having me. It was great hearing your thoughts too.

Carrie Gillon: It was awesome.

Megan Figueroa: Ya’ll don’t be assholes.

Carrie Gillon: Don’t be assholes. [Laughter]

[Background music]

Carrie Gillon: The Vocal Fries podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillon, for Halftone Audio, theme music by Nick Granum. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @vocalfriespod. You can email us as [email protected] and our website is vocalfriespod.com.

#transcript #linguistic discrimination #Iraq #Pakistan #Obama #Bush #foyer #pronunciation #borrowings #place names #proper names #names

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