How could I not post Hsi-Yao Su’s “Global Swearword, local ideologies: The Re-semiotization and indexical field of Fuck in Taiwan” (Language & Communication, July 2026; open access)?
Abstract
This study examines how the English swearword fuck is taken up in Taiwan—a context where English functions as a foreign language—by analyzing metapragmatic commentaries on a controversial moment in which a prominent actress uttered fuck during her acceptance speech at a major awards ceremony. While swearing in official settings, especially by a woman, is conventionally viewed as inappropriate, public reactions to this incident were mixed, with a majority supportive. Drawing on Christie’s (2013) discursive-pragmatic approach to swearing and on the linguistic-anthropological and sociolinguistic notions of indexical order (Silverstein, 2003), indexical field (Eckert, 2008), and language ideological assemblage (Kroskrity, 2010), the analysis identifies multiple, and at times conflicting, indexical associations in the metapragmatic discourse: fuck as inappropriate/vulgar, genuine/authentic, cosmopolitan/sophisticated, performative/professional, gendered, and class-oriented. These associations function as micro-instantiations of broader ideological regimes of moral order, gender propriety, cosmopolitanism, and affective performance. By linking micro-level evaluations to a heterogeneous yet traceable ideological assemblage, the study shows the analytic value of a language ideological perspective for socio-pragmatics research and demonstrates how global linguistic hierarchies are re-semiotized through local moral and affective dynamics.
The “controversial moment” is utterly charming:
When Ying-Hsuan Hsieh, an acclaimed actress in Taiwan, received the [Golden Bell] Best Actress award, she began her acceptance speech in Mandarin Chinese, Taiwan’s national language, as expected. However, because she had been nominated for two roles, she mistakenly thanked the wrong production team. Realizing her error mid-speech, she exclaimed “fuck” in English before restarting her acknowledgements in Mandarin. The incident was uncensored in the live broadcast, and Hsieh later apologized on Facebook to “all the parents” for not being a good role model. Public responses to the incident were mixed but largely supportive, which is particularly intriguing given that both swearing in public (especially in a high-profile event) and by a woman are stereotypically considered inappropriate in Taiwan and cross-culturally.
I’m delighted by the largely supportive response, and this is the kind of scholarship I can get behind unreservedly.
Aside: does Taiwan still use Giles-Wade? As in the author’s surname, Hsi, and the actress’s name, spelled here “Ying-Hsuan Hsieh”. WP spells it with a mixture of GW and pinyin, “Hsieh Ying-xuan”.
Aside: does Taiwan still use Giles-Wade?
It uses a wild mix which I also find utterly charming. No mandated transliteration there!
The respectable UK equivalent would have been “oh, bugger!”
I blame creeping Americanisation.
But in France “Ah, putain!” seems to be holding the fort in spite of the strong ongoing Americanisation
I presume a Russian would say “Ох, блядь!”
A Russian can say fuck as well, if they are a sufficiently cosmopolitanized Russian.
True.
Vis-à-vis this research, how would Russians react to a young actress, generally seen as ‘classy’, using either “fuck” or “ох, блядь” in similar circumstances?
In many cases, I imagine, with boisterous misogynistic humor, but I don’t know in what proportion or how much sympathy there would be.
Separately, I wonder what Ms. Hsieh would have said had she cursed in her native tongue instead of English?
That is discussed in the paper.
So it is:
(Wiktionary.)
Hey: Map of Chinese dialectal equivalents for 肏 (“to fuck; to have sex with”).
Merde has the advantage that it lets you express yourself in real time while you’re turning your fury up to 11: Eh, mère DEUX !!
Locus classicus. Fully integrated into the syntax.
It uses a wild mix which I also find utterly charming. No mandated transliteration there!
Indeed. As you walk along long-standing suburban streets, you can find a wild variety of transliterations of the street name and/or suburb it passes through. Feng Jia Night market on Fengjia Road just outside Feng Chia University, Taichung. (See the photo of the entrance sign — and if you don’t like that spelling … well, there are other signs.)
Since we’re in Taiwan: Jensen Huang suggests to child in Taipei to learn Taiwanese — click the ‘encouraged’ link to hear the codeswitching Taiwanese/Mandarin/English.
If you don’t mind a wild tangent keep reading. O/W skip this post.
“Fuck me to tearrrrs!”
It wasn’t the words, but the soprano tone that grabbed attention. And that because the emitter was built like a linebacker. Vicente (very Greek name) was my Wharton Graduate MBA roommate in the late 1970s. He and his family had left Fidel et alia around 1960 and settled near Disneyland.
He was a college buddy of my first wife and introduced us.
I have never heard that expression from another person. Is it SoCal? Cuban import?
“Fuck me to tearrrrs!”
Sounds quite romantic, really. Emotionally overwhelmed by the act of coition. Precious moments …
[Assuming “tear” as in /ti:ɹ/. /tɛ:ɹ/ would be less romantic. But de gustibus … Still, speaking as a medical professional, I would deprecate this.]
Pleasantries aside, what is the history of self-cursing to express astonishment, as in “I’ll be damned”, “Fuck me [± adverbial flourishes]”, “Shiver me timbers”, etc.? Is it a uniquely English phenomenon?
I have heard Rhinelanders exclaiming Ja leck mich doch de Fööt to express astonishment, where the feet stand in as an euphemism for the backside as body part to be licked.
German swearing is traditionally excrement-based, not sex-based. Fick mich used for swearing exists, but that seems to be English language influence, and I’m not sure whether it’s ever used to express astonishment.
Definitely. It didn’t exist more than 50 years ago. Just like Wichser (with various alternate spellings) as an insult, a calque of English wanker made popular outside of Britain by John Lydon.
“Utterly charming”??? YMMV.
You can view Hsieh Ying-hsuan’s acceptance speech, and the audience reaction, here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsRptBSBnpg&t=171s
“Utterly charming”??? YMMV.
Are you responding to the swearing or the varied transliterations?
@hat, kb
The “utterly charming” was in hat’s original post. I took hat’s reaction to be very strongly related to the context. There is a very poised and elegantly dressed young woman, who realises she has done something foolish and gives voice to her irritation and regret by using an inappropriate word. I might also find this endearing, but I suspect kb finds it annoying.
It was also in my comment about Taiwan’s variety of transliterations. Neither reaction should come as even a tiny surprise to anyone who has followed the blog for any length of time, which is why I was taken aback by the “???”; my love of both cursing and variety is well documented.
I think this is also connected with the fact that “fuck” as a loan seems consistently to be regarded as less offensive than in the source language: part of the cultural context gets lost in the transition.
This happens within English, too: “shag” is not a word that a Brit would use in front of his mother, for example, despite Mike Myers.
It didn’t exist more than 50 years ago.
47 years ago Frank Zappa was singing fick mich, du miserabler Hurensohn.
That was of course meant literally in the context of the song, and probably had almost no wider impact on German culture, but it did give a small group of American teenagers a new swear word to use.
The Taiwan Mandarin equivalent is more likely to be cao4 肏 rather than gan4, because gan4 has many homophones while cao4 has none: the meaning of cao4 is unmistakable.
@DE: This happens within English, too: “shag” is not a word that a Brit would use in front of his mother, for example, despite Mike Myers
Likewise some Americans use “arse” as a milder form of “ass”.
Der Wixxer (2002)
If I may antedate Vanya’s example … the German (fake-German?) lyrics he quotes are coming on 47 years old in terms of the late 1979 release of the studio version of the number, but an earlier version was in the Mothers’ live repertoire by ’71, so Zappa was recycling himself as was not uncommon. Who served as the original consultant/informant for the German lyrics is not known to me but perhaps there’s an anecdote somewhere out there on the internet. (Charming anecdote from similar situation not involving vulgarity: when the decision was made on the spur of the moment in the studio to add Spanish lyrics to the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” the band was devoid of Hispanophones and the tape operator Eddie Garcia was too well assimilated into Americanness to be directly helpful – so Garcia called his Ecuadorian-immigrant mother and she did the translation for them over the phone. It’s supposedly idiomatic if you’re Ecuadorian but maybe not if you aren’t.)
That’s a great story!
The Taiwan Mandarin equivalent is more likely to be cao4 肏 rather than gan4, because gan4 has many homophones while cao4 has none: the meaning of cao4 is unmistakable.
The question is not which has fewer homophones but which is more likely to have been said in such a situation on the spur of the moment, and I’ll take the article’s word for it that it’s「幹」.
People don’t normally think about homophones when they’re cursing.
German once was full of dass mich der Teufel hole (or dass mich der und jener).
Replaced by things like “I think I’m losing my mind”.
Victor Mair believed it was a bowdlerization.
What’s the difference between a bowdlerization and a milder form?
Teufel hole (with an English pronunciation of the second word) sounds like a porn term.
German once was full of dass mich der Teufel hole (or dass mich der und jener).
What do you mean by that parenthetical phrase ? I’ve never heard someone say merely “dass mich der und jener“. It’s not a complete sentence, and even so I can’t imagine what it could mean (as an elliptical form of something). And “dass mich der und jener hole” makes absolutely no sense. Except possibly in the strong gravitational field surrounding Linz that bends West German locutions out of shape.
Maybe = dass mich wer auch immer (referring to zig words and expressions for the evil one)?
Well, Joe Strummer was at least hispanophile (having had a Spanish girlfriend, Paloma Romero aka Palmolive) and had already sung in Spanish on Spanish Bombs. According to Joe Ely, Strummer asked him to help with translating the lyrics “into the weirdest Spanish ever”; Ely’s words indicate that the Spanish was meant to be funny.
Speaking of weird Spanish here’s Rosalía
CUUUUuuuuuute.
#
Se creen especial como un año en Miami que nieva
Como una autopista sin flecha’
Como una utopía sin brecha’
Yo quiero ver la mariposa’ suelta’ (one, one)
Keep it cute, manito, keep it cute
Que aquí el mejor artista es Dios
#
Nacida y criada en las afueras de Barcelona, natch.
Ok, kinda “novelty music” but whatcha got against novelty ?
Re Zappa: That example doesn’t tell us much whether fick mich as swearing was idiomatic in German back then – it could also be the result of someone asking a German (or someone who claimed to be a fluent speaker) what the German translation of “fuck me” is without clarifying the context.
Y: Pleasantries aside, what is the history of self-cursing to express astonishment, as in “I’ll be damned”, “Fuck me [± adverbial flourishes]”, “Shiver me timbers”, etc.? Is it a uniquely English phenomenon?
I’ve thought it to be elliptic for “counterfactual curses” used to convey conviction or (real or facetious) astonishment. “Shoot me if this isn’t a scam!” “Fuck me if this isn’t the opportunity of your life!”
It’s not just an English thing. Norw. Faen ta meg om jeg gir opp! “The devil take me if I give up!” Faen hakke meg for en kamp! “The devil mince me, what a game!”
Or less dramatically, Solan Gundersen’s famous expression of astonishment in the 1975 film Flåklypa Grand Prix, Dra meg (nå) baklengs inn i fuglekassa! “Pull me (now) backwards into the birdhouse”
I’ve thought it to be elliptic for “counterfactual curses” used to convey conviction or (real or facetious) astonishment.
That doesn’t work for the most common use case of “Fuck me,” which is when one does something appallingly stupid or self-defeating. It more or less equates to “I can’t believe I just did that,” and has nothing to do with counterfactual curses.
“Fuck me if that wasn’t stupid!”? But I’ll bow to the native cursers!
I can see how some of these expressions started out as counterfactual curses, became abbreviated and lost their original context, and then inspired any number of later self-curses.
I see FML = “fuck my life” a lot. I just checked in Google, whose “AI summary” confirmed that usage. But the first sentence offered commiseration:
#
Es tut mir leid zu hören, dass du dich gerade so fühlst. “FML” ist der geläufige Internet-Slang für “Fuck My Life” (im Deutschen oft als “Scheißleben!” übersetzt).
#
Just covering all the bases, I guess. I find that rather annoying and distracting. Generative AI gets its boxers bunched when ambiguity crops up.
That example doesn’t tell us much whether fick mich as swearing was idiomatic in German back then
No, it doesn’t. It isn’t actually used as swearing in that example, it’s simply a coarse imperative, which certainly existed in colloquial German even prior to WWI (see Josefine Mutzenbacher)
This may be only true synchronically (or even only in my own head) but I would group “Fuck me” with other (not only imperative) exclamatory phrases expressing a state of paralysed perplexity, e.g.,
Blimey!
Blow me down/He could have knocked me down with a feather!
These are distinguished from but possibly related to the truth-telling oaths calling on God to do all kinds of terrible things to the prevaricator.
Has https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fuck_me_gently_with_a_chainsaw been calqued into any other languages yet?
You can also express surprise by omitting the curse and keeping the counterfactual statement. Skulle du sett … om det ikke er’n Rudolf Blodstrupmoen, du. “Now, look at that … if it’s not Rudolf Blodstrupmoen.*
* Example from memory after Flåklypa Grand Prix.
Me neither, but I’ve read it, which is why I used the past tense.
(There’s a subjunctive in it, for the abovementioned fuck’s sake. Nobody has talked like that in a long time.)
Yes, because if you speak of the devil, he comes and probably gets you!
Also making damn sure it isn’t encouraging suicide again.
From what I hear living in Taiwan, gan4 幹 is much, much, much more frequent than cao4 肏, which I very rarely hear. Taiwanese love punning with homophones but don’t seem to give a fuck about it when they’re cursing (as hat noted above for people in general). Context, also, is usually very clear in cursing, so homophones are not really a problem.
Tentatively, then, through a chain of euphemisms and disphemisms: “I’ll be damned” > “I’ll be dipped” > “I’ll be dipped in (dog) shit” > “I’ll be dipped in asphalt”, and separately “I’ll be damned” > “I’ll be”. Then “Damn me” > “Fuck me (to tears / with a rusty spoon / gently with a chainsaw / etc.)”, and separately “Damn me” > “Blame me” > “Blimey”.
Arguably “Blimey” < “Gorblimey / Cor Blimey” < “God blind me”, and not as stated.
Add to the genre “Dog my cats” and “I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.”
I suspect the genre inspired the complex of “Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit”, “Well, cut off my legs and call me shorty”, “Well, paint me yellow and call me a cab” and a myriad others, discussed here, for example.
[dis- s/b dys-, above.]
I know nothing about Mandarin or Taiwanese; I was simply implying that I don’t find anything ‘charming’ about a young woman blurting out an obscenity in a formal speech.
That was already addressed in the paper cited:
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Public responses to the incident were mixed but largely supportive, which is particularly intriguing given that both swearing in public (especially in a high-profile event) and by a woman are stereotypically considered inappropriate in Taiwan and cross-culturally.
#
You may choose between charming and inappropriate.
Quoth google: ‘No results found for “charmed by inappropriateness”.’ Which must just mean I didn’t articulate the right phrasing, since the concept is certainly floating around Out There. There must be stock scenes in 18th-century novels of aging men being charmed by inappropriately-behaving young ladies.
But of course they wouldn’t have talked about “inappropriateness” back then; you’ll have to find the right search terms.
My daughter, though not herself much given to effing and blinding (at least not in front of her Aged Father), would, I am perfectly certain, staunchly defend the right of her coevals of a similar sex to be inappropriately charming if they wish.
Another one of those German subjunctive ones I only know from reading: Da brat’ mir einer einen Storch “someone roast me a stork”.
20 years ago I went to Uppsala as external examiner of a PhD thesis. I was surprised and amused that its preface included the word coño, as an interjection, not as part of a sentence. The candidate was Cuban, and it may not have occurred to him that an anglophone examiner from France would know the word. It is, of course, much less offensive in Spanish than its equivalent in English, but even so it’s not a word one would expect to see in formal writing. It’s disappearing from everyday use in Chile, but in my wife’s parents’ generation it was not offensive at all, being just the ordinary slang term for a Spanish person that someone might use in front of their mother (on the grounds that Chilean people thought that men from Spain were unable to utter a complete sentence that didn’t include the word coño). I think in other Spanish-speaking countries it has been regarded as only very mildly offensive.
The corresponding French word con has lost almost all of its literal meaning, and mostly just means silly, to the extent that it has a feminine form and a young woman who realizes she had said something silly may say “Hein que je suis conne” without embarrassment. The only place I’ve seen it used literally was the book La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M.
I don’t think I realized that the French noun was masculine (thus giving rise to the need for a feminine equivalent), but I guess the Latin etymon is 2d declension masc. although the politer Latinate modern word (that still literally means “sheath” in Latin) is 1st decl. fem.
The “politer Latinate modern word” is also, amazingly, masculine in French, though it was, of course, feminine in Latin and still is in Spanish. A better illustration of the absurdity of grammatical gender could hardly be found.
Well, it would only be absurd if grammatical gender coincided with natural gender at all times. But if it did that, it wouldn’t be grammatical gender at all.
Verge is, of course, feminine …
Kusaal pɛn “vagina” is the ordinary word for it, and is not taboo, but it looks like that it started out as a euphemism even so, judging by e.g. Mooré pèndé “lower abdomen”, Moba pānǹ “thigh (of a human being.)”
In True Story Swear to God — an autobiographical comic by Tom Beland from the early 2000s — Beland’s Puerto Rican girlfriend blurts out a coño, and then is very embarrassed to admit she said it.
I don’t see why it would be impossible to have a language where grammatical gender coincided with what DE calls “natural gender” at all times while also assigning grammatical genders to referents that lack a natural one, this I guess assuming no “neuter” gender that is thought “natural” for inanimate objects. It might be difficult in practice without a standard loophole/workaround for the common situation where a given referent is in principle highly likely either to be male or female but the speaker doesn’t know which.
simply because 1) all sense that -a is feminine is lost and 2) the merger of the neuter into the masculine has made the masculine the default. The same two factors give you le tibia as the anatomical term for the shinbone.
I wonder why we see (we do) penis and vagina not as tools (of any gender) but rather as something that has “natural gender” (like a man or woman).
just gonna say it again: “grammatical gender” is nonsense. it wouldn’t still be in use as a term if european and u.s. linguists could bring themselves to use the accurate term (“noun class”), which they don’t because it’s associated with languages spoken by black people.
also: nothing has “a natural gender”. gender is a social phenomenon and socially constructed category – which is to say, a human-created thing that only exists in societally/culturally specific forms that vary hugely across time and space. “sex” is what gender gets called when (pseudo*)biology is being invoked to justify a given society’s gender system.
.
* as anne fausto-sterling and many others have explained for decades, a biological “sex” binary does not exist in humans on any level from chromosomes on up (much less for other species). it’s very thoroughly settled science – like on the level of plate tectonics or DNA encoding proteins.
But to be fair, the binary (along with absurd associated ideas of innate superiority/inferiority) is so deeply embedded in us it will take a long time for the facts to sink in and be assimilated.
As I’ve said before, (grammatical) “gender” is actually well established as a (distinctly counterintuitive) technical term in “Niger-Congo” grammatical studies, and is not at all the same thing as “noun class.”
“Noun-class pairing” would be better if one was starting from scratch, but it’s too late now. At least no Bantuist is under any illusions that what they call “gender” has anything whatever to do with sex …
I wonder why we see (we do) penis and vagina not as tools (of any gender) but rather as something that has “natural gender” (like a man or woman)
Moot in Oti-Volta, which doesn’t grammaticalise sex at all; however, I feel impelled to point out that neither Kusaal yu’or “penis” nor pɛn “vagina” belong to the noun-class-pair/gender associated with “tools.” And quite right too. Harrumph!
(The only body part I can think of offhand that does belong to it is “hand”, which makes sense. “Belly” does too, but usually only when used in the metaphorical sense “inside”, not as an anatomical term.)
Those who worry about inappropriately-gendered genitals may be reassured to hear that in Welsh, pidyn is masculine and cont is feminine. But then, pont is feminine in Welsh, too. We are a deeply confused people, and have never been much cop with the Latin. (Eventually, this discouraged the Romans so much that they went home. Yma o hyd …)
“Gender” in the sense of socially or biologically constructed categories arose as a metaphorical extension from “gender” the grammatical term, not vice versa. Perhaps the appropriation has been thorough enough that linguists need to consider abandoning it – but if so, can “passive” and “pronoun” be far behind?
I think you could construct an argument that insisting on an “originalist” interpretation of the word “gender” as “collection of largely semantically unrelated items based on a subset of their behaviour in certain particular contexts” might actually prove quite salutary.
“natural gender”
The idea I think is that I choose Arabic anti “you (f)” or Russian ty poshla “you went(f)” based on properties of the referent, and I choose sigareta dymilas’ “cigarette smoked (produced smoke)(f) based on God knows what.
Natural is less than ideal word, but it does the job. And the reference here is not as much to “science” (that’s why less than ideal) as to the inclination of speakers of many langauges to see some people as “men” or “women”
What I personally don’t like is that Russian linguists soon too will abandon Russian rod, even though (outside of grammar) it has nothing to do with sexes.
Simply because “it’s Modern Linguistics”.
To be fair, dens, fons, mons, pons are the four mixed-declension nouns that look feminine (because they don’t end in -cis or -nis) but are masculine anyway, so they’re exceptions that are sometimes lost. French has managed to establish la dent.
French in this case.
Straight-up calque of genus: rod : vid :: genus : species, in biological taxonomy at the very least.
@Y (Russians), I don’t know. I can’t remember hearing or reading about such things.
But since ~2024 the reaction is going to be a petition to Duma asking them to ban Everything. Awards, whores, words, actresses and their obscene films.
DM, yes (I don’t think it is easy to find a grammatical term which is not a calque. Though деепричастие which looks like some calque, refers to a part of speech specific to Slavic).
The verb rozhat’ means “to give birth” and rod is what you establish by giving births etc. etc. etc.
The think is женский род in the sense пол sounds like confusion (or a rare metaphor).
Also пол doesn’t seem to have any sexual connotations, unlike the adjective половой. English “sex” is too similar to English “sex” – could that motivate spread of “gender” in that meaning? If so, that’s very English-specific.
English “sex” is too similar to English “sex” – could that motivate spread of “gender” in that meaning?
Absolutely, even where it makes matters more confusing.
I don’t think it is easy to find a grammatical term which is not a calque
Started with the Romans (to whom we thus owe the highly opaque term “accusative.”)
@rozele: s anne fausto-sterling and many others have explained for decades, a biological “sex” binary does not exist in humans on any level from chromosomes on up (much less for other species).
According to Wikipedia, Anne Fausto-Sterling says about 1.7% of humans are born in intersex states. Is that right, and is it the basis for your comment?
A fine, fine self-cursing astonishment: “Bless my eyes! Chuck me in the gutter, swallow me whole with my horns, if this don’t beat Bob Smith.” Mysteries of Melbourne Life, 1873 (here).
Which brings to mind also the famous epitaph for a youth who was sadly struck in the eye by a falling icicle.
“collection of largely semantically unrelated items”
DE, not sure I understand what you mean here. This is how the word is understood (not was understood) in linguistics.
As for other meanings, whatever similar word you replace it with, they will also have other meanings.
(I see, though, how in English specifically this word specifically this other meaning may affect perception of the grammatical meaning. I also see that whatever word you use for English he and she, if you use same word for Russian genders, English he and she will affect its perception by English speakers)
There is some confusion within linguistics, though:
There are languages with systems of many genders (unrelated to sex) or a couple of genders (unrelated to sex) or three or two genders (some related to sex) as in Latin and Arabic and also systems where gender is assigned based on a certain property of the referent (say, sex) and systems without agreement but with different pronouns for different referents (English).
So how these really relate to each other? Is English really comparable to languages with many genders and agreement? If so, is it so for historical reasons (like: she and he couldn’t have arisen or didn’t arise on their own, only as retentions from older gendered language)? What about different pronouns for people of different age or social standing or relation to the speaker and what about V and T (the polite you), is it “gender” as well?
Which brings to mind also the famous epitaph for a youth who was sadly struck in the eye by a falling icicle.
Very strange — it doesn’t even give a name! Real, or 18th-century japery?
@JF:
looking at the population labeled “intersex” by doctors, who apply that label to people they are unable to shoehorn into their fiction of two distinct “biological sexes”, is one of the simplest ways to get a clear view of how that fiction is produced and enforced – precisely because intersex people are the ones that even the enforcers of binary “biological sex” admit their categories can’t handle. so fausto-sterling, among others, does some of her analysis there. but that’s not the whole story; it’s the equivalent of checking the lost and found box for your missing scarf before starting to look under tables and chairs. by 2000, in fact, she was pointing out the problems of focusing on those labeled intersex* (in, for example, her article revisting her 1993 semi-satirical essay “The Five Sexes”), in part because she had belatedly taken in the research on gender attribution that kessler and mckenna published in the 1970s.
but here‘s a 2018 op-ed fausto-sterling wrote that lays out some of the larger picture. note the date, however. the Times would likely not print any such thing now, given the active decision by the paper’s ownership (through a. g. sulzberger, who became Publisher in 2018) and top staff to join the far right’s anti-trans campaign. and here is a longer 2016 interview where fausto-sterling goes further into the conceptual and methodological side of things.
and note that as solid and supportive as fausto-sterling is, her language generally lags about a decade behind the terms and framings that trans and intersex people generally use and prefer to be used about themselves. and, importantly, she – like the other biologists and doctors doing the important work of holding the line on believing in evidence rather than mythology within their professions – says nothing that trans and intersex organizers haven’t been saying for over a century. she’s just in a position to bring it into specific professional spaces, backed by the kinds of evidence that her colleagues claim to believe in but manifestly don’t allow to guide their practice when it leads to inconvenient conclusions.
—
@DE:
i’m not wedded to “noun class” as a term. it seems to me that it’s the simplest umbrella term for talking about how groups of nouns (bracketing the definitional questions about that term!) cue patterned accords/inflections/pick-your-term that distinguish them from other groups of nouns. wikipedia, fwiw, seems to favor that usage, saying “noun classes form a system of grammatical agreement”, and calling “grammatical gender” “a specific form of a noun class system”. but i’d be happy with whatever terminological choice can finally take “grammatical gender” out behind saussure’s barn with a shotgun.
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* or, more specifically, the problems of focusing on genital conformation, which is the primary “diagnostic” used to label infants as “intersex” – and to justify immediate surgical reshaping of their genitals, frequently without even notifying their parents.
Athel Cornish-Bowden: Half a century ago I was told of a riot that occurred in Santiago when a visiting Spanish soccer (uh, football) team was greeted with a huge banner reading BIENVENIDOS A LOS COÑOS.
“Bienvenidos a los coños españoles”: el legado español de Valparaíso y el desembarco del Winnipeg.
The earliest mention I saw about the icicle epitaph was from 1813, in one of a myriad collections of ridiculous epitaphs. No one gives any details beyond the statement that it was the Clerk’s son, and there’s no explanation as to why there’s no name, or why “eyes” is written “i. i. i. i. i. i.”
Another in the same vein, “Here lie I / Killed by a Sky / Rocket / In my eye (Socket)” is recorded from 1830 but the actual stone has not been found, and so that one may be fictional.
Was the youth definitely struck in the eye? I’ve seen icicles that could definitely fracture someone’s skull if they fell on him. (If it fell on them?)
Re the factual reliability of gravestones as archival sources, one should perhaps remember Dr. Johnson’s “In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath.”
I’m not so much concerned about factual reliability as the lack of any identifying information beyond “Clerk’s son.” Gravestones are not usually anonymous.
A few thoughts:
> It was also in my comment about Taiwan’s variety of transliterations. Neither reaction should come as even a tiny surprise to anyone who has followed the blog for any length of time, which is why I was taken aback by the “???”; my love of both cursing and variety is well documented.
I don’t check in often enough but I remember asking this with respect to the house rules lol
I have seen “con” used literally in Apollinaire.
As to the Latin for sheath I have to restrain myself on Good Friday when reading from John.