#there’s genuine athleticism at play here#but I truly love the queen who just stopped and put a finger up and said NO. kept walking#the lads were flummoxed @theladyeccentric

The fucking. POWER of the "Talk To My Hand" like she was powerwalking, hand up, like she'd just spotted her ex on the street and needed to walk past him to get where she was going. It was giving that energy.

I keep telling people, drag queens are just a kind of clown. This is clownishness and buffoonery for charity, something clowns love to do. Because clowns love humanity and drag queens are always ready to twirl up a fucking charity event at a moment's notice. I joke that they are the closest thing we have to "serving our (queer) nation" but like. Instead of murder it's charity balls and shows and, apparently, rugby games. It's REAL Service, as in Helping Your Community.

customers the same in all universes

this is it. this is the best response i’ve ever received on this post. everyone pack up, go home, we’re done here

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Okay normally I'm on the side of "words mean whatever we need them to mean".

but guys, I don’t like the suggestion that it’s what is happening here. Being unfamiliar with the term, and guessing its meaning based on vibes, doesn’t mean you have equal authority on whether it’s “correct” with the community who actively use this word in a technical sense.

please do consider that if you haven't been exposed to the word in the context it's used in, "both are correct" and "you can interpret it differently" and “there is no right or wrong answer” and “it feels like it SHOULD be X” cannot be a fully realised take. Sure, linguistics recognises there are rules in which meaning changes - but “laypeople being unfamiliar with the word, and liking vibes better” isn’t one of them.

You can do that with most words, especially slang, and shape them to the needs of the majority, but this isn't like... a fanfiction word, invented for fanfic and, like, solely used for injured hockey players where it doesn’t matter if the injured limb swaps sides 4 times in a sex scene and phases through a stomach. It is, in its context, a bit more load-bearing (ha) than that.

It's fine to be unfamiliar with the context, and it's fine for words to change, but do just take a quick second to hear it in a native sentence!

One of the most common ways of using this word is to assess four-legged animals. "Favouring" is a specific grouping of behaviour - a hesitancy in gait, stiffness, reluctance to put weight on a limb. It’s often inconsistent, as the animal tries to compensate or conceal the pain. It may not be a full limp or obvious lameness, since prey animals especially will actively try to conceal this; favouring is a subtle reluctance, and a useful word for a very specific recognisable behaviour that the animal is usually trying to lie about. (That’s probably why it’s used in romance fiction, as it’s an interestingly romantic and stoic way to react to pain, and doesn’t mean the limb is inconveniently disabled. A fictional character favouring a wounded leg can wince attractively when it’s jostled, but it doesn’t matter too much if the author forgets and has them run to the door suddenly - “favouring” isn’t incompatible with “running” in horses either.)

The sentence “Favouring the off hind” is equestrian jargon: it means “pain behaviour on the back right leg.” It does not mean “opposite-pain in the not-on deer” and is not confusing in its professional register.

If you've only vaguely heard of "myeloma", and most people in a poll are guessing it's a skin cancer, that doesn't mean that myeloma and melanoma can now readily collapse into the same word - they're under active use in their native contexts, where the people frequently using them do need to communicate the difference between skin and blood cancer.

A poll of laypeople misunderstanding “myeloma,” or non-horse-people misunderstanding “favouring,” isn’t quite enough to indicate a full semantic shift and change of meaning of the term. The community that uses the term “favouring” in the context of “limb injury” - vets, farriers, farmers, commentators, equestrians - knows what it means and uses it consistently in the same way. They’re not confused. because to them, it isn’t a vibesy, sex-scene-hand waving word. It’s a cluster of pain signals.

If you aren’t familiar with that usage, then that’s really more about your own lack of familiarity. Not all interpretations DO carry equal authority, especially when one is just confusion/unfamiliarity. You just haven’t met it before, and that’s fine.

Tl;dr: I’m all for words changing meanings, but we shouldn’t be too quick to declare that when it’s based entirely on unfamiliarity and vibes-based readings.

Linguist here. Respectfully, no. The word may be used in a technical sense in some fields, but unlike myeloma, it is not a scientific or specialized term. It is a common word that happens to be useful in a technical context.

The "laypeople" you are chastening for being unfamiliar with the technical usage of this term (which again, is not its common usage), are in fact native speakers of English. They are not laypeople in that context; they ARE the authority. If the question had been "what does favoring mean WITH REGARDS TO ANIMAL HUSBANDRY", then you would have a leg to stand on (pun intended), but because it was a common term presented in a common context, the technical usage is irrelevant.

Both meanings of the word are valid. Both meanings are correct. This isn't ignorance on display, it's language change.

Respectfully, there are a few things you’ve misread or missed here that may be causing confusion!

If you strip away the gentle framing, the horsie picture, and the examples, you’ll see that I argue “we shouldn’t be too quick to declare a second meaning,” “I don’t think that’s what’s happening here,” and “this isn’t enough to indicate a change of meaning.”

• You state that I’m “chastening” the rightful authorities. Laypeople and non-horse-people aren’t being chastened; that sentence reads “this (misunderstanding) isn’t quite enough to indicate a change of meaning.” If you feel this is overly chastening, that’s up to you, but that’s really a criticism of my tone.
• Because I largely talk about horses, you feel I’m arguing “favouring” in this sense is specific to animal husbandry, and you argue is that this is, thus, unreasonably specific knowledge. You say “I’d have a leg to stand on” (ha!) otherwise.
• While I spoke at length about animal husbandry, it being more of my area, at the very beginning, I did say this is a common use. “Favouring the injured limb” is, in fact, also used continuously in human limb injury, too.
• The sense of “favouring the injured limb” is obviously a well-recorded definition - usually coming third or fourth on the list of the meanings of “favour ”. To provide evidence that this is not considered animal -specific knowledge, I found that the Cambridge dictionary only uses human examples in its definition below:
• Favouring: to protect or avoid using one leg, hand, arm, etc. because it is painful, injured, etc. “He limped slightly, favouring his left leg / She was leaning against the table to favour her sprained ankle.”
• To me, this indicates that there are communities using it actively in this sense for humans as well. This seems like a fair record of human definition and active human usage.
• Further, there is no indicator on any of the dictionaries I’ve looked at suggesting that this is a technical, obscure, outdated, specialised, or extinct definition. Those are usually flagged in dictionaries.
• I think all of that’s a reasonable indicator of “favouring the injured limb” not being so animal-related, or so technical, or so hard to find, that I’m being very unfair, and that readers can’t possibly be expected to learn any other senses.
• I presented the animal-related and technical definitions largely because I know them better, but also, you’ll see how the misunderstanding falls down fairly quickly if you picture an animal. A four-legged animal favouring one limb is obviously not “preferring” one limb, and floating on the other three.
• You state that I’d have a leg to stand on “if the poll were about animal husbandry” - but the poll is not about any other definition of favouring than “the favoured limb,” and it’s very easy to find the definition applied to humans.
• I suspect that you are possibly more annoyed by my perceived tone than by my thesis, because if you were rebutting my argument on a professional sense, as a linguist, you would have checked the definition and usage of “favouring” and seen that it is NOT specific to animal husbandry, and that the poll is about a common usage, and the phrasing of the poll matches example sentences in humans. The CONTEXT IS IN THE POLL.
• If you were treating me respectfully as a linguist correcting and educating an equally intelligent person, then before declaring that you had taken away “my leg to stand on,” you would have done me the academic honour of checking up on my claims to have a leg at all. Checked both the poll’s thesis and the dictionary definitions, and re-reading where I said I wanted to talk about common uses in animals, shows this is the wrong leg to catch me floating on. That’s perfectly okay, but it feels a little unfair, when I would prefer to be tackled fairly before accepting correction.
• Anyway, I have my leg back to stand on. I may have been confusing with the horsie picture, but I didn’t stated it was exclusive to animal husbandry, and a glance at the recorded evidence shows it isn’t.
• I genuinely perceive my tone here as positive, sharing and encouraging - plenty of “let’s learn about context!” - and people have told me they perceived it as kind and friendly.

However, the thing I really want to challenge here is that we are seeing language change. Where? Where do you see it?

If you step back and disentangle yourself from the confusions - the picture of the horsie, the “chastening” tone - my post says “I don’t see sufficient evidence in a tumblr poll to declare a language change, especially given that the word is actively used correctly in the community using it.”

The poll is not demonstrating language change. It’s demonstrating people picking a leg.

I argue that it is demonstrating nothing - CAN demonstrate nothing - except familiarity with a phrase.

Anyone can bring plenty of living evidence of people using “favouring a limb” as current, up-to-date language across multiple registers - and no evidence that it’s fallen out of usage. Can we bring similar-quality evidence of language change? We seem to mostly have a poll on tumblr of people who - among the misclicked answers and people who misread the question - some people are declaring that their confusion should be sufficient to Declare the Formation of a New Contranym. But there are also plenty of people in the notes who are going “huh! Guess I was wrong.”

Is a few people doubling down on a wrong poll answer because (checks arguments) they don’t like being wrong - look, is that REALLY enough to declare a new contranym? Who is actually using that way, where, how and why?

My argument throughout is “I don’t see enough evidence to declare a valid contranym; I think people just didn’t know, and are defensively claiming it SHOULD be a contranym.” Since authors and people-who-talk-about-limb-injury consistently use it in the sense of “favouring the injured limb,” the burden is now to find evidence of the claimed other sense of favouring, this “just-as-legitimate contrary meaning of the word in the sense of an injured limb” actually EXISTING and doing WORK in the world - not just evidence of people guessing what it means.

I’ve poked about a bit online and didn’t find actual evidence of language change - apart from one person’s grandma in the notes of the poll who apparently firmly “favoured” her good knee - but, if we are being fair, that’s not MY job to provide.

This isn’t a case where “hello, linguist here, i don’t like your tone” is a rebuttal. I can produce linguists of varying qualifications who support the point I’m making, and I can produce people who think I have written kindly and encouragingly. This is a case where you’re challenged to provide evidence of actual language change, not people justifying their pick on a tumblr poll. Where is “favouring a limb” meaning the “good limb” doing work in the world that shows language change. Show me the language change.

THANK YOU