In today's linguistics class we talked about metaphors, and we really want two of the ones we talked about to become conventionalised.

So first of all this one girl told us about a newer metaphor in Russian, "I have paws", which is something you say when you don't really want to do something, so you say you're incapable of doing it since you have paws instead of hands. Like, "hey, finish that report" "aw but I have paws :(" and I think that's adorable. It's like "I'm just a girl" but for animals.

We also had the task to invent a novel metaphor and have the others guess what it means, and the teacher really liked my "she's such a capybara" = "everyone loves her". Capybara energy is like golden retriever energy except you're chill about it. You're just vibing and everyone digs that.

Anyway I think these deserve to become more common in English

Tumblr tags from Simuran reading, "it means 'I have LITTLE paws' specifically. like a cat. it also led to a newer one! мощны твои лапищи - 'how mighty your big paws are!' for when you've become good in something that used to be difficult for you."ALT

VERY important addition oh my gosh,,,

being a woman isn't a feminist action btw

being a lesbian isn't a feminist action either. It's just a thing

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There is nothing inherently evil or wrong about how masculine or feminine you are and I wish people would stop acting like one is better than the other. The way you act and speak as a person says more about what kind of person you are than your gender presentation. There is plenty of people capable of being horrible people and there are plenty of people that are capable of being good people. It's a choice, gender has nothing to do with it.

if you (you reading this) pick up a pencil and start drawing for the very first time in your life tomorrow and you barely manage to draw a stick figure please know that your crooked stick figure fucks a million times harder than any "polished" concept art a computer will ever output

contrary to popular belief not everyone has an innate sense of internal gender or care to have one or seek a name for it, some people go their whole lives without questioning their occupation in one of two gender roles, but for some people, if pressed, they don’t feel that internal sense of ‘i am a woman’ or ‘i am a man’, and in that case i feel the switch over to transgender vs cisgender relies on active identification of a gender other than the one they were assigned. if someone’s like ‘idk dude I just work here’ then that’s valid

A portion of people in the notes are like ‘but that makes you trans. That’s called being agender’ and another portion of people are going ‘this is how the majority of cis ppl feel and it’s NOT agender’ and personally I feel like both of them are missing the point here. Yes a lot of people identify as agender because of this feeling. Yes a lot of people with this same feeling still identify as cis. These are not mutually exclusive experiences and it doesn’t mean the agender people are secretly cis or the cis people are secretly agender. It just means they have very similar experiences of gender that they choose to conceptualize and label differently, and neither of them are mistaken or wrong to do so.