Tea is great, tea is delicious. Coffee however, will forever be my drink.
I’m thinking I may be an ok person to know: I like candy, I like cuddles, and I like friends.
I’ven’t written a story in a long time, I actually don’t think anything I’ve ever written really constitutes a story.
Exams were looming, and now I have my first midterm this afternoon. I doubt I’ll be leaving the library today except to go to class and for the occasional break.
Summer calls me.
I’ve been thinking a lot about language and semantic gaps; I’ve been coming across parts of my life that are difficult to describe in conventional language. Often, there are no words to describe things i consider critical or foundational parts of my life. I think a lot also about linguistic privilege and what it means to be part of a radical community that has its own manners of speech, linguistic conventions, and terminology. Also, we reclaim words and use them in counter-normative ways that are confusing if not off-putting to a casual listener.
While I can understand where issues of alienation and elitism/cliquishness are very important to address (particularly when it comes to “bullshit intellectual” jargon and elitist academic language), I also think it’s critical to recognize that as “radicals” we’re not only trying to fight capitalism or some oppressive institution or another, we’re also creating a culture of our own. All cultures, including radical cultures, revolutionary/insurrectionary cultures, and cultures of resistance require their own language through which it can be transmitted. I think Zapatismo is a great model of how struggle can be applied to cultural fields equally as it is to politics. Like they say, our word is our weapon.
One place where I keep coming up against semantic gaps is in how I understand my personal relationships with others. While the categories of “acquaintance, friend, girl/boy-friend” are broadly functional, I know it’s impossible to categorize my relationships according to any standard typology. In politics, of course, there is always the trusty, friendly, and super-functional “comrade.” I know some folks don’t like to use it because of perceived communist/Soviet interpretations, but I understand the word as falling within a general leftist or far leftist tradition. In Spanish I like both the direct equivalent and cognate camarada (gender neutral, despite the -a) an the more general compañera/o. In Arabic, there’s rafiiqah (رفيقة), the politicized equivalent to ṣadiiqah (صديقة). However I still make pretty extensive use nonstandard words such as comradical, only partially tongue-in-cheek.
