Re: Using Slang is Homophobic now?
I had this ... dream? Wherein a barbarian child lay on the ground, and was encircled by doves. Then the doves were encircled by ravens. The ravens cawed discordantly, but the doves sang in unison, and their song overpowered the voices of the ravens. You could hear the ravens in the brief pauses, but the doves outsang the ravens until the child stirred, and stood, and walked off into the field.
Since the doves were, in context, clearly symbolic of angels, and the ravens demons, and there's this idea that angels outnumber demons 2:1 because of this verse from Revelation where 1/3 stars fall from heaven, I looked up the wingspans of doves and ravens, and tried to calculate the relative sizes of the circles, if they were standing wingtip to wingtip, to get those ratios, and posted it to Facebook.
Then I realized that everyone on Facebook is in war-mode over that thing that happened, and somebody might read the doves and ravens as symbolic of something completely different. So I ran back to Facebook to delete it, only to find that the instant I opened it, a comment appeared, that ... was either literally about birds, or someone trying to subtly express concern about the rl situation with plausible deniability, and I just gave up and relied on the fact that people generally ignore me anyway.
A dream that clerifies itself can be as symbolic as it wants. So too poetry, or self-identified parables. But this bullcrap where we apply poetry class or outright Cabalistic levels of literary analysis to every little thing anyone says—and, yea, that there are enough people actually communicating such that this is sometimes useful—is absurdly frustrating when one wants to literally just make a random comment about how many birds can fit in a circle because of a weird dream.
I want to blame the internet, or English Majors, or whatever, but that'd be silly. It got on my nerves before all that, during that brief window before I got to the internet but after all my classmates started reading sex into absolutely everything. The trouble with subtext is that it is subtle enough that you can never know what was intended, but everyone can act like they do. And before you know it, someone's just asking questions, and someone else is just concerned about safety, and we're just "keeping the peace", and by the way lol you said "hard" and "long" at some point and it had nothing to do with sex but we're laughing like it did because GAH THIS CIVILIZATION IS AWFUL.
And what can be done about it? If you lay down the weapons of subtext and symbols, but someone else does not, they'll just keep using them to make a mess of things.
I suppose you could run off to 4chan and start a plot to ruin some random word or idea, and then lyao when it actually works. But ... maybe don't do that? Communications har—difficult enough as it is.
What was the point of all this, in context? I do not know. I got tired of the crapstorm by the end of page 2, noticed that things had changed when I skipped to the last page, but wrote the above anyway.
I'd write some pithy conclusion, but every time I leave the box and try to get back into it, iOS first throws me into the address field, and I am just fed up with that, too. That's not symbolic of being fed up with using hypertext to war over subtext, but I'm sure this is not a coincidence.
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