Doreen Michele

A relatively young Alec Guinness, probably best known as Obi-wan Kenobi in the Star Wars franchise, plays Prince Faisal in the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia . When he says "a little people, a silly people etc" Lawrence smiles because Faisal is quoting his own words back at him. He spoke them in an earlier encounter with Sherif Ali ibn el Kharish, played by Omar Sharif.  He is present in the above scene, sitting behind Lawrence.  So this informs Lawrence these two talk to each other and Faisal knows all about the unpleasant encounter.  " Gun " in the military means artillery or similar. They mean "big guns," not firearms. I'm a former military wife. My father was also career army though he retired when I was three. Having been around military culture enough to know guns  has a specific meaning in the military and it's not rifles, I cannot help but wonder if the British Colonel is being willfully obtuse and pretending "You ignorant Arabs who spe...

Personal gain is very much secondary to Sadistic funsies and your path of rampant destruction. Narcissists are just trying to meet their needs and hurting other people is incidental. Sadists are people pursuing a GOAL of intentionally hurting other people and secondarily also grabbing whatever unearned benefits for personal gain they can lazily and incidentally snap up, in part because it's a sick burn.

All y'all is a Southern expression inclusive of myriad groups of peoples. Y'all is just plural to distinguish it from singular you. I'm struggling here to explain it because historically English had thee and thou but that wasn't singular versus plural you. It was intimate versus formal you. Tu in French is a close friend or similar. Vous is someone you don't know well. The word they can be used in singular form as a gender neutral version of he or she if being gender neutral matters more than grammatical agreement on singular versus plural. It's generally less awkward than trying to use the word one  which sounds stiff and formal and folks don't much use that construction. In the South, generally speaking: You = just one person that I'm speaking to. Y'all = a group of folks I'm addressing who likely identify as a group, such as members of the same family or members of the football team. All y'all  = a group of groups, inclusive of many dem...

Grandfathered in is a phrase from the ugly post-Civil War Jim Crow era in the Deep South that refers to efforts to legally protect the rights of White people while denying newly freed Blacks voting rights.  They passed a law saying illiterate people couldn't vote knowing most newly freed slaves were illiterate because it had been illegal for slaves to learn to read. They then added a clause saying "You can still vote even if you are illiterate if your grandfather could vote." This meant dirt poor illiterate White people were likely to qualify for the right to vote but no newly freed slaves would pass this test granting an exception for illiterate Whites. Their grandfathers were likely slaves (or rapey White slave owners not admitting to being the father, but that detail is something newly freed slaves were unlikely to argue in a court of law at that time). That's from a piece called Rotten to the Core on Eclogiselle and you may wish to read it because it says more...

Michael Stipe, lead singer for R.E.M., has said the song is not about religion. The phrase is a Southern expression and I think it's probably more or less a polite euphemism for losing my shit. Since writing that piece, it has occurred to me it probably also means forgetting my manners . The Deep South is very religious and famously polite as Ugly Americans go and religion and manners are seen as related in the Deep South. So I think one meaning for the phrase is getting so upset with someone you fail to be polite and respectful as is generally expected from people where I come from. You drop your Sunday Best behavior and go off on someone.

I know why bastard has negative connotations. Historically, if you were born out of wedlock, life was going to be extremely tough. On Cyburbia, there was a conversation once about "Special is the new retard." They routinely rename economic recessions and the new word soon means the same as the old. I spent years baffled by why "fuck you" or "go fuck yourself" is harsh language. Why would get laid and masturbate  be expressions for jacking your shit up? And then I recently wrote this piece . Someone once said to me "I'm the fucker. You're the fuckee." because it was a heterosexual relationship and I'm a woman.   My former sister in law would be in her fifties and raised three children by an alcoholic boyfriend who never married her. The third child is probably the product of rape and it may not be the only one. She's probably still fucked. Her life has never recovered.  I'm sixty and did marry the father of my children and had...

Copied from search:  Atrophic refers to tissue or an organ in the body that has become smaller, thinner, and weaker. It is associated with wasting away due to disease, disuse, defective nutrition, or nerve damage. I'm an environmental studies major who studied Latin and Greek root words in high school in a gifted class to help prepare me for the SAT. Copied from search: Trophic levels refer to different positions in a food chain or web. They represent the feeding relationships within an ecosystem. The main trophic levels are: 1. Primary producers (e.g., plants) at the base. 2. Herbivores (consumers of plants) at the second level. 3. Carnivores (consumers of herbivores) at higher levels. 4. Apex predators (top-level carnivores) at the highest level. So when I see the word atrophic , my mind wants to think you are talking about creatures that don't eat anything (a la the word asexual reproduction -- reproducing WITHOUT sex, surely you people know that term). I mean PLANTS aren...

It's weird to me anyone would call me Miss because in The Deep South ma'am is used for any woman over age 18 . Southern honorics are a thing. They don't get called honorics in the south but that's defacto what they are.  Close family friends are frequently called Aunt or Uncle (plus their first name) by the children and in my family close German friends of my mother's were called Tante plus their first name. Tante is German for Aunt. In Asian cultures and languages, honorifics are common and this can be a translation challenge. If you have a rude character in Asian fiction who fails to use honorifics, they sometimes translate that as someone with a potty mouth because there's no cultural equivalent in English. There's also Mr. or Mz. (first name). When I worked at Aflac, the last living founder was called Mr. Paul by everyone in the company. It's both respectful and familiar which is an artifact of southern culture not found in most of America. Souther...

The Nazi Party officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei  or NSDAP) Also from the above Wikipedia page, here is the origin of the term Nazi which isn't actually the acronym for National Arbeiter Zocialist (something) like my brain is determined to believe having grown up in a bilingual home which taught me just enough German to mangle it: Before the rise of the party, these terms had been used as colloquial and derogatory words for a backward peasant, or an awkward and clumsy person. It derived from Ignaz, a shortened version of Ignatius, which was a common name in the Nazis' home region of Bavaria. Opponents seized on this, and the long-existing Sozi, to attach a dismissive nickname to the National Socialists. I've been seeing talk of how desperately America needs a workers party "because Elon Musk and Donald Trump are Nazis!" basically. He who fails to learn from history is doomed to repe...

Working off a dead horse is an expression from a few hundred years ago. When individuals joined the military to pay off debts as a form of bankruptcy, they were fed hard tack by the military as a cheap means to keep them fed while their pay went to their debts. The expression is double entendre. It both means they are working to pay off the debts and it means they are eating hard tack as their primary or sole food for long periods. The "dead horse" refers to both the debts and the unappealing meat they are eating. Russia most likely invaded Ukraine because Ukraine is the bread basket of the region and Russia is a large country in the far north and has trouble raising enough food.  My sons are part Viking on their father's side and have read up on the history and culture of the Vikings to understand their heritage. They have told me things about it that I cannot find a nice, neat source to cite with a blurb supporting their assertions but I think what they have told me mak...

This is a colloquial word that basically means preferences.  It's your laundry list of what you would rather  have IF you can get it and I believe it most likely comes from saying "I'd rather..." (probably with some kind of rural or regional accent) and then the S on the end means you've listed out multiple things you would rather have or multiple reasons why this specific detail matters to you. To my mind, it implies a stigmatized out group that gets insufficient respect speaking to preferences that are not merely "nice to have." They are important for reasons this individual is familiar with due in part to being a part of a stigmatized out group but they also are being realistic and know that odds are long against getting it because it will be counterintuitive to the people in power and the rules and laws they write up and still enforce. It is rooted in my father using such expressions. He grew up on a farm and was a high school drop out (in an era whe...

I just now searched for "sacrifice definition" and it pulled up an assortment of different meanings, none of which are wrong per se but none of which say what I think the word really means. The closest was this: The act of giving up something highly valued for the sake of something else considered to have a greater value or claim: Searching for "sacrifice etymology" gets me this: Latin sacrificium The word sacrifice comes from Latin sacrificium, which means "a making sacred". It is composed of the Latin words sacer, meaning "sacred" or "holy", and facere, meaning "to do" or "to make". The word sacrifice originally referred to the act of offering something to a deity as a sign of respect or appeasement. And that agrees with what I think of the word. Sacrifice is making a choice which honors and invests in something you value so much you "hold it to be sacred." If you feel like giving up something is a painfu...

A heteronormative view, therefore, involves alignment of biological sex, sexuality, gender identity and gender roles. Heteronormativity has been linked to heterosexism and homophobia, and the effects of societal heteronormativity on lesbian, gay and bisexual individuals have been described as heterosexual or "straight" privilege. I increasingly use the phrase heteronormative culture . So I thought I would define what I mean for future reference. I'm not talking about the view that most people are straight. I'm talking about a lot of cultural norms rooted in the implicit assumption that nearly everyone is straight, thus being something other than a cis het person is some extremely tiny minority, so small as to be an aberration and therefore nothing society needs to incorporate any kind of cultural accommodation for. This is not and has never been true. The lack of healthy societal norms for anything other than "You must fall in love with a member of the opposite ...

I like living well and enjoying life. I think of myself as a hedonist but I rarely call myself that because to other people that seems to mean "shortsighted idiot who has zero concept of consequences and is incapable of learning from their mistakes." Because most people seem to think "hedonist" means "drunkard and drug addict who sleeps around casually and has zero sexual ethics " Excuse me? I like my fun without regrets. Hangovers, STDs, jail time and other ruinous consequences for shortsighted behavior are absolutely not my idea of "fun," thanks. The expression bon vivant  seems to do a better job of conveying what I mean which is that I like eating well, good conversation, nice clothes and similar pleasantries.  I like living well and bon vivant is French for "person who lives well." (Literally "good liver.") If you want to communicate effectively, it's pointless to try to insist your audience is wrong about what a wo...

According to Wikipedia , Tsundere is a Japanese term for a character development process that depicts a character with a personality who is initially polarized warm/soft, cold, temperamental, hotheaded (and sometimes even hostile) before gradually showing a warmer, friendlier side over time. I didn't learn this term from Wikipedia. I learned it from some folks I know who are very into Japanese media, like anime, one of whom told me once "I have no idea why Wikipedia says that. That's not how it gets used." Before I explain what I understand the term to mean, let's take a slight detour into the land of Columbo. This scene is one that gets fully explained later in this episode but only partially explained in the linked clip. Not only does the guy know she gets car sick, which is why she prefers the front seat, he switched the sugar bowl and the artificial sweetener bowl to put her preference closer to her. I saw absolutely no significance in that detail the...