Picture my hand on your throat, my voice in your ear, and nothing in your control~

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If there's one theme in at least the transfem community I'm loosely a part of, it's the line between good and bad dehumanization.

Like, if you're around someone cool you might a doll or a robot or a puppy, but you're still gonna react negatively if someone dehumanizes you in a malicious or a dismissive or patronizing way. Sometimes you straight up have two gender identities, one for your friends and one for society at large. (It/its to my friends, she/her to my enemies)

It can lead to some interesting collisions, like when someone who publicly self-identify as a robot have a discussion bout the implicit dehumanization of "doll" as mainstream queer slang. Like, navigating this distinction is not an issue most of the time, it's not actually a contradiction, but it does make your head spin a little when the two modes rub up against each other.

for those of you with really bad and persistent heartburn like me, here’s a tip that I just discovered:

try sucking on an antacid like it’s a hard candy instead of just chewing it and swallowing it. that way it’s neutralizing the acid and washing it away every time you swallow. when I do this I get relief for the entire time that I’m sucking on it, and it takes a while for it to start burning again afterward

a while ago I posted a criticism of the word “idempotent” and this is what I was trying to say. in order to understand this word you have to either:

• memorize what it means
• google it every time
• know Latin

obviously googling a single word isn’t a problem on its own, but it becomes a problem when you’re reading an article that uses one fancy academic word after another and you can’t even get a clue about what the words are supposed to mean without - again - knowing Latin

now imagine if instead of “idempotent” we said “change-once”. as in, a change-once operator. it still doesn’t get the exact meaning across but it’s drastically better than “idempotent”, and it’s much easier to memorize too!

obviously what I’m implicitly saying is that academic words should be in English by default, instead of Latin or Greek, and I don’t like that (I wish we were speaking Esperanto or an even better conlang than that) but I think it’s the pragmatic choice because it’s the most-spoken language in the world

and speaking of writing in Latin so that only other nobles can understand, isn’t it interesting how academic language almost exclusively uses Greek and Latin roots? I wouldn’t be surprised at all if speaking in plain/vernacular English was shamed as “unprofessional” or “uneducated” in academic circles, and I think it comes back to this same mechanism for excluding the working class

anyway yeah I suspect that this “secret language” thing is a widespread problem in all branches of academia - not just math

this is also how I feel about math notation because math notation is:

• extremely terse
• extremely cryptic
• impossible to google unless you already know what the notation means
• effectively a secret language that can only be learned through {cost-prohibitive college courses} or {multiple $100+ textbooks and lots of free time and energy}

it reminds me of how Medieval nobles would speak and write in Latin so that they could only be understood by other nobles, as a form of social exclusion. because no one else had access to the leisure time and money for tutoring costs that it would take to learn a skill like that

so yeah kas’s hot take of the day is that math notation is a classist secret language and knowledge of math is deliberately inaccessible to the working class

💕💕

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