Junkyard Quotes: Week of 3/28/11

1) "They are all subsistence farmers, and if they don't have a good harvest, they starve."

The CEO of GoDaddy explaining his elephant-hunting. That's neither here nor there for me at the moment. What struck me was his use of the word "subsistence" as a category of farming societies, rather than farming as a type of subsistence society. I'm so used to the anthropological use of the word "subsistence" that it throws me every time I hear someone use the phrase "subsistence farming." I guess one of the things about writing is to be aware that language evolves and that the same phrase might be nonsense in one context but have proper meaning in another. And not only that, but also to research whether or not a commonly used word or phrase is grammatically correct.

2) "There's a profound difference between 'I got outplayed today' vs. 'I choked'; implicit in the second is that your competitor could never have beaten you if you hadn't choked. It's a third rate, classless move and that's why truly fierce competitors never say it."

Someone on Television Without Pity message boards complaining about Richard Blais winning Top Chef. The breakdown of semantics would be an interesting discussion if not for the fact that it's a loaded argument to begin with: the poster isn't interested in debating the validity of both sides, only in presenting his or her own. I would argue, among other things, that "truly fierce" and "classless" are not automatically confined to either/or usage.

3) "You're having coffee alone at 7:30 in the morning."

Some guy on a tv show, explaining why the woman seated opposite him is single. Among other things, this attitude marks why I have an allergy to most romantic relationships on tv. The autonomy of female characters is forfeited almost by default. There are not enough BOOs and HISSes for that.

4) "While most reasonable people see women and men as equals, few (if any) dare to claim that femininity is masculinity's equal."

Julia Serano of Whipping Girl said this, and I'm unfamiliar with the series (or novel or whatever it is), but found this quote on TVTropes and felt compelled to think about it for a while. It's too much to go into, but I wonder sometimes at the implicit premise here: why is feminine value measured against masculinity to begin with? That reminds me of women in fiction who are "worthwhile" female role models, not because of what they're doing, but because they can do it as well as any man. When will we reach the point when that suggestion is met with a "What's 'man' got to do with it?"

Also from TVTropes:

5) "Anvilicious: A portmanteau of anvil and delicious, malicious or vicious, depending on the usage, anvilicious describes a writer's and/or director's use of an artistic element, be it line of dialogue, visual motif, or plot point, to so obviously or unsubtly convey a particular message that they may as well etch it onto an anvil and drop it on your head."

I mentioned Supernatural in my reaction to "A Good Man Is Hard To Find," and nothing describes exactly why I have gone from adoring the show to loathing the very faces of its heroes as well as this word. This is part of why "Popular Mechanics" worked for me so well and O'Connor's story didn't.