A commenter on Matthew Yglesias's site referring to me as "this Phoebe guy."
The very existence of a course entitled "Color of Queer: Race/Sexuality." I am almost certain that this was placed on the time schedules by a sneaky conservative wishing to prove a point.
"Kerfuffle." Is this a word that exists outside of the blogosphere? Lest I receive accusations of semi-literacy, I should point out that, being a French major, I have only a high school-level education in English literature. I might also point out the amount of time I spent during high school watching the Designing of certain Women, transfixed and pleasantly sedated by the drawls and the shoulder pads, but I also might not.
Thursday, February 24, 2005
Things that have amused me recently
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8 comments:
I personally don't get the signifigance of the colon. Race and Sexuality are the color of queer?
From the OED:
Also carfuffle, cafuffle, etc. [f. prec. vb.
Now widely used as a colloquialism in the forms GEFUFFLE and (esp.) KERFUFFLE.]
Disorder, flurry, agitation.
1813 G. BRUCE Poems 65 An' Jeanie's kirtle, aye sae neat, Gat there a sad carfuffle. 1816 SCOTT Antiq. xx, Monkbarns in an unco carfuffle. Ibid. xxix, Troth, my lord maun be turned feel outright..and he puts himself into sic a curfuffle for ony thing ye could bring him, Edie. 1823 MISSES CORBETT Petticoat Tales I. 333 (Jam.) Ye need na put yoursel into ony carfuffle about the matter. 1953 John o' London's 3 July 602/3 The word cafuffle is still in general use in her part of Scotland..as a noun meaning a state of confusion. 1955 C. S. LEWIS Surprised by Joy vii. 114, I could put up with any amount of monotony far more patiently than even the smallest disturbance, bother, bustle, or what the Scotch call kurfuffle. 1960 K. MARTIN Matter of Time 187 The girl next door and her boy friend are having a wee cafoufle in the garden. 1961 Radio Times 14 Dec. 3/2 You remember the cafuffle there was when the Ministry of Transport introduced their ten-year test for cars. 1971 Times 9 Jan. 16/4 Since the predictable pre-April curfuffle, there has been the predictable summer and autumn hush.
I accept that it's a word. But why is it used so much more than "disorder", "flurry", or "agitation" in the blogosphere? Btw, if anyone's interested, the Hebrew equivalent is, I'm almost certain, "balagan".
to be fair:
1) the full name of the course is "The Color of Queer: Race and Sexuality in Contemporary Writing"
2) there's a lot of really good study on the relationship between race and sexuality. not only in terms of the american construct of "otherness" and similarities in how it treated both issues, but also in terms of the experience (Tony Kushner told me that "being Jewish taught me how to be gay"). not to mention that, as Chauncey indicates, while occasionally sexual subcultures were more accepting of racial difference, more often they replicated the racial divisions of society as a whole, sometimes even more than mainstream society did (see: Gay New York).
Not to say it has no academic merit, but the course title, even in full, reads like something that the Intercollegiate Studies Institute would have made up.
The actual name does make more sense.
I had some soup with a kerfuffle in it.
Um, a wee bit low on our Izzard lingo?
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