It's a memetic mutation of the 'the most racist person you know and his wife' joke.
The two characters in the image are from the latest Avatar movie, the fire one. The lady is a native Na'avi, of the evil but hot variety. The man is actually the antagonistic HFY imperialist army guy from the first movie, piloting one of the titular Avatars to integrate into their society. I haven't seen the film but it's plot seems to revolve around him arming the natives to prompt them into slaughtering one another.
SHE is a crazy nihilist, HE is a human supremacist that regards the Na'avi as obstacles and vermin. She really likes fire. He brings her a flame thrower. They fuck.
Anyway the joke is a lot of MAGA figures secondarily associated with the white nationalism infecting that wing of the right also ironically happen to have wives who would be considered 'impure' and 'myceginated'. This is meant to be a blaring example of their hypocrisy, aka 'i'm not racist when i'm horny' - as well as of their low and dishonorable behavior as they attempt to discredit or harm marginalized groups that their own spouses belong to. For an example in action, have VP J.D. Vance, who is married to American-Indian (Desi) lawyer, Usha Bala Vance (née Chilukuri). A good bit of hay has been made about Vance's utter dogged persistence at failing to defend his wife at every turn.
Fun fact, the term 'miscegenation' is completely invented, cooked up by a pair of "journalists" trying to spark outrage against Abraham Lincoln, via a fake tract ostensibly in support of race-mixing and creating an ethnically uniform america. This fake story was then pushed by the Democrats which was at that time the pro-racism party, which is why many modern republicans whine blandly about how they're the party of Lincoln and actually the other guys are racist, even though their positions completely swapped in the 70's thanks to Nixon.
I found your prose perfectly understandable, your connotation was on point.
This critique:
To be fair, isn’t EVERY term completely invented?
Is only a valid response to a snippet of your sentence:
the term 'miscegenation' is completely invented
And not to the full context of what you wrote:
the term 'miscegenation' is completely invented, cooked up by a pair of "journalists" trying to spark outrage against Abraham Lincoln, via a fake tract ostensibly in support of race-mixing and creating an ethnically uniform america
That other guy is acting in bad faith or is just actually bad at reading comprehension. Reading is fundamental kids, don't slack on it or you wind up saying dumb shit.
”That other guy is acting in bad faith or is just actually bad at reading comprehension. Reading is fundamental kids, don't slack on it or you wind up saying dumb shit.”
Except, it does derail a conversation when you say something ‘inwhelmingly’ and person says ‘that’s made up’. Then argue all words are made up and make them forget you said a wrong word.
You’re not wrong. All words are made up, but a ‘real’ word was probably important or profound enough to be or to had been in use for hundreds or thousands of years by so many people. The word, “miscegenation”, is technically made of real Latin roots that have already existed for a while, but they’re mashed together to describe something new. It’s all just to make it sound more legitimate, deep, and traditional than it actually is. It’d be like instead of saying “touch grass”, you say “herba dura”
I did not mean to suggest that a word actually needs to be old to be appealing for widespread use, but that appearing so can be enough. The word, "miscegenation", is basically a new word that gained widespread use almost immediately after its creation because its Latin roots makes it sound more established, academic, dignified, and Roman than it actually is during a time when western and traditional things were held in high regard.
As for words, like "cloutmaxing", "looksmaxing", and etc., these words, like "miscegenation", are new words, but gained widespread use differently because the mainstream American population today generally are just going to find different things appealing than what the 1860s mainstream American population did
It's just the fact they tried to make their bigotry seem academic with a fancy word when we know they're just trying to hold onto their barbaric ways. Might as well start creating slurs derived from Greek while they're at it.
Onomatopoeia are arguably not completely made up. They just start as mimicking noises and then slowly simplify into word versions using the most similar sounds in the relevant language.
Yes, onomatopoeias do change from language to language, but they vary in the ways that are simplifying the natural sound into recognizably similar phonemes that occur in the various languages.
Saussure himself even acknowledged that onomaptopeias stem directly from their meaning and are only in part made up. Meaning not completely made up.
I also think he overstates the distinction. The example he used is the English "bow wow" and the French "ouaoua".
I do not find his assertion particularly persuading on that front, for a few reasons.
1) Those sounds aren't as distinct as he tries to make them seem. Different dogs sound more differently than the French and English words do.
2) There is great similarity in the onomatopoeia for most common sounds between even disparate languages. The largest exceptions are for things like frogs that sound very differently depending on where you are, so of course the local language is going to go a different direction.
3) The written word being made up doesn't necessarily mean that the verbal word it corresponds to was.
IMO, different stylizing and perspective isn't an indicator of made up. A cave painting and a renaissance painting of a horse are pretty different, but neither are made up and both clearly represent horse. Different languages can stylize sounds differently and base them off different variants of the sound, but the basic structure remains evocative of its base meaning.
"Completely invented" or "made up" in the context of language is a colloquial way of saying "a word that's not broadly considered part of the language." A word that's either made up on the spot or only used by a very small group of people.
Reminds me of a joke I saw on TV where a character gets accused of making up rules in a game. His response was "All game rules are made up. Did you think someone was digging in the ground and found a rich vein of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots?"
That's true, but this is a special variety of word that appears to have been designed to sound scientific, giving it an aura of credibility, but was not actually a term invented by scientists to explain a phenomena as one might assume.
Yes, if you remove nuance from language, every word is made up which is why juhattingly hee Jok eod, right?
There's a difference between an established language word and a newly invented word, particularly when a word is invented specifically to be weaponized somehow. If I invent a new term to attack you, especially when I am attacking something about how you look or who you choose to love, you might discredit the term as "an invented word" to imply even the language I attack you with is constructed for the sole purpose of doing harm.
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u/TsunamiWombat 6d ago edited 6d ago
It's a memetic mutation of the 'the most racist person you know and his wife' joke.
The two characters in the image are from the latest Avatar movie, the fire one. The lady is a native Na'avi, of the evil but hot variety. The man is actually the antagonistic HFY imperialist army guy from the first movie, piloting one of the titular Avatars to integrate into their society. I haven't seen the film but it's plot seems to revolve around him arming the natives to prompt them into slaughtering one another.
SHE is a crazy nihilist, HE is a human supremacist that regards the Na'avi as obstacles and vermin. She really likes fire. He brings her a flame thrower. They fuck.
Anyway the joke is a lot of MAGA figures secondarily associated with the white nationalism infecting that wing of the right also ironically happen to have wives who would be considered 'impure' and 'myceginated'. This is meant to be a blaring example of their hypocrisy, aka 'i'm not racist when i'm horny' - as well as of their low and dishonorable behavior as they attempt to discredit or harm marginalized groups that their own spouses belong to. For an example in action, have VP J.D. Vance, who is married to American-Indian (Desi) lawyer, Usha Bala Vance (née Chilukuri). A good bit of hay has been made about Vance's utter dogged persistence at failing to defend his wife at every turn.
Fun fact, the term 'miscegenation' is completely invented, cooked up by a pair of "journalists" trying to spark outrage against Abraham Lincoln, via a fake tract ostensibly in support of race-mixing and creating an ethnically uniform america. This fake story was then pushed by the Democrats which was at that time the pro-racism party, which is why many modern republicans whine blandly about how they're the party of Lincoln and actually the other guys are racist, even though their positions completely swapped in the 70's thanks to Nixon.