so i just googled the phrase “toeing out of his shoes” to make sure it was an actual thing
and the results were:
it’s all fanfiction
which reminds me that i’ve only ever seen the phrase “carding fingers through his hair” and people describing things like “he’s tall, all lean muscle and long fingers,” like that formula of “they’re ____, all ___ and ____” or whatever in fic
idk i just find it interesting that there are certain phrases that just sort of evolve in fandom and become prevalent in fic bc everyone reads each other’s works and then writes their own and certain phrases stick
i wish i knew more about linguistics so i could actually talk about it in an intelligent manner, but yeah i thought that was kinda cool
Ha! Love it!
One of my fave authors from ages ago used the phrase “a little helplessly” (like “he reached his arms out, a little helplessly”) in EVERY fic she wrote. She never pointed it out—there just came a point where I noticed it like an Easter egg. So I literally *just* wrote it into my in-progress fic this weekend as an homage only I would notice. ❤
To me it’s still the quintessential “two dudes doing each other” phrase.
I think different fic communities develop different phrases too! You can (usually) date a mid 00s lj fic (or someone who came of age in that style) by the way questions are posed and answered in the narration, e.g. “And Patrick? Is not okay with this.” and by the way sex scenes are peppered with “and, yeah.” I remember one Frerard fic that did this so much that it became grating, but overall I loved the lj style because it sounded so much like how real people talk.
Another classic phrase: wondering how far down the _ goes. I’ve seen it mostly with freckles, but also with scars, tattoos, and on one memorable occasion, body glitter at a club. Often paired with the realization during sexy times that “yeah, the __ went all they way down.” I’ve seen this SO much in fic and never anywhere else
whoa, i remember reading lj fics with all of those phrases! i also remember a similar thing in teen wolf fics in particular – they often say “and derek was covered in dirt, which. fantastic.” like using “which” as a sentence-ender or at least like sprinkling it throughout the story in ways published books just don’t.
LINGUISTICS!!!! COMMUNITIES CREATING PHRASES AND SLANG AND SHAPING LANGUAGE IN NEW WAYS!!!!!!!
I love this. Though I don’t think of myself as fantastic writer, by any means, I know the way I write was shaped more by fanfiction and than actual novels.
I think so much of it has to do with how fanfiction is written in a way that feels real. conversations carry in a way that doesn’t feel forced and is like actual interactions. Thoughts stop in the middle of sentences.
The coherency isn’t lost, it just marries itself to the reader in a different way. A way that shapes that reader/writer and I find that so beautiful.
FASCINATING
and it poses an intellectual question of whether the value we assign to fanfic conversational prose would translate at all to someone who reads predominantly contemporary literature. as writers who grew up on the internet find their way into publishing houses, what does this mean for the future of contemporary literature? how much bleed over will there be?
we’ve already seen this phenomenon begin with hot garbage like 50 shades, and the mainstream public took to its shitty overuse of conversational prose like it was a refreshing drink of water. what will this mean for more wide-reaching fiction?
I’m sure someone could start researching this even now, with writers like Rainbow Rowell and Naomi Novik who have roots in fandom. (If anyone does this project please tell me!) It would be interesting to compare, say, a corpus of a writer’s fanfic with their published fiction (and maybe with a body of their nonfiction, such as their tweets or emails), using the types of author-identification techniques that were used to determine that J.K. Rowling was Robert Galbraith.
In an earlier discussion, Is French fanfic more like written or spoken French?, people mentioned that French fanfic is a bit more literary than one might expect (it generally uses the written-only tense called the passé simple, rather than the spoken-only tense called the passé composé). So it’s not clear to what extent the same would hold for English fic as well – is it just a couple phrases, like “toeing out of his shoes”? Are the google results influenced by the fact that most published books aren’t available in full text online? Or is there broader stuff going on? Sounds like a good thesis project for someone!
You may also notice that, because modern fanfiction, at least, is formatted differently from published books, there are structural choices that work better in fanfiction than they do in published works. Fanfiction is generally published sans indent, single spaced with a space between paragraphs. That means that doing things like having a number of short/one-word/cut off lines works far better in fanfiction than it would in a published novel. For example, in one of my fics, I have:
He slows to take a turn
and he’s chained up by his arms
and there’s a honk as he veers into the other lane
as water is poured down his throat and he chokes
Something like this would likely not be possible in a published novel. Similarly, people will go back and forth between either POVs or timelines/times between paragraphs or very short scenes through the use of italics or obvious line breaks in a way that would likely be much more confusing in a published novel. I do find myself using different structural choices between my original fics and my fanfiction for this very reason. So it’s not just the language we’re using but how we’re putting it together.
I’m lead to believe that a writing book called “The Bestseller Code” (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01FVDGRB6/?coliid=I3Q5S594RG9LSF&colid=3D8A2I3G6XWE2&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it) might be relevant to this discussion. I haven’t actually read it, it’s on my list, but my understanding is that it dissects a number of bestsellers and looks for them commonalities to try and identify what a bestseller needs. And they basically had to have an entirely different take for 50 Shades (yes, hiss boo) because of its roots in fanfiction.
Up until now, it had been thought that the Botai culture were the first to domesticate horses, and that all domestic horses were descended from this stock. Now, it turns out that not only are modern horses probably not descended from Botai horses, but that Przewalski’s horse probably is. So not only are Przewalski’s horse as “wild” as mustangs, but horse domestication probably happened twice.
That Przewalski’s horse is feral is certainly a surprise, the finding that Botai culture horses aren’t the ancestor to modern domestic horses really isn’t. The domestication and spread of the horse is securely linked, archaeologically and linguistically, with the cultures of the Pontic-Caspian steppe (on the other side of the Urals from the Botai culture). In the late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age, these cultures developed a highly mobile pastoralist lifestyle based on horses and a marvelous new invention called the wheel (or, in their language, *kwekwlo-, which literally means something like turn-turn, and from which the English wheel descends). They then migrated out of the steppe into Europe, Anatolia, and Central Asia, bringing with them horses, wheels, metallurgy, and their early Indo-European languages, which would give rise to Germanic, Italic, Celtic, Baltic, Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Albanian, Armenian, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Tocharian, and Anatolian languages.
The Botai culture was contemporaneous with the earliest Pontic-Caspian horse tamers, but they didn’t seem to be part of the spread of horses throughout the Old World. These new findings actually make a lot of sense; the Botai culture was an entirely separate thing, and our horses all descend from the Pontic-Caspian horses. Perhaps Przewalski’s horse originated when the Botai people switched to using Pontic-Caspian horses and let their horse herds go free, or perhaps the Botai people were conquered, absorbed, or destroyed by Pontic-Caspian invaders, leaving their horse herds to go feral.
The Botai culture may have left another legacy besides Przewalski’s horse. Uralic is a language family whose proto-language was spoken by hunter-gatherers living in the taiga just north of the Eurasian steppes in the vicinity of (fittingly) the Ural mountains. Linguists have tried and failed to firmly establish that the Uralic languages are genetically related to Indo-European languages, but it is clear that proto-Uralic peoples and proto-Indo-Europeans (the Pontic-Caspian peoples) were in close contact, due to Indo-European loanwords into Uralic.
However, many Uralic languages have a cognate word for horse that isn’t Indo-European. It probably isn’t a native Uralic word, since horses weren’t native to the taiga that proto-Uralic speakers called home. It may be that that word was a loan from whatever language(s) the Botai culture spoke.
By “many Uralic languages”, you probably mean the Ugric languages: Hungarian, Mansi and Khanty (all the other languages either use clear Indo-European or Turkic loanwords, or have an etymologially unclear word with no cognates meaning ‘horse’ in any other language). A few of these words for ‘horse’ are ló (Hungarian), /luw/ (Mansi, northern), /lɑw/ (Khanty, Northern).
Geographically this is promising, but the chronological match is poor. The Botai culture was around 5000+ years
ago, the split of the Ugric languages from their relatives is usually approximated to be more like
3500 years ago. By this time the main parts of the steppe were already full of Indo-Iranians, and also the Tocharians were hanging out somewhere around Xinjiang. Also while both of these IE-speaking groups had the usual IE word for ‘horse’ (Indo-Iranian *aćwa, Tocharian *yɨkwe) — the Tocharian words for ‘animal’ are lu (Tocharian A), luwo (Tocharian B), which comes suspiciously close to the Ugric, close enough that this already makes a better etymology than speculating with derivation from a completely unknown languages such as that of the Botai.
We also know from history that the Hungarians were still steppe nomads up to about 1000 years ago. As for Mansi and Khanty, they are today spoken in southwestern Siberia, but e.g. oral history, mythology and a few other items of horse vocabulary shared with Hungarian (’saddle’, ‘stallion’, ‘horsehair’ etc.) suggests that they were introduced there by one or more nomadic groups, who probably assimilated into the indigenous population but left them their languages. Also, Uralic languages moreover tend to replace the names of “important animals” (prey such as elk, wild reindeer; predators such as wolf, bear) with euphemisms. So what’s the animal par excellence for horse-riding steppe nomads? Going to be the horse, I would wager. If former Uralian hunter-gatherers switching to the steppe lifestyle are going to taboo the name of one animal, the horse is probably it.
tora42's nonsensne 