To be fluent in another language means that you can communicate with relative ease, that is, without it being a real strain on either the speaker or the listener. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, is fluent in English, despite the fact that you can hear he is not a native speaker and that he may, on occasion, use the word “delicious” when he probably meant to say “delightful”.
Pretty much anyone can become fluent in pretty much any language at pretty much any age. It’s not even true that young children learn languages faster than older children or adults: if you expose different age groups to the same amount of instruction in a foreign language, the older ones invariably do better, both initially and in the long run. Learners of any age can achieve a brilliant, even nativelike, command of the vocabulary of another language, including such challenging structures as idioms or proverbs.
The puzzling thing about older learners – something the authors of the new study also found – is that they seem to have more problems mastering some, but not all, grammatical phenomena.
A good example for this is the fact that, in English, most verbs have to have an “s” added to them in the third person singular: so it’s I/you/we/they walk but he/she walks. Many second language learners keep getting even such comparatively simple grammar rules wrong, even though they may have an amazing command of vocabulary. However, it seems that if you learn the language at a younger age, you have an easier time mastering the kinds of structures that older learners keep struggling with, and the same is true for acquiring a native-like accent.
GIFs in general comprise single looped images, but fans often create more complex GIF sets, which are “sets of images, sometimes animated, sometimes not, arranged in a grid of sorts to communicate as a whole” that have “evolved primarily on Tumblr, where the interface allows for easy juxtaposition of multiple animated or still gifs” (Stein 2016). The dominance of this use of GIFs and GIF sets on Tumblr takes narrative moments out of time and out of their place in a narrative. They are instead replayed and looped in ways that can change meaning or render visible moments that were hidden until images or sequences were slowed down and reworked in the GIF format. Tumblr’s modes of reblogging and the infinite scroll means that the constant repeat viewing of the same content can be therapeutic as a result of the physical act of repetition. Such viewing works to assuage fannish anxieties, helping fans cope.
concept: the year is 2034. i walk into work with coffee in hand. coworker is wearing cool shoelaces and i compliment them absentmindedly. they look me dead in the eye and say, “thanks, i stole them from the president.” scalding coffee leaks out of every one of my orifices and i hide in the bathroom convulsing for the rest of the day
it is physically painful to remember that people have continued to join tumblr since 2012 and that there are people–perhaps people reading this! right now!!!–who don’t have the foggiest memory of this fucking post. this post haunted me, do you understand, i saw and heard this code used in REAL FUCKING LIFE, I CANT FKJCLNG HANDLE THIS
the sorrow you feel when someone’s Tumblr description is “I’m just here to reblog kitty gifs” but the most recent posts on the blog are all 87 rebuttals deep into furious Discourse
This is something I’ve been mulling over for a while now, but I think I know why the whole ‘anti’ thing on here never really had a snowball’s chance in hell of ensnaring me, at least not as an adult. Because my approach to fandom and fannish activities is fundamentally different than that of a substantial number of younger people on Tumblr. To them, fandom’s both primary and overriding function is that of an activism space. Whereas either twenty years ago or now, my approach has always been:
Fandom is for pleasure.
I’m not saying that it can’t or shouldn’t also be a space for activism – it often is for me as well. What I’m saying is that my primary motivation when approaching fannish activity isn’t activism in and of itself. It’s being pleased. The two aren’t diametrically opposed. To wit:
I ship queer ships because that’s what pleases me, that’s what makes me happy;
I scowl at love triangles and write polyamory instead because I had shoddily-written, eye-rolling-inducing, heteronormative love-triangles shoved down my throat for years and now can’t stand them, whereas poly ships make me grin from ear to ear;
I read and write about politically powerful, complex, conflicted, morally gray women because I love them and went through a dearth of them in far too many mediums
So on and so forth. You might be wondering why I’m even pointing this out and going ‘both roads lead to the same thing for you, same difference.’ Not exactly – and Tumblr itself is amply showing the difference. By not basing my approach solely on a form of activism, I’m effectively not limiting myself in the kinds of things I read or write or enjoy. Not all my queer ships need be all fluff and sunshine and rainbows and healthiness. Not all my women protagonists need be shining beacons of morality (most aren’t). I’m a lifelong educator when it comes to consent culture, but that doesn’t mean I’m obligated to renounce my ravishment fantasies, either in my head, my reading or when practiced in the consensual, communication-first environment of a kinky relationship.
The difference came into sharp focus for me a few months ago, when a post written against the Prince Lotor/Lance pairing of Voltron went something along the lines of ‘shipping this abusive ship is bad because it’s horrible representation for MLM!’ The bedrock assumption underlying the whole thing was that all fannish activity had a moral duty to exist for the express purpose of validation and good representation. Therefore Lotor/Lance wasn’t seen as something in bad taste, to give an example, but rather as a moral failing. This clashes head-on with my own approach, because I’ll ship healthy, meant-to-aspire to dynamics when they please me – but I also go for messy, broken, terrible ones when they also please me.
For me, the overriding question in fandom isn’t ‘what is the most Perfectly Progressive Thing here so I can focus on that.’ It’s ‘what’s the Thing That Pleases Me Most in here.’ That the progressive things largely end up overlapping with what makes me happy is due to my experiences with marginalization and all its associated shit. This, however, doesn’t change the fact that the non-overlap section also includes other things that do it for me (that cater to my kinks, to my darker preferences when it comes to fiction, etc).
The disconnect, I think, comes from the fact that for me (and other older people who’ve also done a lot of hands-on activism work out in meat-space) fandom has always been a place to temporarily break away from how bleak and fuckingexhausting activism can get – to relax and unwind and just lose ourselves for a while, when our IRL projects seem to just be spinning their wheels in the mud. Fandoms that are nothing but activism spaces, where everything must be sanitized and pre-approved and healthy and Pure are a nightmare for me specifically because it would mean I’d have to live my life primarily as an activist 24/7, until I’m completely burnt out.
However, a lot of young people on here haven’t done any on-the-ground activism work – their first meeting with activism was on the Internet and in fandoms and the only place where they could stretch their legs as activists was fandom. Therefore, they take this one step farther and naturally view fandom as primarily a place for activism. I don’t even have to describe how horribly that clashes with what I described above – you can see it at work on Tumblr every day, in the myriad of posts going ‘how dare you ship this?!’ or ‘how dare you get off on that?!?!’ or ‘how dare you support this kink!’
This is why it’s so difficult for a lot of people of my age to find any common-ground with antis. Our starting points are radically different and even when we have more in common than different in regard to fannish preference, we’ll still never see eye to eye, because whole sections of this place have taught themselves that it’s a supposedly horrid thing to approach fandom from any angle that’s not based on a very strict, narrow sort of morality.
So much this.
And a lot of the rhetoric doesn’t help, because the rhetoric is full of shit like “well people who ARE [marginalized identity] don’t get to take breaks from this!”
Except that, like. For JUST a personal example: as a queer, disabled, neuroatypical, mentally ill woman? I am most often here to get away from having to deal with being all of those things. (And sometimes, sure, that does in fact mean writing about people who do not share any of my identity markers because then I get to stop thinking about this shit.)
I want to read a trashy shippy piece of fiction without having to think about the realities or the underlying power dynamics or whatever the fuck, and sometimes that means just … ignoring them for a while. Among other things.
So no, you cannot make that assumption and you cannot make that blanket statement. Often we are here to try and take a break from dealing with that shit. It’s not simple.
@paticle 