Talkin' crap

So… a needle pulling thread.

No, wait… so, last night I'm up playing online games and watching Eddie Izzard routines on Netflix and searching for some electronic Arabic/English dictionaries I don't have to pay for just and generally being a total 21st century internet zombie. Around this time Eddie starts talking about latin. Of course, we're Americans and haven't learned latin in schools since, oh, what? What is today? Oh, right, ever. Still, we have some general background of what it would be like if we cared about anything that didn't happen on American Idol and had an attention span longer than… ooh, a butterfly!

Latin, latin, it's a fucked up kind of language. I know because some transvestite standup comic told me. But like many languages it has not only the usual past, present, and future tenses but masculine and feminine, too. But English doesn't. Alright, there's some basic his and hers, but we don't assign gender to things. Boats, yeah, I'll give you that. Cars sometimes. But not so far as to have different words for male or female cars. It's "car", not "caro" or "cara" and the like. Nobody is getting the crap beaten out of them for referring to some guy's Nike's in the feminine tense (Nika's?).

So I start wondering if that's why America really took the lead in women's rights? Well, us and the Brits. They had female rulers long before we had a Constitution. Still, English speakers. America really took the lead in giving women the vote. And I'm gonna keep believing that so long as I don't look as history books or stop writing crap like this at 1:30 in the morning.

The Brits came up with Chivalry (as far as I know). Of course, it wasn't so much about opening doors as it was about not shoving random pesant women into the mud and raping them. Yeah, it sucked to be women back in the mud ages. And pretty much anytime, for that matter. But, yeah, bad time to be a woman and a much better time to be rich, armored, and male.

Could it be that the women's rights movement got a better foothold here than in other countries because gender division isn't built right into the language. Not as much anyway. Yes "man" is still part of "woman", but we all wear jeans, not jeans and jeans.

Nah, it probably has much more to do with the fact that the whole damn country was established around freedom from oppressive ideas like religious dogma, slavery, and eventually even gender roles.

Ignore all this crap.