the short answer is: every poet. but here’s a brief (ok, that’s a lie. this is really long) list i typed up during accounting instead of learning about accounting for inter-corporate investments
John Donne Who wins: you look, most of donne’s repertoire is terrible love poems or terrible poems about religion, or both. someone needs to fight him, and you’ll probably win. the only problem with fighting him is that the entire time he’ll just be thinking ‘haha, who wilt be laughing when i livest eternally in the blessed light of the Lord???’ or something so fuck him.
Shakespeare Who wins: shakespeare shakespeare was an actor back when actor was one step up from thug, if that. if you fight shakespeare you will lose. the only things you get out of it is the knowledge that you touched shakespeare and the satisfaction of rubbing it in oxfordians’ noses just how wrong they are
Basho Who wins: who cares? why would you fight basho? he wrote quiet gentle poems about flowers and seasons. don’t fight basho. jump back a few centuries and fight sei shonagon and she’ll put you down in her list of things that annoyed her
Villon Who wins: villon Here’s what we know about villon: he wrote a lot of poetry (where are the snows of yesteryear??) and he did a lot of crime. i know the temptation to fight the french is strong, and the temptation to fight french poets is even stronger. but don’t fight villon. he’ll probably kill you.
Dante Who wins: you Dante can’t even get to hell without getting virgil to help him??? dante if a self-respecting poet can’t even go to hell without a guide what self-respect can he really have (definitely fight virgil but the latin poets merit a whole other post on their own)
Blake Who wins: it’s a toss-up Really this depends on how buff and sexy you are. not because it’ll help you take him down easier. but given from blake’s loving depictions of sexy satan, i’m pretty sure if you’re swole enough and you flex he’ll be distracted enough for you to take him down easily
Alexander Pope Who wins: pope I get it. Everyone wants to fight pope. the guy wrote the frickin dunciad. on the other hand: pope literally poisoned a guy, and then wrote about it, just because the guy kept publishing his poems without permission. don’t fight pope unless you’re willing to sit through days of vomiting and nausea and potential death
Lord Byron Who wins: byron Byron also desperately needs to be fought. on the other hand: dude wanted to be an actual soldier and he fought in duels and shit, could probably take you in a fistfight. alternately if you want to take him down vicariously just read ogden nash ripping apart the destruction of sennacherib
John Keats Who wins: you Don’t fight junkets. he was a gentle soul, and he died young. be kind.
Wordsworth Who wins: you You’ll probably win this fight, considering how much time william spends thinking about flowers. on the other hand: dorothy will never invite you back for tea at their beautiful lake district home again, so is it really worth it
Anne Bradstreet Who wins: probably mistress bradstreet PLEASE fight anne bradstreet. her poetry sucks. on the other hand, her reaction to her house burning down was to write a poem talking about how she’s totally fine with it because it’s what god wants. this is a capital P puritan we’re talking about here. there’s no way you come out on top, but someone’s gotta fight her
Alfred, Lord Tennyson Who wins: DOES IT MATTER? (you) SOMEONE FIGHT TENNYSON reasons to fight tennyson: he’s a member of the british nobility. really that’s all you need but also i hate his poetry
Walt Whitman Who wins: you, probably Whitman could probably take you he tried hard enough but really he’s just here to have a good time
Emily Dickinson Who wins: you Why would you fight emily dickinson? why would you do that? she’s shy and she likes bugs. she uses – too many – dashes – but that’s hardly a reason to pummel a gal
Stephen Crane Who wins: crane crane wrote a poem about some dude in a desert taking great big bites out of his own bitter heart, so obviously hes got some repressed demons here. don’t fight stephen crane.
Rainer Maria Rilke Who wins: you, probably Rilke was a sad dude. he suffered, and he thought a LOT of time thinking about death. i mean, i think about death a lot, and rilke almost certainly thought about death even more than i did. so you’ll probably win this fight, but at what cost?
Wilfred Owen Who wins: owen look, owen was a fuckin soldier. don’t fight any of the WWI poets basically, they’ve all got ptsd and also lots of repressed anger at the government-bourgeoisie for sending them into battle in the first place
Sylvia Plath Who wins: no one here’s how this goes down: you’ll probably kill plath, which was her plan all along. so she’ll be dead, and you’ll go to jail. don’t fight sylvia plath.
Charles Baudelaire Who wins: toss-up it depends on how sober he is at the time. baudelaire was a layabout who spent his money on prostitutes and clothes and alcohol. his poetry is good, but anyone who titles anything “spleen and ideal” needs a good solid punch. pull yourself together, man!!! you have like seven STDs!!!!!!
Langston Hughes Who wins: hughes all of langston hughes’ poetry is about how the world is terrible to him but he’s still fighting. why would you fight langston hughes?? do you have ANY degree of reading comprehension?
William Carlos Williams Who wins: you this is just to say / i have read your poems / with the shitty sexual metaphors / forgive me / they were assigned reading in school / also your apologies suck
Shel Silverstein Who wins: him all i know about shel silverstein is from the pictures of him on the back of his books and im pretty sure they terrified all of us when we were young. his feet are SO BIG and he is SO BALD. don’t fight shel silverstein.
W. B. Yeats Who wins: you why would you fight yeats? look, the fact that you COULD doesn’t mean you SHOULD. yeats brought the western world gitanjali, yk. if you fight him you gotta fight tagore
Alan Ginsberg Who wins: who cares please fight alan ginsberg
Robert Frost Who wins: you Frost probably has some experience pummeling people but his adherence to rhyme scheme makes his moves predictable and weak
TS Eliot Who wins: does it matter? someone needs to fight eliot. he’s had it coming. so whoever’s going to fight him, HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
@readmeseymore You were correct, this is the greatest thing I’ve seen all week.
“Martha Washington often recalled the two saddest days of her life. The first was December 14, 1799 when her husband died. The second was in January 1801 when Thomas Jefferson visited Mount Vernon. As a close friend explained, “She assured a party of gentlemen, of which I was one…that next to the loss of her husband” Jefferson’s visit was the “most painful occurrence of her life.”
please note that george washington was martha washington’s second husband, so her rank potentially went 1) george dying, 2) jefferson in her house, 3) first husband dying.
this was removed from tumbrl due to “violating one or more of Tumblr’s Community Guidelines”, but since my wish came true the first time, I’m putting it back. 🙂
This is unutterably fantastic, but … I don’t understand why it’s silly to have a word for the fourth stomach of a ruminant? I mean, actually in use today we have words for all four? (And they are: rumen, reticulum, omasum and abomasum, just in case you were wondering). It is my understanding that tripe, the food, is only made from one or two of the stomachs, so you’d need to know which one to keep, so you need a name for it if you’re a butcher! And if you’re a farmer with sick stock, you need to be able to communicate with the vet about things like blockages in your cow’s gut (cows will eat stupid things and get bunged up – I saw a cow eat a bra once).
Also actually they’re stomach compartments, but y’know, I think I’ve been pedantic enough!
PS I really do like this post I just can’t help myself on the subject of anatomy.
Right, well, since someone else has been pedantic before: most of these except for rhotacism and lingible (and of course defenestration) are words that, at some point or in some place, would have been useful everyday word! With the exception of those three, they sound funny partly because they’re no longer in common use (we no longer fear that people might falsely arrive by sea and pretend to be destitate… no wait yes we do, we just call them “boat people” instead), but also partly because they are formed from native anglo-saxon roots. They’re low-class words for low-class things. (Overmorrow and Eremorrow not so much – they’re funny just because the prefix has been swapped)
The exceptions on that list, rhotacism, lingible and defenestration are funny not because they’re more germanic than we’re used to but because they’re latinate or greek in origin. None come via medieval french, so they haven’t had time to soften and morph into the local language – because they’re rarely used outside specialist contexts.
Rhotacism has been used to refer to speech defects which primarily affect the -r- sound but the word was coined to describe the process by which some languages turn -s- into -r- as they adopt words. High German is particularly notable for this, thus the term was first seen in German (formed from a byzantine greek word) before moving into English. It’s extremely nifty to know there’s a word for this, but it’s not surprising there is a word – it’s exactly as useful as, say, ‘heteronormativity’ or ‘transubstantiation’: it expresses a complex concept in a single word, very specifically, to in-group speakers (in the case of Rhotacism, linguists; in the case of heteronormativity, a mix of queer people, gender scholars, tumblr denizens, and anyone else likely to participate in a complex discussion about gender and/or sexuality; for transubstantiation, catholics and religious scholars); when dealing with out-group speakers it will need to be expressed in simpler terms at least once.
Defenestration: as far as I can tell, all the cited examples of this in the OED refer specifically to the Defenestration of Prague (or one of them): actual political showdowns in which people got thrown out windows in Prague. The word is easy to form from latin, de-fenestra, and seems initially to have been used humorously in English – by people amused that an actualfax historical event culminated in window-throwing – but is now used perfectly seriously to refer to said event. The second of the two, in 1618, was a prelude to a major war, so you can see why people would keep talking about it.
Lingible: now the OED has only one citation for this, from in 1618. It’s perfectly easy to form in any romance language, from Latin lingere (same root that gives us cunnlingus, fun fact!). That 1618 citation is from a book of pharmacology, describing how medicines may be consumed: some are lingible. Clearly the word didn’t catch on, but in 1618 anyone concerned with pharmacology could be reliably assumed to know the Latin root word. (I mean, yes, he COULD have said lickable, but academic texts of that period are littered with improbable loan-words: it’s only very, very recently that ‘plain english’ has become prized). Perhaps even now scientists recognise it: i found a few citations in googlebooks to do with immunology: ‘lingible bodies’ seem to be a thing.
Does English have more weird words than other languages? Maybe so, but if so, that’s down to two things: linguistic history and specialisation, and the OED.
Firstly, English has a huge vocabulary because of how Norman French hit Anglo-Saxon at a dead run and they shattered and multiplied. The end result was in many cases a doubled vocabulary – the famous cow/beef distinction, where the french word refers to the meat (eaten by francophone nobles) and the native word to the animal (raised by saxon farmers). But other examples of specialisation turn up that aren’t so clearly class related: skirt/shirt, where one is an anglo-saxon word for drapey garment and one a norse word, is a great example.
Then there’s the grammatical/syntactical impact: English almost completely lost its case system when it met French, and lost a lot of verb conjugations over the middle ages as well. That means it’s really easy to adopt new words into English. When a new word enters, say, Icelandic, it needs to be one that fits into the noun declension and/or verb conjugation patterns of the existing language. Icelandic cannot easily incorporate, say, Japanese words the way English can because it needs its words to fit its existing paradigms. Also, due to having lost so much of its native grammatical structure, it’s really easy to coin new words in English by moving them from class to class. Don’t have a noun for this? Borrow a verb! Need a verb? Verbalize an adjective! This is not equally easy in all languages.
And secondly, the OED. Bless the OED. For a new word to “become” French it has to be approved by the Academie Francaise, who take an active role in curating the language. There’s the infamous ‘le weekend vs le fin-de-semaine’ case, for instance. The early lexicographers of English were curatorial – Webster, for instance, set about systematically standardising spelling, and that’s why Americans will be cringing that I didn’t put a z in standardize, but brits would cringe if I did.
But the OED, my friends, was from the outset a descriptive dictionary. One reason it took so bloody long to finish the first editin was that it set out not to proscribe words that ought to be known but to describe everything they could conceivably get their hands on. So English has more of these weird medieval and early modern rare words kicking around in its Official Dictionary than many other languages have. (Eg: yerd. Yerd does not belong on that list of ‘weird words English has’, it’s a bloody MIDDLE ENGLISH word, no one’s used it since the 13th century! It is not a word that could conceivably be used now, or even in 1600!)
I thought I was gonna go to bed early tonight but I guess not
hey friend you just unleashed my nerdy wrath buckle up
short answer: no, I know r&j is a tragedy and I read it as such. Shakespeare didn’t write “romances”, at least not in the sense you mean (some people call his later stuff that’s harder to put into a genre ‘romances’, such as the winter’s tale and the tempest)
so no I’m not a moron thanks
here’s the long answer:
I presume you’re “one of those people” who likes to count themselves as the Specialest Snowflake In All The Land because they don’t buy into the fake cheesy idea of //romance// that everyone else so blindly believes
maybe you like to talk about how romeo and juliet were “just horny teenagers”, how they knew each other for three days, how romeo so loved rosaline thirty seconds before spotting juliet, so clearly he’s fickle and silly. they weren’t actually in love, they were just teenage idiots. because only stupid girls buy that stuff. you’re more mature than that. am I right?
well, here’s the thing, sunshine- you aren’t special. I hear this same damn argument right down to the last word every time I mention my love of this play and it ENRAGES me every time because 99% of the time this is coming from /other teenagers/. other young people talking about how this isn’t a story to be taken SERIOUSLY. it’s silly and frivolous and unrealistic. they don’t realize that this play is dedicated to them.
and it’s criticizing people just like you.
while I do believe that these two young people were soul mates (I’ll get to that later), I don’t really think this is a story about love. it’s a story about /passion/- how love and hate are only a hair’s breadth apart and their overwhelming capacity for healing or for destroying. the emotion that drives mercutio to defend romeo from tybalt. what drives mercutio to be killed at his hand. what pushes formerly docile, dreamy romeo to slay his cousin in law: it all begins to seem like the same continuous passion, enflaming the same group of people on the hottest day of the year.
as a result, love isn’t a pretty thing in this play. it’s linked inextricably to death, to murder, to chaos. love is presented as the most dangerous force in the universe. it leaves five bodies in its wake, and then at the end (people forget this) it’s what finally brings the ancient feud to an end. it’s not silly. it’s not frivolous. o brawling love, o loving hate.
and who are the conductors of this unstoppable force? who sets verona burning and then rebuilds it better in under a week?
kids.
people with a shitty understanding of this play who love to dismiss it and downplay it like to call it a “cautionary tale”- why you shouldn’t think with your dick, why you should grow up and not be so rash, be sensible.
I agree with part of this. it is a cautionary tale. but it’s directed at YOU.
you, who devalue youth. you, who underestimate teenagers and what they’re capable of, who wave off their every thought or feeling with “just a kid”. who think that love is a pretty little silly thing and that no one under the age of 25 is capable of really experiencing it. that the kids don’t MATTER.
capulet thought it- he dismissed tybalt’s rage during the party as dumb kids throwing a hissy fit. he wrote juliet off as a child who should be seen and not heard, shuffled from her father to her husband, guided by the wisdom of those older and wiser than her.
in the world presented in the play, age has NOTHING to do with wisdom. the adults range from careless (montague) to helpless (lady capulet) to blithering (the nurse). the wisest character, the most eloquent and intelligent one with the most beautiful poetry, is fourteen year old juliet. (go back and read it. whose speeches are the most beautiful, sophisticated, complex? Juliet’s.)
okay, fine, you say. but they didn’t love each other, they just saw each other and got hot and bothered and wanted to jump the other’s bones! anyway, what about rosaline?!
I’ll address rosaline first:
shakespeare likes making fun of the poets of old (take for instance his “my mistress’ eyes” sonnet, a deliberate parody of the Petrarchan model of frilly love poetry). heres another example in romeo. when we first meet romeo he’s mooning over a girl in the frilliest, stalest, most formulaic verse imaginable. we get the feeling he’s enjoying himself, basking in his misery.
notice, though, that we never see rosaline on stage. she represents romeo’s vague infatuation with the //idea// of love, the pretty image he made up in his head from reading old poems. this not only creates an incredible arc in his character, but makes his love for juliet obviously the real deal by comparison. he meets juliet and his world goes into free fall; he’s rash and violent and impulsive, and the verse that was so stale and ingenuine before shifts into some of the most famous passionate poetry in the english language. in his first scene, he asks “is love a tender thing?” he falls in love with juliet- REAL love, not the kind in poems- and comes to answer his own question: no. no it fucking isn’t.
but, you say. but they CANT have loved each other! you don’t fall in love just by LOOKING at someone!
yeah, I know you don’t.
but here’s the thing. if you aren’t willing to suspend some modicum of disbelief, you won’t get anything from shakespeare. period.
we’re already assuming that these people just happen to walk around speaking in blank verse and rhyming couplet. the plot of hamlet relies on the existence of a ghost, a midsummer night’s dream on fairies, macbeth on witches, the tempest on magic, measure for measure on the friggin /bed trick/- is it SUCH A HORRIBLE STRETCH FOR YOUR CYNICAL POSTMODERN MIND TO MAKE that characters can identify their soulmates with a look? have we reached that level of lazy cynicism as a society that magical love flowers and vengeful ghosts are believable, where a woman can turn into a boy by shoving a hat over her hair and statues spring to life as deceased loved ones, but love at first sight (a very very common Elizabethan plot device; it’s /everywhere/ in shakespeare) is just too much of a stretch?
no one rolls their eyes at hamlet because “ghosts aren’t real. are you one of those people who believe in ghosts?” no- they take it for the plot device that it is in order to get to the message of the play as a whole, and the truths of the human conditions it reveals, with the help of some purely theatrical elements.
but kids in love. that’s far too silly.
it’s really fucking sad.
and questions like yours, anon? those make me really, really fucking sad.
bringing this back cuz someone tried to challenge me today
A Middleground 