“There Viktor held him, both counting seconds while their breaths tried to even out. He felt the heat in his cheeks, saw the blush in Yuuri’s; beads of sweat tangled in his hair. And those eyes. Those beautiful, dark, enchanting eyes that had held him ever since that first night at the banquet. “…E adesso ti bacierò.” He gave Yuuri just enough time to realize that those weren’t a continuation of lyrics before he pulled him closer, meeting him halfway with a kiss; his first in eight years.”
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!
Toeing out of one’s shoes may be a fanfic trend, but toeing them off is in the Oxford English Dictionary:
[Image description: A screencap of the Oxford Dictionary’s web page for the word “toe.” The first definition for the verb “to toe” is [with object and usually with adverbial] push, touch, or kick with one’s toe: ‘he toed off his shoes and flexed his feet.’ ]
How it mutated from common usage “toed off” to fanfic usage “toed out” is a mystery that has been lost to time, but I felt like pointing out that it’s not something fanficcers invented out of whole cloth.
@deadcatwithaflamethrower This seems like the sort of discourse you’d be happy to jump in on…thoughts?
Well…the internet has sped up the evolution of language and word definitions and useage at a pace where linguists are basically screaming “WAIT WAIT WE CAN’T KEEP UP WITH THIS SHIT WHAT THE HELL GUYYYYYSSSSSSS–”
Take yes and yeah.
Yea. Yeh. Yas. Yis. Those last two? Those are very, very new, and yet they are EVERYWHERE. Before global communication, new terminology didn’t spread that fast.
rocky horror is the worst and is also transmisogynistic can we please finally get over this shit movie
ok but like the writer is transgender nonbinary and the language used in the play was the preferred language by trans people of that time can we not deny parts of our history because we’ve evolved since then thanks
So fucking much this.
PS, youth of today: you’ll be saying the same damn thing about art from this time before too long, for good or for ill. Terminology will, in fact, change. Definitions will, in fact, shift. It always does, they always do.
PPS, it is pretty much impossible to overstate how life-alteringly important this movie was to kids who didn’t conform to standard expectations of gender and sexuality, back in the day. Especially when back in the day was the mid-to-late 1980s, when the only queers you saw on TV were neutered AIDS tragedies, Bowie was playing straight, and even Elton John was married to a woman, and midnight showing of RHPS were pretty much the only place that felt like home. It was mental life raft for a lot of people.
I was one of them.
rocky horror was a lifeline.
y’all have NO IDEA how isolated we were before the internet, before mobile phones. imagine never having an unsupervised conversation with your friends. literally never. you were at school, or you were on the landline in the same room with your parents. imagine never having access to reading material that wasn’t mainstream-published. imagine never seeing a video that wasn’t network tv or hollywood. imagine every single bit of information you had access to being thoroughly filtered and vetted by the majority-mainstream. imagine all this under ronald reagan and margaret thatcher and the ussr and a divided germany, the cold war still threatening to go nuclear and violent religious extremists rising in the middle east, a bunch of dirty little wars festering in central and south america, china gutting mongolia, north korea defiantly starving to death…
it felt like the literal end of the world, and you were completely fucking alone.
and then there was this cultural phenomenon. this unapologetically senseless movie, morbid and silly and full of genderweird and catchy songs and cheesy tropes. the places that did the midnight showings were financially unimportant, out of the way, under the radar, and it was safe to be weird there. you could convince your parents to let you go because you’d go in a group, and since it was at a theater or college cultural center they knew you wouldn’t be drinking and doing drugs and having sex (Just Say No!) and you were technically under adult supervision – but the theater employees were generally college students and didn’t give a fuck as long as you didn’t wreck the place or get arrested.
you could dress up, you could be loud, you could play with gender, you could camp it up and let your hair down. you could be free. and for just one night of the week, you could forget that it was the end of the world.
too lazy; didn’t read: you’re talking out your ass and you need to clench up.
i went to a very open and sexually liberal performing arts highschool in the aughts like twenty years later, and RHPS was still a wonderful thing to experience as a teenager sorting out gender and sexuality issues. i was surrounded by girls trading yaoi comics and boys trading yuri comics and theater kids that had every line of RENT memorized. and i saw RHPS in ninth grade, i think, and made sure to go to showings nearly every year thereafter, at older friend’s parties and at college media screenings and outdoor park showings and in independent theaters. i still go when i can. i think everyone over fourteen or fifteen should. it’s a piece of history and it’s a very vibrantly alive and relevant cultural tradition, and the atmosphere is so weird and so welcoming, and the movie is so profoundly silly. it’s absurd to me that anyone could say we’re done with it.
Bolded, above. I was in uni just as the internet became a way to connect. It was still so new, not yet a part of our lives as fully as it is now.
RHPS was freedom. It was your neighbour’s roommate in gold hot pants and no apologies, being able to kiss your girlfriend in the middle of a crowd and not be attacked, it was corsets on DMABs and three-piece suits on DFABs, and everyfuckingthing was queered. Right there, on stage, in living colour.
It was amazing.
Don’t sneer at the old guard, kidlets. Every generation forges the media it needs at the time.
Always reblog this. Especially now at the 40th anniversary.
Reminder: I grew up in *Manhattan.* My parents, in the grand scheme of things, were pretty liberal and open and accepting.
I still desperately needed RHPS as my place to be weird and discover myself.
It was important, and that importance should not be discounted.
There’s a bit on Harrison Ford’s wikipedia page that says he once flew a helicopter to rescue a hiker suffering severe dehydration and all I can think about is how surreal that must have been for the hiker
You think you’re about to die, you’re dehydrated so you’re probably light headed/hallucinating anyway, and suddenly Han Solo is saving your life
