10 Answers2026-07-29
I'd say it's a good sign, but with a huge asterisk regarding the rest of his behavior. Does he seek you out? Does he remember things you told him? Does his body language open up when you're around him? One wink is a flash in the pan, but consistent attention and memory is a steady flame that you can rely on. Use the wink as a clue, not the entire mystery.
8 Answers2026-04-09
I was curious to see how other famous phrases originated. ‘Let them eat cake’ is perhaps the most famous and is often attributed to Marie Antoinette. ‘Jump the shark’ is also well known and has a fairly solid origin story too. Our digital folk lore phrases are quite the opposite. The majority of them are shrouded in mystery, lost in the obscurity of the internet, deleted from servers forever. This phrase ‘Slap an Idiot Day’ is a great example of a truly communal piece of folklore. In a way, it’s even more special that it has no known origin, a little mystery that is left to the community to unravel.
All of us use this phrase, all of us recognize it and none of us can claim to have coined it. It’s a pure expression of our collective id. It would be against nature to try to establish the origin of this phrase. Its power stems from the fact that it is untraceable, it appears to have always been there, between our screens and our frustrations.
3 Answers2025-06-30
'Apology, A / Smile' (visited May 7, 2016) -- A dental emergency plus teenage insecurity equals an amusing middle school story. In 'Smile,' Raina's dental mishap draws attention to all of her already existing flaws and her bout with pain and humiliation triggers typical bullying behavior by both kids and grown ups alike. A really satisfying resolution, not a neat fix for all of the story's tension and no change in popularity status, comes when finally Raina learns to draw and ultimately come to terms with her newly "different" self.
The support of her family is felt throughout the book but never in a saccharine way. They tease her in a gentle manner but also give her space and are angry with her when she needs them to be. Raina’s growth throughout the book is such that she eventually finds peace by not conforming to others' ideas of normal. The final panels of the book are of Raina smiling with her braces, indicating that she has finally found happiness not because her teeth are perfect but because she has finally stopped waiting for them to be.
9 Answers2025-07-16
Just as there are different interpretations of a Beethoven symphony – period-instruments performance, lush orchestral recording from mid-20th century, piano transcription, etc. – all playing the same notes but with a different timbre, tempo and overall ‘feel’ to them, Garnett being the grand, romantic orchestral recording of Beethoven’s work from the mid-20th century, P&V a period-instruments version of Beethoven’s work often jarring but attempting to be historically accurate, McDuff a crisp and clear digital recording of Beethoven’s work, Avsey being a passionate live performance of Beethoven’s work, etc. – none of them are objectively better than the others; they’re all just different interpretations of the work, and which one to go for will depend on what you’re looking for in music and/or prose.
9 Answers2025-03-20
So this is either about using secrets in fiction or in online discourse, and I can imagine that the former could easily be translated to the latter, but in stories, secrets generally function as plot points of high dramatic value. They are often the moment when the reader gasps and throws their hand up over their mouth. Secrets are just pure concentrated drama. In fiction, secrets are great because they make me so angry when they are revealed in the worst possible way and then I get to be so happy when the character seeks revenge. I love to hate when an author uses secrets this way because it instantly makes me care about the character and then I’m invested in their quest for revenge.
8 Answers2025-03-20
Many people resist the changes in language used to refer to sex, but it is an area that has evolved significantly over the past hundred years. Writers from the past often used euphemism, and were often restricted by the constraints of Victorian prudishness. Today’s writer has the opposite problem: such language can seem to be affected or even silly. So writers have reverted to using straightforward language to refer to sex in order to be authentic. The expression “Dick me down” is an example of this current. It is based upon a very recent, perhaps short-lived, part of the English language and thus is of interest to historians in order to gauge whether it will be found to be a temporary phenomenon or a permanent addition to the language.
5 Answers2026-07-28
Ultimately you have to rely on your gut feeling of how something felt in the moment you read it. Was it warm and friendly or cold and critical? Or perhaps it was the most neutral of communications and simply passed you by? Our instinctive gut feeling when reading online in real-time is usually way more accurate than any subsequent analysis we come up with afterwards. Our minds can quite easily make up a justification for something after the event has passed, but our initial, immediate gut feeling usually hits the nail on the head in terms of how we actually felt about something in that moment. Our subconscious mind will have picked up on all the tiny micro-cues and processed them before our conscious mind can even list them, so go with your first feeling – if it felt good, then it probably was; if it felt strange then it probably was too.
8 Answers2025-03-14
The term ‘dicked down’ is used as an extremely direct slang term, similar to being ‘hooked up’ or ‘slept with’. However, while those terms can be somewhat vague as to what exactly happened between the two individuals, ‘dicked down’ is not. The term is commonly used in an extremely heterosexual manner and refers to penetrative sex of some kind or another. It is often used to denote a somewhat transactional or very physical connection, which lacks any sort of romanticism. As such, you are unlikely to come across the term in a romance novel and it is far more at home in a gritty urban fantasy, in a rap verse, or in a very edgy contemporary drama trying to gain a genuine insight into a particular subculture and using the most appropriate language to do so.
6 Answers2026-07-29
A tool is a tool. Write a scene of intense physical passion in which the protagonist loses fine motor skills? “Buck” her hips. It’s not a polite phrase in isolation, but it serves a useful function in a scene that is trying to move quickly. A reader reads very fast in such scenes, and your ear for your own writing must recognize that “bucked” immediately conveys to the reader a physical image and the sum of its parts: that she has lost control. It is a workhorse phrase, and in its proper context, it functions beautifully. (This is a workhorse phrase, in fact. Workhorse.)
10 Answers2025-03-20
The internet is also a reminder of the worst aspects of language. You can be admiring a cute cat playing the piano on YouTube within minutes, and then spend hours scrolling through the worst of the worst on etymology of intensely sexist Jamaican cursing. Information is power. But the worst part is that once you have learned something, you cannot “unlearn” it. This particular “word” does not serve any positive purpose. Learning it does not make one a more complete or wise individual in any way. It merely provides another term for hatred that can be added to one’s vocabulary.
This word is one of nothing but harm to most people’s lives. It adds nothing good to the lexicon of someone who learns it. All it does is further pollute the vocabulary of the mind of someone who speaks it. Sometimes I wish that things were still the way they were. Such knowledge was kept within the community that had full comprehension of its power and evil. It was not disseminated to everyone on the planet to be further watered down. Not everything needs to be a Wikipedia entry. Some words are best kept local. They should have power and consequences that are understood completely by the speaker of that word or words. Not a trivia question for the rest of the world.