The pun is a misunderstood and often maligned form of comedy. Most of us, if you asked what we think of puns, would say we find them groan-worthy and associate them with dad jokes. But there’s so much you can do with language – it’s such a broad category of comedy that even if you think you can’t stand puns, there’s bound to be one out there for you too. Not to mention, dad jokes have actually been enjoying a surge of popularity in recent years.
Here are some posts that people shared on /r/puns as well as /r/PunPatrol, proving that wordplay is a thriving art. Some of the setups that people make just so they can take a picture of it and pun around might concern you. Others didn’t have to do anything, just find some poor sap who asked an innocent question and left themselves wide open.
Scroll down for some good and some so-bad-it’s-good wordplay.
Traveling is the perfect medium for experiencing different cultures complete with all sorts of art, music, crafts, and traditions. But visiting other countries is usually not just all roses.
With that idea in mind, artist Malachi Ray Rempen decided to share his traveling experience and situations in the form of fun comics dubbed “Itchy Feet Comic”. This weekly cartoon chronicle is mostly about travel, language learning, and life as an expat. It’s just about any bizarre situation you can imagine yourself in while traveling.
“Itchy Feet Comic deals with two very specific areas: language learning and traveling. One of the things I love about Itchy Feet Comic is the minute observations on the experiences that are so universal that you cannot help but say “That is so true!”” – says the artist.
So scroll the page and have a quick walk around the world!
Monster hits by K-pop bands and Spanish-speaking rappers show its not necessary to sing in English to conquer the world, says Caroline Sullivan who writes about music for the Guardian
A band has attained a certain stature when its world tour consists of an imperial sweep through four continents, with just half a dozen concerts in each. The South Korea-based girl group Blackpink are currently midway through just such a jaunt next month, they arrive in Europe to play six dates (London and Manchester included).
Remarkably, this high-visibility procession is the first time the K-pop quartet have toured outside Korea or Japan; more remarkable still, theyve released just one album and a scant handful of tracks and while theyve made English-language videos, most of their material is in Korean or Japanese. Nonetheless, theyre adored by a worldwide fanbase, for whom language is no barrier. Recent industry figures underline the strength of the global music market, with some suggesting the place of the English language at the forefront of pop is diminishing.
Blackpink, whose most streamed single, Ddu-du Ddu-du, has had 735m views on YouTube, are the latest manifestation of what is looking like a baseline change in how pop is conveyed. Until recently, English was its lingua franca, and to sing in any other language relegated an artist to the second tier, successful only in their own region, unless they had a rare border-crossing novelty hit.
But in 2018 a bubbling linguistic pot came to the boil when worldwide breakthroughs by the K-pop boybands BTS and Monsta X, and Spanish-speaking rapper/singers J Balvin, Ozuna and Bad Bunny, all of whom make a point of performing in their own languages, upended convention. Blackpinks album became the first by a female K-pop group to reach Americas top 40 chart, and the most streamed song globally of 2018s last quarter was DJ Snakes Spanish-language Taki Taki. The idea that the public would listen only if they understood the lyrics? Wrong, it turned out.
And Indias huge industry could be the next to see its artists claim new territory, writes Tim Ingham of Music Business Worldwide: Spotify is expected to launch in the territory in the coming weeks, with a heavy focus on striking up relationships with local artists. The firm recently inked a global content licensing deal with Indias biggest label, T-Series, which also happens to be the owner of the worlds second largest YouTube channel, with over 60.5 billion plays of its videos to date.
So, its farewell, then maybe to English as pops primary force. Perhaps it was inevitable: there are 7.5 billion people in the world, and only 5% 360 million are native Anglophones, meaning that it has ben punching far above its weight. The globalisation of pop feels, as do so many current cultural shifts, like a necessary redressing of the balance, and not an unwelcome one: having reviewed sold-out London shows by BTS and Monsta X last year, I can verify that you dont need to understand Korean to get it. (It helps that their music, and that of Blackpink, is an instantly recognisable tumult of electronic pop with rappy bits the musica franca of every teenager in the world.)
And yet not so fast. In listening to music, there are times when, for English speakers, only English will do. Its rhythms and intonations suit particular genres, notably rock and the singer-songwriter strand of indie, where wordplay and apt turns of phrase often crop up. Theres no real substitute, especially in gloomy moments, for listening to some familiar song and feeling that the songwriter knew exactly how you felt when they wrote those twisty little couplets. English might be ceding some of its supremacy, but the music businesss centre of gravity is still the US and the UK, and Anglophone musicians wont be turfed out of a job for a while yet.
Caroline Sullivan writes about rock and pop for the Guardian
The long read: For centuries, lexicographers have attempted to capture the entire English language. Technology might soon turn this dream into reality but will it spell the end for dictionaries?
In February 2009, a Twitter user called @popelizbet issued an apparently historic challenge to someone called Colin: she asked if he could mansplain a concept to her. History has not recorded if he did, indeed, proceed to mansplain. But the lexicographer Bernadette Paton, who excavated this exchange last summer, believed it was the first time anyone had used the word in recorded form. Its been deleted since, but we caught it, Paton told me, with quiet satisfaction.
In her office at Oxford University Press, Paton was drafting a brand new entry for the Oxford English Dictionary. Also in her in-tray when I visited were the millennial-tinged usage of snowflake, which she had hunted down to a Christian text from 1983 (You are a snowflake. There are no two of you alike), and new shadings of the compound self-made woman. Around 30,000 such items are on the OED master list; another 7,000 more pile up annually. Everyone thinks were very slow, but its actually rather fast, Paton said. Though admittedly a colleague did spend a year revising go.
Spending 12 months tracing the history of a two-letter word seems dangerously close to folly. But the purpose of a historical dictionary such as the OED is to give such questions the solemnity they deserve. An Oxford lexicographer might need to snoop on Twitter spats from a decade ago; or they might have to piece together a painstaking biography of one of the oldest verbs in the language (the revised entry for go traces 537 separate senses over 1,000 years). Well, we have to get things right, the dictionarys current chief editor, Michael Proffitt, told me.
At one level, few things are simpler than a dictionary: a list of the words people use or have used, with an explanation of what those words mean, or have meant. At the level that matters, though the level that lexicographers fret and obsess about few things could be more complex. Who used those words, where and when? How do you know? Which words do you include, and on what basis? How do you tease apart this sense from that? And what is English anyway?
In the case of a dictionary such as the OED which claims to provide a definitive record of every single word in the language from 1000AD to the present day the question is even larger: can a living language be comprehensively mapped, surveyed and described? Speaking to lexicographers makes one wary of using the word literally, but a definitive dictionary is, literally, impossible. No sooner have you reached the summit of the mountain than it has expanded another hundred feet. Then you realise its not even one mountain, but an interlocking series of ranges marching across the Earth. (In the age of global English, the metaphor seems apt.)
Even so, the quest to capture the meaning of everything as the writer Simon Winchester described it in his book on the history of the OED has absorbed generations of lexicographers, from the Victorian worthies who set up a Committee to collect unregistered words in English to the OEDs first proper editor, the indefatigable James Murray, who spent 36 years shepherding the first edition towards publication (before it killed him). The dream of the perfect dictionary goes back to the Enlightenment notion that by classifying and regulating language one could just perhaps distil the essence of human thought. In 1747, in his Plan for the English dictionary that he was about to commence, Samuel Johnson declared he would create nothing less than a dictionary by which the pronunciation of our language may be fixed, and its attainment facilitated; by which its purity may be preserved, its use ascertained, and its duration lengthened. English would not be merely listed in alphabetical order; it would be saved for eternity.
Ninety years after the first edition appeared, the OED a distant, far bulkier descendant of Johnsons Dictionary is currently embarked on a third edition, a goliath project that involves overhauling every entry (many of which have not been touched since the late-Victorian era) and adding at least some of those 30,000 missing words, as well as making the dictionary into a fully digital resource. This was originally meant to be completed in 2000, then 2005, then 2010. Since then, OUP has quietly dropped mentions of a date. How far had they got, I asked Proffitt. About 48%, he replied.
The dictionary retains a quiet pride in the lexical lengths to which it will indeed, must go. Some time in the late 1980s, Proffitts predecessor as chief editor, John Simpson, asked the poet Benjamin Zephaniah about the origins of the noun skanking. Zephaniah decided that the only way to explain was to come to OED headquarters and do a private, one-on-one performance. Skanking duly went in, defined as a style of West Indian dancing to reggae music, in which the body bends forward at the waist, and the knees are raised and the hands claw the air in time to the beat.
The tale touches something profound: in capturing a word, a sliver of lived experience can be observed and defined. If only you were able to catch all the words, perhaps you could define existence.
The first English dictionary-makers had no fantasies about capturing an entire culture. In contrast to languages such as Chinese and ancient Greek, where systematic, dictionary-like works have existed for millennia, the earliest English lexicons didnt begin to be assembled until the 16th century. They were piecemeal affairs, as befitted the languages mongrel inheritance a jumbled stew of old Anglo-Germanic, Norse, Latin and Greek, and Norman French.
The language was perplexing enough, but in the mid-1500s it was getting ever more confusing, as political upheavals and colonial trade brought fresh waves of immigration, and with it a babel of recently Englished vocabulary: words such as alcohol (Arabic via Latin, c1543) and abandonment (French, c1593). Scientific and medical developments added to the chaos. In 1582, the schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster issued a frantic plea for someone to gather all the wordes which we use in our English tung into one dictionarie. Such a book would stabilise spelling, a source of violent disagreement. Also, there would finally be rules for proper use.
In 1604, a clergyman named Robert Cawdrey attempted a stopgap solution: a slender book entitled A Table Alphabeticall. Aimed at Ladies, gentlewomen and other unskillful persons, it listed approximately 2,500 hard usuall words, less than 5% of the lexis in use at the time. Definitions were vague diet is described as manner of foode and there were no illustrative quotations, still less any attempt at etymology. A Table Alphabeticall was so far from being completist that there werent even entries for the letter W.
Johnsons Dictionary, eventually finished in 1755, was a heroic achievement. He corralled 43,500-odd words perhaps 80% of the language in use at the time. But in some eyes, not least the editors, the book was also a heroic failure. In contrast to the jaunty Enlightenment optimism of his 1747 Plan, with its talk of fixing and preservation, the preface to the published Dictionary is a work of chastened realism. Johnson explains that the idea of taming a fast-evolving creature such as the English language is not only impossible, but risible:
We laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay.
Much as lexicographers might fantasise about capturing and fixing meaning as Johnson had once fantasised a living language will always outrun them.
Still, the dream lingered. What if one could get to 100% lassoing the whole of English, from the beginning of written time to the present day? Numerous revisions or rivals to Johnson were proposed, though few were actually created. After a Connecticut schoolteacher named Noah Webster published his American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828 (70,000 entries), British pride was once again at stake.
In November 1857, the members of the London Philological Society convened to hear a paper by Richard Chenevix Trench, the dean of Westminster, entitled On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries. It was a bombshell: Trench argued that British word banks were so unreliable that the slate needed to be wiped clean. In their place, he outlined a true idea of a Dictionary. This Platonic resource should be compiled on scholarly historical lines, mining deep into the caverns of the language for ancient etymology. It should describe rather than prescribe, casting an impartial eye on everything from Anglo-Saxon monosyllables to the latest technical jargon (though Trench drew the line at regional dialect). Most of all, it should be comprehensive, honouring what Trench called glancing jealously at Germany, where the brothers Grimm had recently started work on a Deutsches Wrterbuch our native tongue.
The quest to capture the language in its entirety may have been centuries old, but, like a great railway line or bridge, this new dictionary would be thoroughly Victorian: scientific, audacious, epic and hugely expensive. Building it was a patriotic duty, Trench insisted: A dictionary is a historical monument, the history of a nation.
For the first two decades, the New English Dictionary, as it was called, looked as if it would go the way of so many previous projects. The first editor died a year in, leaving chaos in his wake. The second had more energy for young women, socialism, folksong and cycling. Only after it was taken over by Oxford University Press, who in 1879 were persuaded to appoint a little-known Scottish schoolteacher and philologist called James Murray as chief editor, did things begin to move.
There are no limits to the corpora that can be constructed: at a corpus linguistics conference in Birmingham last year, I watched researchers eavesdrop on college-age Twitter users (emojis have long since made laughter forms such as LOL and ROFL redundant, apparently) and comb through English judges sentencing remarks for evidence of gender bias (all too present).
For lexicographers, whats really thrilling about corpus linguistics is the way it lets you spy on language in the wild. Collating the phrases in which a word occurs enables you to unravel different shades of meaning. Observing how a word is misused hints that its centre of gravity might be shifting. Comparing representative corpora lets you see, for example, how often Trump supporters deploy a noun such as liberty, and how differently the word is used in the Black Lives Matter movement. Its completely changed what we do, the lexicographer Michael Rundell told me. Its very bottom-up. You have to rethink almost everything.
But while other dictionary publishers leapt on corpus linguistics, OED editors stuck to what they knew, resisting computerisation and relying on quotation slips and researchers in university libraries. In the 1970s and 80s there was little thought of overhauling this grandest of historical dictionaries, let alone keeping it up to date: it was as much as anyone could do to plug the original holes. When the OEDs second edition was published in March 1989 20 volumes, containing 291,500 entries and 2.4m quotations there were complaints that this wasnt really a new edition at all, just a nicely typeset amalgam of the old ones. The entry for computer defined it as a calculating-machine; esp an automatic electronic device for performing mathematical or logical operations. It was illustrated by a quotation from a 1897 journal.
By astonishing coincidence, another earthquake, far bigger, struck the very same month that OED2 appeared in print: a proposal by an English computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee for a large hypertext database with typed links. The world wide web, as it came to be called (OED dates the phrase to 1990), offered a shining path to the lexicographical future. Databases could be shared, and connected to one another; whole libraries of books could be scanned and their contents made searchable. The sum of human text was starting to become available to anyone with a computer and a modem.
The possibilities were dizzying. In a 1989 article in the New Yorker, an OUP executive said, with a shiver of excitement, that if the dictionary could incorporate corpus linguistics resources properly, something special could be achieved: a Platonic concept the ideal database. It was the same ideal laid out by Richard Chevenix Trench 132 years before: the English language over a thousand or more years, every single word of it, brought to light.
The fact that so much text is now available online has been the most cataclysmic change. Words that would previously have been spoken are now typed on social media. Lexicographers of slang have long dreamed of being able to track variant forms down to the level, say, of an individual London tower block, says the slang expert and OED consultant Jonathon Green; now, via Facebook or Instagram, this might actually be possible. Lexicographers can be present almost at the moment of word-birth: where previously a coinage such as mansplain would have had to find its way into a durable printed record, which a researcher could use as evidence of its existence, it is now available near-instantly to anyone.
Anyone, and anywhere when the OED was first dreamed up in the 1850s, English was a language of the British Isles, parts of North America, and a scattering of colonies. These days, nearly a quarter of the worlds population, 1.5bn people, speak some English, mostly as a second language except, of course, that it isnt one language. There are myriad regional variants, from the patois spoken in the West Indies and Pidgin forms of West Africa to a brood of compound offspring Wenglish (Welsh English), Indlish or Hinglish (Indian/Hindi English), and the Chinglish of Hong Kong and Macau. All of these Englishes are more visible now than ever, each cross-fertilising others at greater and greater speed.
The circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernible circumference, James Murray once wrote, but modern lexicographers beg to differ. Instead of one centre, there are many intersecting subgroups, each using a variety of Englishes, inflected by geographical background or heritage, values, other languages, and an almost incalculable number of variables. And the circumference is expanding faster than ever. If OED lexicographers are right that around 7,000 new English words surface annually a mixture of brand-new coinages and words the dictionary has missed then in the time youve been reading this, perhaps two more words have come into being.
Most people, of course, now never go near a dictionary, but simply type phrases into Wikipedia (used more often as a dictionary than an encyclopedia, research suggests) or rely on Google, which through a deal with Oxford Dictionaries offers thumbnail definitions, audio recordings of pronunciations, etymology, a graph of usage over time and translation facilities. If you want to know what a word means, you can just yell something at Siri or Alexa.
Dictionaries have been far too slow to adjust, argues Jane Solomon of Dictionary.com. Information-retrieval is changing so fast, she said. Why dont dictionaries respond intelligently to the semantic or user context, like figuring out that youre searching for food words, and give you related vocabulary or recipes? And not just words: Id love to include emojis; people are so creative with them. Theyve become a whole separate language. People sometimes need explanation; if you send your daughter the eggplant emoji, she might think thats weird.
Some have dared to dream even bigger than polysemous aubergines. One is a computer professor at the Sapienza University of Rome called Roberto Navigli, who in 2013 soft-launched a site called Babelnet, which aims to be the dictionary to beat all dictionaries in part by not really being a dictionary at all. Described as a semantic network that pulls together 15 existing resources including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Microsoft Terminology, it aims to create a comprehensive, hierarchical root map of not just English but of 271 languages simultaneously, making it the largest lexicon/encyclopedia/thesaurus/reference work on the web. Navigli told me that his real aim was to use semantic technology to enable the holy grail for software engineers everywhere: autonomous machine-reading of text. This is the dream, right? he said. The machine that can read text and understand everything we say.
Machines already understand a lot, of course. Some have talked of culturomics, a form of computational lexicology that uses corpus tools to analyse and forecast trends in human behaviour. A 31-month study of Twitter tried to measure the shifting sentiments of the British population about austerity, and there is even a claim somewhat disputed that a passively crowd-sourced study of global media could have foretold the Arab spring. At least on a large scale, computers, and the information giants who own and lease the data, may be able to comprehend language better than we comprehend it ourselves.
For lexicographers and Google alike, one linguistic frontier remains stubbornly inaccessible. Whereas its now easy to assemble written-text corpora and open a window on how language functions in a particular environment, doing so for spoken language has always been far harder. The reason is obvious: recording speech, then transcribing it and creating a usable database, is both time-consuming and hugely expensive. Speech corpora do exist, but are notoriously small and unrepresentative (its easy to work with court transcripts; far harder to eavesdrop on what lawyers say down the pub).
For lexicographers, speech is the most precious resource of all, and the most elusive. If you could capture large samples of it people speaking in every context imaginable, from playgrounds to office canteens to supermarkets you could monitor even more accurately how we use language, day to day. If we cracked the technology for transcribing normal conversations, Michael Rundell said, it really would be a game-changer.
For OEDs editors, this world is both exhilarating and, one senses, mildly overwhelming. The digital era has enabled Oxford lexicographers to run dragnets deeper and deeper through the language, but it has also threatened to capsize the operation. When youre making a historical dictionary and are required to check each and every resource, then recheck those resources when, say, a corpus of handwritten 17th-century letters comes on stream, the problem of keeping the dictionary up to date expands to even more nightmarish proportions. Adding to that dictionary to accommodate new words themselves visible in greater numbers than ever before, mutating ever-faster increases the nightmare exponentially. In the early years of digital, we were a little out of control, Peter Gilliver told me. Its never-ending, one OED lexicographer agreed. You can feel like youre falling into the wormhole.
Adding to the challenge is a story that has become wearily familiar: while more people are consulting dictionary-like resources than ever, almost no one wants to shell out. Sales of hard-copy dictionaries have collapsed, far more calamitously than in other sectors. (OUP refused to give me figures, citing commercial sensitivities. I dont think youll get any publisher to fess up about this, Michael Rundell told me.) While reference publishers amalgamate or go to the wall, information giants such as Google and Apple get fat by using our own search terms to sell us stuff. If you can get a definition by holding your thumb over a word on your smartphone, why bother picking up a book?
Go to a dictionary conference these days and you see scared-looking people, Rundell said. Although he trained as a lexicographer, he now mainly works as a consultant, advising publishers on how to use corpus-based resources. It used to be a career, he went on. But there just arent the jobs there were 30 years ago. He pointed to his shelves, which were strikingly bare. But then Im not sentimental about print; I gave most of my dictionaries away.
Even if the infrastructure around lexicography has fallen away or been remade entirely, some things stay pleasingly consistent. Every lexicographer I spoke to made clear their distaste for word-lovers, who in the dictionary world are regarded as the type of person liable to scrawl fewer on to supermarket signs reading 10 items or less, or recite antidisestablishmentarianism to anyone who will listen. The normally genial John Simpson writes crisply that I take the hardline view that language is not there to be enjoyed; instead, it is there to be used.
Throughout it all, OED churns on, attempting to be ever so slightly more complete today than it was yesterday or the day before. The dictionary team now prefer to refer to it as a moving document. Words are only added; they are never deleted. When I suggested to Michael Proffitt that it resembled a proud but leaky Victorian warship whose crew were trying to keep out the leaks and simultaneously keep it on course, he looked phlegmatic. I used to say it was like painting the Forth bridge, never-ending. But then they stopped a new kind of paint, I think. He paused. Now its just us.
These days OED issues online updates four times a year; though it has not officially abandoned the idea of another print edition, that idea is fading. Seven months after I first asked how far they had got into OED3, I enquired again; the needle had crept up to 48.7%. We are going to get it done, Proffitt insisted, though as I departed Oxford, I thought James Murray might have raised a thin smile at that. If the update does indeed take until 2037, it will rival the 49 years it took the original OED to be created, whereupon it will presumably need overhauling all over again.
A few days ago, I emailed to see if mansplain had finally reached the OED. It had, but there was a snag further research had pushed the word back a crucial six months, from February 2009 to August 2008. Then, no sooner had Patons entry gone live in January than someone emailed to point out that even this was inaccurate: they had spotted mansplain on a May 2008 blog post, just a month after the writer Rebecca Solnit had published her influential essay Men Explain Things to Me. The updated definition, Proffitt assured me, will be available as soon as possible.
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The term snowflake has been thrown around with abandon in the wake of Brexit and the US election, usually to express generic disdain for young people. How can we neutralise its power and is it a bad metaphor anyway?
Between the immediate aftermath of Brexit and the US presidential election, one insult began to seem inescapable, mostly lobbed from the right to the left: snowflake. Independent MEP Janice Atkinson, who was expelled from Ukip over allegations of expenses fraud, wrote a piece for the Huffington Post decrying the wet, teary and quite frankly ludicrous outpouring of grief emails she had received post-referendum as snowflake nonsense. The far-right news site Breitbart, whose executive chairman Stephen Bannon is now Donald Trumps chief strategist, threw it around with abandon, using it as a scattershot insult against journalists, celebrities and millennials who objected to Trumps inflammatory rhetoric; its UK site used it last week to criticise a proposed class liberation officer at an Oxford college who would provide more support for working-class students.
On an episode of his long-running podcast in August, Bret Easton Ellis discussed the criticism of a lascivious LA Weekly story about the pop star Sky Ferreira with a furious riposte to what he calls little snowflake justice warriors: Oh, little snowflakes, when did you all become grandmothers and society matrons, clutching your pearls in horror at someone who has an opinion about something, a way of expressing themselves thats not the mirror image of yours, you snivelling little weak-ass narcissists?
But recently it has widened its reach, and in doing so, diluted its meaning. It has been a favoured phrase of some tabloids, which have used it as a means of expressing generic disdain for young people who are behaving differently from people older than them. Whenever a new survey appears that claims young people are having less sex, or drinking less alcohol, or having less fun, its there as a handy one-word explanation: they are snowflakes.
Until very recently, to call someone a snowflake would have involved the word generation, too, as it was typically used to describe, or insult, a person in their late teens or early 20s. At the start of November, the Collins English Dictionary added snowflake generation to its words of the year list, where it sits alongside other vogue-ish new additions such as Brexit and hygge. The Collins definition is as follows: The young adults of the 2010s, viewed as being less resilient and more prone to taking offence than previous generations. Depending on what you read, being part of the snowflake generation may be as benign as taking selfies or talking about feelings too much, or it may infer a sense of entitlement, an untamed narcissism, or a form of identity politics that is resistant to free speech.
The phrase came to prominence in the UK at the beginning of 2016, after Claire Fox, director of the thinktank Institute of Ideas, used it in her book I Find That Offensive to address a generation of young people whom she calls easily offended and thin-skinned. Fox is clearly a natural provocateur and has written about generation snowflake in bulldozing articles for the Spectator (How We Train Our Kids to Be Censorious Cry-Babies) and for the Daily Mail (Why Todays Young Women Are Just So Feeble). As intended, both caused considerable debate which is precisely what Fox claims generation snowflake are losing their ability to do.
Im confused! says Liv Little, 22-year-old editor-in-chief of the magazine Gal-Dem, who was recently selected as one of the BBCs 100 most influential and inspirational women of 2016. She finds the idea that she and her peers are self-obsessed and unable to cope with the world absurd. I dont get what they want to happen. Do they want people to be quiet and suck it up? Do they want people to have breakdowns and be really unhappy and accept a political system that doesnt represent them?
Little set up Gal-Dem as a student in 2015, in response to a lack of diversity at her own university. It has since grown to a collective of more than 70 women of colour and recently won a prestigious award for Online Comment Site of the Year. She says that what she sees is people taking that feeling that the world isnt working for them and turning it into something positive and active. A lot of offensive stuff is happening. Why should people not be offended? People are offended but theyre using that feeling of being offended to bring about change. Things are so dire sometimes that its necessary. If I want to carve out a safe space, why shouldnt I?
Liv Little, editor-in-chief of Gal-Dem: People are using the feeling of being offended to bring about change Photograph: Lennon Gregory
Much of the disagreement is down to how you define these endlessly complex sticking points of campus debate. For Fox, a safe space is a censorious exclusionary zone. For Little, it is a starting point that doesnt hurt anyone, not least the people who are left out. Creating safe spaces is good for us, its good for our mental health, its good for us in terms of preparing and organising, and then when we want to welcome people in to our spaces, we can. How often have women or people of colour been excluded from so many spaces in the world? And then people are crying because were creating spaces for us. It doesnt make sense!
Often the argument that younger people are weaker and less able to cope feels like a dressed-up way of saying things were better in my day. We live in a time of stark generational division and animosity, in which the years huge political decisions, the ones that have seemed most cataclysmic Brexit, Trump have been decided by older voters whose opinions are vastly different from those of younger voters. Millennials are living in a time of economic uncertainty, without guaranteed access to the affordable housing, free education and decent job market enjoyed by the generations before them. I think our generation is really under pressure, says Little. I look around at my peers, at women around me, and theyre all working themselves into the ground. Its a difficult climate. Weve sucked it up for a while and now were trying to take control, says Little. In our case, its for women of colour. And thats just inherently a good thing.
