i hate writing historical fic because every five sentences you’re googling random shit like “when did billiards become popular in america” & i’ll have you know it was the 1820s
fun fact my pals the word ‘okay’ or ‘O.K.’ (the abbreviation for the old timey spelling of ‘all correct’) was popularized in 1840 by Van Buren’s US presidential election slogan and seeing it in historical fiction before then feels like a little glitch in the matrix, but seeing it in an Old Timey Fantasy setting sends me down the rabbit hole of how a fantasy world language would be brutal to translate, and language in general is a trip, and nothing means anything, probably
I just want to add a correction: O.K. was not an abbreviation for an “old-timey” spelling of “all correct”; it is in fact an abbreviation for an INTENTIONAL MISSPELLING of “all correct.” There was a short-lived period in the 1800s where it became amusing and trendy to flagrantly misspell conversational phrases and then abbreviate them, and “O.K.” is the only one to survive to the present day.
So in my research for my thesis, I learned a thing, and it’s not useful for my thesis so I’m posting it here instead.
Okay, so, everyone knows that the words canon and cannon are not synonyms, and if you’re like me it kind of makes your teeth grind when people talk about firing the canons or historical cannon. BUT HERE’S THE THING. The word canon is a direct lift from Latin, and it means law or rule. And so when heavy metal guns were developed and needed to be called something other than ‘that big murder machine over there’, the word cannon developed directly out of canon in the sense of “to lay down the law,” the same way Samuel Colt’s gun got called the Peacemaker. Likewise, ordnance comes directly from the Latin ordinance, which also got transferred directly into English as another synonym for ‘rule.’
And that is your totally useless historical fun fact of the day.
When Zev Shofar, a 14-year-old from Takoma Park, started going to Jewish summer camp seven years ago, the children all learned the Hebrew words to introduce themselves. “Chanich” means a male camper; “chanichah” means a female camper.
But what if Zev didn’t feel male or female — neither a chanich nor a chanichah?
Zev’s camp didn’t have a word that worked for Zev. In fact, the Hebrew language doesn’t have any words. Like many other languages — Spanish, French and Russian, for example — Hebrew assigns each noun a gender.
In Israel, or anywhere else that Hebrew is spoken, there’s no linguistic solution, either. But now there is at camp. Zev is a chanichol.
The seven Habonim Dror camps, spread across North America, are pioneering a new gender-neutral form of Hebrew this summer. They hope to set an example that Hebrew-speakers worldwide might someday follow.
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Those cheers have had to be rewritten this summer to fit the new gender-neutral Hebrew. Plural masculine nouns in Hebrew — including any group of people that includes at least one man — typically end in im, while feminine nouns end in ot. At Camp Moshava, all groups of both boys and girls now end in a blend: imot.
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In Israel, some LGBT communities have adopted the –imot plural, but few seem to have decided on a non-binary singular.
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So Habonim Dror decided on its own that –ol would be its singular non-binary ending, based on the word kol, which means “all.”
