So a fella on the Men’s Rights subreddit made this poster, which he’s planning to post in the vicinity of the Women’s Studies Department at his school, assuming he can find it.
Since I know that a lot of females read this blog, I thought I’d ask you all just which of these Unchecked Female Privileges (There’s Nothing “Benevolent” About Them) are your favorites. You can pick more than one! (I know how inherently greedy you feemales are.)
Has he missed any important ones?
Non-women are allowed to post in this thread as well, but only if they preface their comments with “If it may please the feemales, might I humbly suggest that … .”
@Dusty: Possibly you don’t have that saying in English? In Sweden we have a saying that goes “even a blind chicken occasionally finds a corn”, but since everyone knows the entire saying, you usually shorten it and just go “well, even a blind chicken…”.
So the chicken, because blind, just picks around at random at the ground. Like 99 times out of 100 it’s just gonna hit the ground with its beak, because it’s blind and can’t see where it’s picking. But it’s fairly likely that it’s gonna pick up a corn eventually, if it just keeps picking around for long enough. Likewise, an MRA-idiot will keep spewing shit about how this is bad for men and that is bad for men and so on, mostly making completely idiotic statements. But it’s pretty likely that eventually he’s gonna make at least one claim that makes sense.
@Dvärghundspossen
In America we say “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day” to mean roughly the same thing.
What other cool Swedish sayings can you tell us about? I love hearing idiomatic expressions from other cultures.
emilygoddess: That is a huge problem; women are more likely to experience “atypical” (atypical because its not what men usually experience) symptoms of heart attack. When I was in nursing school there was a push for medical personnel to recognize heart attack symptoms in women. I was hoping things were getting better on that front. Heart disease is the number 1 killer of women (in the US, at least last time I checked the stats); to have ER doctors wave off possible heart attack symptoms as pregnancy is scary.
And I’ve never heard of the blind chicken; in the northeastern US we have the one about the blind squirrel finding a nut every now and then.
Sweet, thanks! I love learning new proverbs 😀
@Sparky: Funny how you have a squirrel! That’s so similar to the chicken. I prefer the versions with animals rather than the clock, since the clock doesn’t actually do anything.
Um, more cool proverbs… Do you have “when you’ve taken Satan in your boat”?
Dvarghundspossen: No we don’t. What happens when you take Satan into your boat? It doesn’t sound like it will end well….
The whole proverb is “if you’ve taken Satan in your boat you gotta row him to the shore”. It means that perhaps you had an idea that seemed good at the time, started up some kind of project (like, um, rowing Satan from one shore to another). Once you’ve begun the project you realize that it was actually a terrible idea and you’ve made quite a mess, but there’s no use in just throwing your hands up in the air and whine; you gotta finish what you started and clean up any mess you’ve made.
Find the meaning of the following
It is no cow on the ice
Walk like the cat around hot porridge
Yeah, these are really weird. 🙂 Talacaris, are you daring the non-Swedes to make guesses?
I think it should be “there’s no cow on the ice” but that’s nit-picking. 🙂
talacaris: Hmmm. Would that cat around the porridge be “as nervous as a long-tailed cat in room full rocking chairs?”
Trying to remember some of the expressions I heard growing up in West Virginia. There was “great day in the morning” and “land o’ goshen,” both of which were exclamatory phrases along the lines of “holy shit!” Only more family friendly. Then there was ” ’till the cows come home,” which meant doing something (usually something fun) for a long time. So if you partied ’till the cows come home, you were up until the wee hours of the morning. And whenever it thundered, grandma always said it was the tater rolling by overhead. And when it rained when the sun was shining, that meant the devil just kissed his wife.
@Dvarghundspossen
The “satan in your boat” one sounds a lot like “you’ve made your bed, now you have to lie in it”.
I’ve heard that in Sweden, the rudest curses are the ones having to do with illness (unlike the US and UK, where they tend to involve sex acts or bodily functions). Someone (Swedish) once told me that people in Sweden say “cancer” instead of “fuck” when they stub their toes.
“When it thundered, grandma always said it was the tater wagons rolling overhead.”
That’s how that should read.
@Emily: That “cancer” thing must be local, since I’ve never heard it before. I think lots of Swedes nowadays use curse words that have to do with genitals and sex because we’ve been so heavily influenced by American pop culture, but that didn’t really exist when I was a child. Traditional Swedish curses have to do with Satan.
– Jävlar (devils)
– Helvete (hell)
– Fan (what you might shout out on stubbing your toe, but means Satan).
‘Till the cows come home” is something I’ve heard here too!
“There’s no cow on the ice” means “there’s no reason to panic/get all stressed out”. Makes sense I guess insofar as you would have reason to panic if you’re cow had wandered out on a lake with ice a bit too thin to support it’s weight…
“walking like a cat around hot porridge” is a really weird one, because it means beating around the bush. You could understand the proverb if it was something cat’s like, like “walking like a cat around hot fish stew” or something. Then it would make sense that the cat wants to approach the meal (like a person might want to approach a subject) but doesn’t really dare to because it’s so hot. But it’s really weird that it’s porridge.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh_SEkdshks Literally: Hell’s devils… Satan!
Dvärghundspossen: Yes
Sparky: No not really, it is more like avoiding the (hot ) center of the issue
emilygoddess. No, I think it is the Danes that say things like kræft (cancer). Here thethe rudest courses all deal with the Devil. I think I’ve heard of a Mormon missionary who tried to use a translated form of expression “cute little devils” or maybe it’s just an urban legend. Suffice to say it’s not well-adviced.
I once did a kind of oral history with an older black gentleman, W, and he had so many charming turns of phrase that we made a list of them. I have to dig that back up. But all I’m remembering now is the phrase a friend of his had for the way W told his stories. He had this way of telling stories that would meander all over the place before finally getting to the point, but once you saw what the point was you would realize all the meandering was actually related. His friend called that “birdwalking,” comparing it to the birdtracks you’d see on the sand as birds were stalking sandfleas and sandcrabs. It would look totally random, but it had a purpose.
Oh, that makes sense! I like that! I shall have us that expression!
“Have to use” not “have us.” Great day in the morning, what’s wrong with my typing skills today?
If feminism equals privilege then MRM equals privilege.
And how do women have cheaper healthcare? Women pay MORE for health insurance in the USA.
And if the sisterhood is a privilege then the brotherhood/old boys club is privilege too.
It would take awhile to look through all of these things……….
Oh man, I wish I still had the list my family made of all my Nana’s turns of phrase… For her 70th birthday, they made t-shirts with 70 aphorisms (not all of which were really the generally-used ones, because my Nana is a little… creative… when it comes to words and phrases), because she is always using folk phrases 🙂
My local county council just tweeted this, in relation to some kind of public health campaign:
“Nearly twice as many men as women die from bladder or kidney cancers each year in England #bloodinpee”
So I’d like to add that to my list of unchecked female privilege – I ain’t dying of bladder or kidney cancer right now.
Ah yes, the #bloodinpee hashtag, sure to catch on!
Birdwalking! That’s the perfect name for it–and it utterly delights me when a story-teller can manage to do it right!
And not end up on a completely different topic? I’m going to have to email pecunium that one, for obvious reasons XD