Which things will you remember with fondness?
I think about this a lot when I’m driving around. And then I promise myself I’ll write about it when I get home. But I never do because other things distract me. So I was thinking about memories. What they mean to us, why we remember some things but not others, and which things I’ll remember in the future.
I do this because often I’ll remember something pleasant. This sometimes happen when I’m having a craptastic day. Such as today. The memory helps me to get through that moment and, eventually, the day. Exercise helps, too.
It could be something silly, such as my favourite doll’s name from when I was a wee one. Or perhaps I remember my childhood crush — Andrew. Oh, how I’m smiling now!
So I’d love to know from you: which things do you think you’ll reflect on next year or in 2012? Will you remember a special moment from today?
Does mineral oil benefit my skin?
So I’ve been trying to find information on beauty products’ efficiency as well as their benefits. I did a bit of googling and found a post on The Beauty Brains about the top 5 myths about mineral oil part one and myths about mineral oil part two.
The first part talks about the 5 myths and gives reasons why they are illogical. I bolded the last two sentences to show the contrast between this section and a comment — also in bold – in the second half of the article. So now I ask you with tears in my eyes — what’s the point in using mineral oil aka baby oil if it doesn’t provide the skin with moisture?
2. Mineral oil dries the skin and causes premature aging. Mineral oil works as a barrier between the skin and the air. It acts as an occlusive agent which prevents water from naturally leaving your body through your skin. It will not dry out your skin or cause premature aging. Quite the contrary. It will provide moisturization.
The comment in the second half:
thebeautybrains January 7, 2008 at 8:27 am
Angel,
And snake venom will kill you. The point is that there are plenty of natural materials that are not “good” for you.
Most of your comments are just a rehashing of things others have said. If you could include some proof to back up your opinions it would be nice.
Your car example…the parts exposed to oil do not rust. Not all the parts are exposed to oil all the time.
You’re trying to create a straw man logical fallacy. I never said mineral oil imparts moisture. It doesn’t. Go back and read through the comments. This has already been discussed.
What is your proof that plant based oils soak into your skin? The fact that they are organic is irrelevant. They don’t soak in any different than mineral oil.
Where is your proof that petroleum based products will lock microbes in your wounds? More unproven propaganda.
Finally, mineral oil doesn’t add vitamin A or C to your skin. And what exactly do vitamins, mineral or fats do when applied to your skin?
Either/Or Logical fallacy…
“And by default- if it NOT putting any kind of vitamins, minerals, or fats of any kind into the skin then logically we have to call it what it is: a filler.”
It’s an occlusive agent put in products to increase the level of moisture in your skin. This is proven by the fact that when skin moisture levels are measured with a device like a corneometer, they are higher when mineral oil based creams are used.
We’re being erased…
A Google search for information on whether ’slams’ is a pejorative word led me to an article by Ashraf Johaardien about his struggle to find information on the disappearance of the words teram-akasie and kanala in the Cape Malay community.
He doesn’t mention his feelings on the struggle to find any information but this is [yet another] an example of erasuring a people’s history.
So yes, there can be many reasons why he failed to find anything about the disappearance of teram-akasie and kanala from the Cape Muslim community on Google. But we live in a Western world, even though we live in Africa. Many white people still refer to themselves – and to others of their tribe – as European. Never mind that many of the Afrikaner tribe can’t speak any European languages.
Some of the best reasons that I can think of are the following:
1. The POC community exists only to make jokes about
2. POC communities exist only in pictorial books in Exclusive Books stores
3. Few people in [white] academia see POC as worthy of research
4. There are few interested [insiders] people who chronicle the history of POC dialects’ language quirks.
5. The publishing industry is not as transformed as they would like to think(pdf)
6. And POC communities are only worthy when they exude ‘blackness’, ie, poverty.
Another example of this erasure is ‘Daisy’ Dube’s murder on 12 June 2008. Few online South African newspapers mention this murder; I learnt of it from a comment on a blog that had criticised the blogger slash comedian for his sketch about a transwoman.
Rarely even do we get to write our own histories. That honour is reserved for people such as Chris Ledochowski, John Liebenberg and David Goldblatt. Don’t forget about anthropologists and sociologists. But they are nearly always fond[er] of stories that contribute to the single African story. And these stories all conform to the ‘one true’ way of telling stories about Africa. POC who do not fit the narrow mould of their story are erased. Their experiences are discounted as not ‘black’/'authentic’/'African’ enough.
The other reasons why few ever hear our stories is not there are too few people creating content. And the number one reason for this is systemic racism. This is racism that is built into our society and that might be eradicated in a couple of thousand years, though I highly doubt that. Umuzi’s writer page shows that only 11% of their writer base is black. Oops, sorry, K. Sello Duiker is dead. So out of the 98 writers on that page, only 11 are black. And Sir Richard Branson is a British citizen. But Umuzi has more POC writers on their books than Jonathan Ball Publishers; I could only find one living black author on JB Publishers’ fiction page.
Solani Ngobeni, the former International Young Publishing Entrepreneur of the Year finalist, said this: “We are not documenting our own stories and history; instead, we are allowing the former colonial master to do so on our behalf and then to resell it to us. Shame on us African publishers!“
I’d bet a substantial amount of money that most publishers believe they are being fair in sourcing unique stories to be published. But the reality is that transformation needs to happen sooner rather than later. And not just on junior levels. We need people in senior positions, people with clout, who can help us to get everyone’s story out there. This means that POC should be promoted and not side-lined.
Online media, on the other hand, does not rely on publishing houses; online media relies on eyeballs. But to start an online media empire one needs tools: decent broadband, some type of computer, networking, a smattering of good fortune, and writers. Oh, and time, too. These criteria exclude more than 95% of this country, let alone people of colour.
We don’t need more blogs written by POCs with Gammat jokes; we need more POC blogging that dissects the news and offer analysis; we need more POC blogging about fashion theory; we need more POC blogging that criticizes something, anything, everything; we need more POC blogging that can challenge the stereotypes the [white] media creates and perpetuates of us.
Do your rights trump mine?
Vuvuzela supporters are causing a stink — a cacophony? — with their insistence on using the instrument during the World Cup next year. And now Motoaki Inukai wants Fifa to ban the instrument.
I’m no law expert and these are only my personal views but the supporters seem to believe their right to making as loud a noise as possible is an inalienable right. There are few such rights — life, dignity, health, freedom and equality. Inflicting pain and suffering on someone else’s eardrum doesn’t strike me as one of those rights.
Some claim the vuvuzela is uniquely African. Alas, it seems that the instrument is uniquely American and Chinese.
Anyway.
When two rights oppose each other , eg, your right to smoke and my right to clean air, we have a problem. Sure, you’re allowed to smoke. But my right to a clean environment trumps your right to smoke in this instance. My right to quiet enjoyment of my property trumps your right to play doof doof music at any time of day. And my right to clean air trumps your right to wear perfume that constricts my throat.
So why is it that this is not common knowledge? Why are people quick to point out that I’m infringing on their rights? And why the defensiveness? Perhaps it’d be a great idea to go back to Emsie Schoeman’s etiquette guide.
I read a post about perfume in the workplace and one commentor sums it up nicely:
I foresee the same thing happening to fragrance wearers that happened to smokers. At least banning the use in the workplace and using natural deoderizers (baking soda, etc.) and fragrance free cleaning products. Unfortunately we are the ones who are in the forefront of this revolution similar to the suffragettes who fought for the right for women to vote.
South Africa does not have enough legislation to cover those of us who feel our rights are being infringed. Nor are enough people, organisations and companies aware of the problems. All too often, people are told to suck it up; the offender will not change their behaviour(s). This needs to stop. It’s time to recognise that we all need to be more considerate of other people. And sometimes that means forgoing or altering certain of our behaviours or products.
Yeah, they think coloureds are hilarious
Some of the searches that lead people to my blog:
learn to speak cape coloured
coloured hare
cape coloured jokes
cape flats jokes
coloured people front teeth
why coloured have no teeth
funny papsak pictures
coloured models
cape town coloured speak
Many people would find this funny, I know. Just a pity that I don’t. It’s interesting, though, to see what the online world thinks of us. But what’s even more interesting is that there are some people who think colour is no longer supposed to be an issue.
I wonder what these people think when they arrive on my blog? Are they disappointed? Especially when they realise I’m not a coloured model and that I have all my front teeth 
Update: Another searcher arrived here by searching for ‘talk like a cape coloured’.
What and who is POC/WOC?
Why should anybody want to define himself by what he is not? — William Safire
I recently received an email from Jason, one of my readers, who wanted to know what POC and WOC are. So I gave him a short explanation. And then I wrote that if he doesn’t know the terminology, I might have to do a post about the two acronymns’ meaning.
I remember my introduction to the term in 2006. I was on a date with an older guy who is a Kenyan expat. He called me a woman of colour. Something in the phrase made me uncomfortable. I have no idea what it could have been. But I didn’t like it and for that week I kept introducing myself to my friends as – “Hi, I am Joy-Mari Cloete and I am a woman of colour.” We thought it was funny.
Fastforward to 2009, only 3 years later, and I have done a 360° on this phrase. I now realise that the word black isn’t always descriptive of the majority of people in this world — many are something else: Creole, coloured, Jews, Latina/o, Indian, Native American, Aboriginal, Inuits. And the term ‘black’ has negative connotations in many parts of the world. So it makes sense to call myself a woman of colour instead of coloured when I’m speaking to my Canadian friend who flinches when she hears what she calls the C-word.
POC means either person of colour or people of colour, depending on the context. Similarly, WOC means woman of colour or women of colour, depending on the contex.
No-one can safely say when the term was first used, nor do linguists know who had used it first. But an 1818 pamphlet, ”Report of the Committee, to Whom was Referred the Memorial of the President and Board of Managers of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States.”, may be one of the earliest known usages of the term. French colonies have used gens de couleur liberes to speak of emancipated black people. And the oldest known usage is from 1781, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But I’ll be damned if I can find a credible link on that piece of information.
And yes, immigrants and refugees could be people of colour. The term has expanded since it first became en vogue in the late 20th century, when Frantz Fanon and Martin Luther King Jr used it.
Activists created it as a counterreaction to ‘non-white’. Why do white people [get to] set the standard? And we have to define ourselves on what we are not? But perhaps my initial dislike of the term stems from yet again being ‘othered’. White people are just that — white. They don’t seperate themselves into categories, as they did with people of colour: quadroon, mulatto, quintoon, octoroon, Eurasian.
I have incorporated the words into my vocabulary but am still more than a bit reluctant to call myself black, even though I can identify with Steven Biko’s definition of black as everyone who had suffered under Apartheid.
How to link unto others
I’m sure I don’t need to evangelise the concept of one writer or blogger linking to others. I’m sure that many of you know that linking = good. It’s a great way to add depth to an article and you’re also helping to sustain the internet linking community. So I’ll touch on a related topic, which should be one of those Blogging fun-DOH-mentals. It’s something that schools should teach. It’s so easy –link unto others as you would have them link unto you. Good linking “sends people away to keep them coming back.” Linking also helps our readers to tailor-make their internet reading adventure, sorta like those 1990s choose-your-own adventure books that I loved.
Link to the idea, not to the person
It’s frustrating when I’m reading your post on oh, I don’t know, 50 Ways to make your colleagues love you more effectively, and you mention something interesting but you neglect to link to the article, Youtube video, or Tweet. Instead of doing this you link to the person who wrote the article, posted the Youtube video, or wrote the Tweet. This means that I need to do a quick Google search for the relevant piece. It’s not a great user experience for me. Help me to save time and I’ll be devoted to you. I’ll proselytise and evangelise your website or blog simply because I like to think of myself as an information curator. And I love sending people links to stuff that’s useful. Let’s hope your site is next.
Another reason why this is a good idea is that it promotes deep-linking. But this places some responsibility on you the blogger — ensure that the site allows deep-linking and that your readers will go to the exact page you had intended them to go to.
Link only when needed
You don’t need to link to every single name, idea or Youtube video; only link to those that would benefit your readers the most. Gratuitous links to your blogging buddies only benefit them, unless their websites offer such amazing thought, content and entertainment value that you have to link to them. A link to an A-list blogger might get you noticed — they, too, check their stats. Practise restraint when linking out try to keep it fun and informal. No need to cite MLA or The Chicago Manual of Style; be as informal or formal depending on the type of writing you do.
Keep the reader’s flow at a constant level
Sometimes you’re writing a rant or a stream of consciousness piece of writing that doesn’t need linking to others. Then you don’t need to link. Unless you want to add more depth to your writing.
Use original link text
‘Click here’ tells your reader nothing about where the link will take them. Tell the readers something about the destination by using link text that describes where the new link will take them. You don’t need to know much about HTML to do this, either; most blogging platforms — I use WordPress — help you to format correctly. And there are many web tutorials that you can use to learn HTML. I used W3Schools and love it. It’s so useful to know HTML, even if it’s just the basics.
Underlining does not belong in internet documents
Your users will want to click on the underlined text and be disappointed when they realise it isn’t a link to a site that’ll solve all their problems. And there are many other linking practises that you want to embrace or stay away from.
Please, no links to categories
Big online newspapers are the ones guilty of this. I am sure that it has some benefits for both the newspaper and for its readers. But which is better – newspapers linking to categories within the text or our [learning how to] using the search box ourselves. Because that’s what these categories are. I’d rather that they, like blogs, use drop-down category boxes.
Twitter replies
This doesn’t really belong in my list. But I’m gonna touch on it regardless because I see so many people who are unaware of the convention. Twitter allows you to reply to a tweet by clicking on ‘reply’. This applies to all Twitter clients, even to cellphone applications. Please use it. It helps to keep tweets in context, especially when you’re replying to one of my tweets. And then I don’t need to reply with a ‘huh?’ to your tweet. This function didn’t work on 13 November but Twitter has fixed it since then.
One link to rule them all
So you’re writing about your company, blog, new book on Amazon, etc etc etc. One or two links to it is OK; anything more is overkill. Trust me, I saw the first link. I saw the second link. And my eyes are hurting from looking at the 435 other links in your blog post/article. Less is definitely more in this instance.
Political spectrum quiz
My Political Views
I am a center-left moderate social libertarian
Left: 1.86, Libertarian: 2.67
I did this test in January 2009 and it told me I am a center-left moderate social libertarian. I wondered whether my views on these issues had changed since January…so I took the test again today.
My Political Views
I am a left moderate social libertarian
Left: 6.58, Libertarian: 1.77
It’s a difficult test because you can’t make decisions in a vacuum; context matters. And all our decisions are tainted with bias, whether we’d like to admit it or not. Another factor that makes it difficult is when you want to tick the ‘liberal’ or ‘libertarian’ answer but know that it would be intellectually dishonest to do so. So you remain neutral, for fear of being outed as a ‘conservative’. Yes, even to yourself. Eep.
This test scores you on how you feel over certain civil issues: personal freedom; government and church involvement in everyone’s lives; the economy; and nationalism.
Go take the political spectrum quiz and see how your views had changed since Pol Sci 101. I’m surprised to see that my views have shifted more towards the left. And I’ve always thought of myself as a liberal. Funny, eh?
Your sexist writing style isn’t professional, dude
There is sexism in language, it does enhance the position of males, and males have had control over the production of cultural forms. (Spender 1985: 144)
Sexist writing takes one of a few forms: you could assume that all your readers are men or you could use gender essentialist views of women and men.
Why does this matter? Surely, women have made many advances in the last 100 years? And surely, no-one means to subjugate women by something as simple as language?
My answers: it matters because women are human beings. Women and men should receive the same social, political and economical treatment. Yes, women have made many advances over the last century or so. But that does not mean that the process is finished: we still need to eliminate much man-centric language and thought processes. The former will only happen once the latter – modifying our thought processes – becomes the norm. And changing our thought processes is dependent on changing our language; the one cannot happen without the other.
And yes, most people do use [sexist] language innocently but that is a poor excuse for using sexist language.
I recently started reading Die Burger again and was offended at the subtle jabs at women in this Afrikaans daily: journalists write of companies, the SA government and processes as ‘he’, ‘his’, and ‘him’.
I had a look at my copy of the Afrikaanse Spelreëls but I couln’t find any rule that promotes the use of the male pronoun when writing of inanimate objects. And even if there exists a rule such as that, surely Afrikaans – and, by extension, Afrikaans editors – should change the ‘convention’ to something more fitting the 20th century? Surely we should lobby the Afrikaans media to change their writing style to include, and not exclude, women.
One of the excuses apologists offer for using sexist language is that it’s a reflection of today’s society. And that’s where they leave it; they’d rather not try to change the language – that’d be too drastic and would give to much power to the ‘PC brigade’.
I wrote Henry Jeffreys, Die Burger’s editor, a few emails – first email on 17 August – and only received a response from Hendrik Coetzee, Die Burger’s ombudsperson, on 2 September. He offered one reason why they support the male hegemony: it has been thusly decreed by the compilers of Afrikaanse Woordelys en Spelreëls and Sakboek van Regte Afrikaans.
Here’s the problem I have with that argument: it’s lazy and does nothing to change the status quo; instead, it approves of, and justifies women’s oppression. Another excuse Hendrik offered was that other languages — English, French, Dutch — use sexist ‘conventions’; therefore, it’s OK that Afrikaans follows their example.
I wrote an email to Die Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns and received – instantly! – an email from Professor van der Elst: he’s referring this issue to Professor Kotze, the head of their language commission. Professor Kotze doesn’t agree: he reckons that this has nothing to do with sexism; it’s part of the language conventions.
Professor Kotze from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University answered one of my many questions about the gendering of pronouns. I wasn’t satisfied with his answer and tried to prod a bit more. And then he wrote an incredibly patronising email to me – and to me alone; he had not CC the other respondents in on this last mail – with the hopes that I’ll have a wonderful life: “Sterkte met u lewe vorentoe.” It is OK for him to disparage me; however, it is not OK for me to be offended at his actions.
I’ll try to contact a few Afrikaans and Women’s Studies professors to see what they think.
I don’t know whether they’ll agree with me that this is sexist; many women are indoctrinated by society — they don’t see sexism. And they are some of the key people we need to speak out and voice their disapproval — if they do disapprove after they had given the issue deep thought. Your organisation or company needs an anal grammarian to obsess over everything you send out – to internal as well as external clients. But this person needs to be progressive, or at least aware of all the -isms out there.
So many of us wordophiles — my word — obsess over whether to use may or might; few of us obsess over non-ableist language. A few of us claim to watch our sexism but how many have a definitive stance on which term is more appropriate — gypsie or Roma? How many are there who still use ‘men’ and ‘guys’ as generics?
I’m not sure what to do next. The gatekeepers have spoken and I feel powerless. I feel powerless because of my inability to have a conversation with them without getting told off for my tone. I feel powerless because of the lazy arguments they use to justify the language rules. And I feel powerless because far too often I have to hear how I should rather fuss over more ‘worthy’ things. What those things are I don’t know.
For a far more intellectual discourse on how language affects our reality, read this University of Stanford article and this Shakespeare UK pdf.
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