tf_talk | continued Thatfucker discussion

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continued Thatfucker discussion

Since we've been kicked off FFA for the week, please feel free to continue the anon discussion here. Apologies if this is a big flop - I've never made a DW community before!

The rules are vaguely the same as they are over on FFA. Please refrain from being too much of an asshole, making personal attacks, posting identifying information or engaging in transfail.

ETA: If there's information you'd like to see archived (journal/blog posts related to Andy, etc.), please dump it here and link to it from the main post for discussing.

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While "hard work" and "success" can be complex ideas that can be used to devalue people who don't fit into a narrow social framework (to make a very short disclaimer), I think it's extremely telling that Thanfiction has to embellish his work stories because he has very little in the way of accomplishments. He has to come up with stories because those jobs aren't exciting enough for him - they may even be (gasp) mediocre!) - and tell stories about how professors totally came in an ordered their coffee from him in Ancient Greek.

And then he complains about his value as a "weaver of word-magic" not being recognized in ridiculous posts like this: http://andythanfiction.tumblr.com/post/50961914873/id-be-surprisingly-good-for-you

He's not wrong that a) everyone should have access to adequate healthcare regardless of their jobs and b) rich people can be really annoying customers, but there's just something so off about how he says it.

OH HELL NO to the Ancient Greek thing. I actually submitted anon to TB about this because it was so ridiculous and made me so mad. There is just NO WAY that is a thing that anyone did.

1) He apparently thinks that a vocabulary list is sufficient to learn a language (see his attempts at reconstructing Tolkien's languages) which tells me that he's never seriously studied any language, much less an ancient one.

1b) It takes years of dedicated study to be able to read Ancient Greek anything like fluently, and that's ignoring/conflating the proliferation of dialects. YEARS. Yes, even if you're "preternaturally brilliant and talented" or whatever.

2) NOBODY just chats in Ancient Greek. The nerdiest nerds in my department (myself included) do sometimes fling snippets of Latin at one another, including asking if someone wants coffee, but even then, the question translates to "do you want to go get a thing which is to be drunk?" (bibendum) rather than mentioning coffee specifically (see my next point). And even we don't just chat in Ancient Greek. It's not a thing.

3) There is no Ancient Greek word for coffee. Three seconds of googling did, however, yield this conversation about how best to refer to it: http://danielstreett.com/2012/01/20/coffee-in-koine-greek/ which does mention the Attic Greek translation of (drumroll please) Harry Potter. Though that seems to be a red herring, as the translator apparently skips that line. So maybe TF read that far into the comments and no further?

4) Note the multitude of different suggestions at that one link. So while it's possible that one might figure out a way to ask for coffee in Ancient Greek, the odds that another person (even a magical telepathic snowflake like TF) would be able to understand and act on that request? Vanishingly small.

Oof. I apparently have a lot of feelings about this.

SA - Sorry, my numbering went a bit off the rails there. He's done a lot of things that are objectively far more awful, but this is my life's work, and it fills me with rage to see him claiming it as one of the many, many things he supposedly picked up overnight without even trying.

Thank you for saying it so well! I've had the same annoyance with this particular story - it's just so lazy and poorly thought-out, and such a blatant example of how ignorant Andy is about the skills he claims to have!

Aside from trying to express the idea of "coffee" in Ancient Greek, how about artificial sweeteners? The concept of "syrup?" Variations in milk type/fat content - heaven forbid anyone want soy milk!

AYRT: It's things like this that almost make me feel sad for him in a weird way. It really highlights how shallow his understanding of the world is and how that's never going to change as long as he thinks it is, or should be, this easy.

Building a real, satisfying life is hard work. If you're always looking for shortcuts and shiny accomplishments-- and I do have a degree of empathy for that desire, but it's something to be outgrown-- you'll never stop being hungry and empty.

Don't know if that makes sense outside my head.

Furthermore, the misspelling that TheTeaBlogger points out:

"Anne O'Nymous" to Carlanime: One would think a woman with a degree in psych and gender studies would have more charitable opinions towards severe gender disphoria leading to dissociative identity disorder comorbid with borderline personality disorder.

Andy to Carlanime: As you know , the official on paper diagnosis of what’s wrong with me: Severe Gender Disphoria leading to Dissociative Identity Disorder possibly comorbid with Borderline Personality Disorder on select aspects.

dys- is a Greek prefix. You'd think he'd know that one, huh?

dys- is a Greek prefix. You'd think he'd know that one, huh?

Anon, you just brightened my day considerably. ~Carlanime

Ha! That's both hilarious and a great catch!

Also a great catch on the original spelling error TB, apart from the fact the Anne O'Nonymus email to Turimel just sounds so much like Andy, that consistent misspelling of "dysphoria" pretty much confirms it.

Claiming to be able to speak languages he doesn't is another of Andy's favourite lies. I've seen him claim he speaks six languages (link below) on tumblr. He's claimed to have learned Irish from this grandfather, and that he speaks French, but (IRCC) it's "18th century literary French" or something of that nature. Which is why he needs an actual French speaker to help him translate things.

http://andythanfiction.tumblr.com/post/44496687605/how-many-languages-do-you-know

"18 century literary French"? Okay, I've been thinking it for a while, but this confirms to me that his understanding of linguistics is fucked (if the BS about accents didn't already). You can't learn to SPEAK a language solely from reading it. You may learn prescriptivist grammar, vocab, etc, but you cannot learn to SPEAK it unless you actually, y'know, speak it. First off, you wouldn't get pronunciation right, and second off, there's this flawed idea that written language is more 'pure' or accurate than spoken, when spoken always comes first in a language, with the written language following.

Which actually calls back to the Ancient Greek (and to a lesser degree, Latin) thing, too, because all we have of it (bar some attempts at reconstructing pronunciation) is the written form.

Eh, Greek/Latin I'm willing to give a LITTLE leeway on since the writing is all we have to go on. There are professors of Greek and Latin, I've known people who went to private Christian schools and took Latin. Learning dead languages through the literature is kind of the norm, though yes, speaking it is reconstruction.

But a living language like French? No, no, no, you do not learn to speak it by just reading it.

Re: Andy explains why he's too special to live a normal life

(Anonymous) - 2015-04-15 02:51 (UTC) - Expand

+3

I have a minor in French, and while I didn't take a course specifically on 18th century French literature, I took courses that included works from that time period. As well as two courses specifically on 17th century French literature, a course on 19th century French literature, and a course on Medieval French literature (we covered approximately the 11th through 13th centuries).

It amuses me that Andy says/said he spoke 18th century French as a way to A) explain why he won't actually be proving his language skills to modern speakers and B) act like he's not wrong, he's just fancier and more sophisticated.

Reading 18th century French is very easy if you can fluently read contemporary French. You get used to the slight spelling and grammar differences pretty quickly -- it's not like it's literally a different language, lmao. It's cool if you're good at reading it, but not like, Special Prodigy-level of cool. Now if you're immediately able to read "Lancelot, le Chevalier de la Charrette," come talk to me then.

But you would never pick up the pronunciation from reading it. We watched a few productions of Moliere in class (17th century, I know, not 18th) where the actors were trying to approximate what some consensus of scholars thinks the pronunciation *might* have been like. And you just never would have gotten those sounds from the text if you came from a background of modern English and/or modern French.

His claims are at once too easy to be impressive and too preposterous to be true.

It does make me wonder if there was some specific reason for picking the 18th century. Any characters from that time that he might be into? Maybe tying into the revolution.

He did grow up in Williamsburg, and worked in Colonial Williamsburg. (Though his historical knowledge is sorely lacking, considering his background.) Also, Dangerous Liasons had a major influence on pop culture when he was a kid. There's also the Horatio Hornblower connection, though technically that's the beginning of the 19th century rather than the 18th.

As a fellow studier of dead languages, YEP. That claim is so transparently false.

I did, however, have to stop and wonder if there might be a word for coffee in Ancient Greek, which led to googling the history of coffee. So thanks, Andy, for making me a more informed person. Who knew coffee wasn't around before the 10th century?

I don't know what's scarier in that Andy post linked above. The selling realities line really jumped at me. That tells me he knows exactly what he's been doing the whole time.

It's so icky and also manages to hit my embarrassment squick pretty hard with all the "weaver of word-magic" + other unearned self-declared nonsense. Like, he just doesn't get how ridiculous he appears to other people. That's the one thing he really is clueless about.

There's another post quite like that one that strikes me: http://andythanfiction.tumblr.com/post/26741450761/books-covers-and-judging-them-not-lest-ye-be

Actually, that guy is me. He’s 28, and he’s been on his own since he was a teenager. He got the tattoos years ago, and they’re in French (which he speaks, along with Spanish, Classical Greek, Latin, and Gaelic), a philosophical quote about the power of hope and patience by Alexander Dumas. He’s a talented freelance illustrator, but he’s been struggling since the economy tanked, especially since his last client screwed him over pretty badly. Even still, he’s constantly looking for work, which includes the dozens of applications he’s put in for jobs that aren’t even in his field. He’s incredibly frugal and resourceful, which is how he’s managed to overhaul all that thrift store and garage sale clothing, some of which he’s made last for over ten years, including that leather jacket.

There's just an overabundance of justifying why he is better than everyone else in his statement that's supposedly about not stereotyping people on food stamps.

That's "Alexandre" to you, Andy. And others have pointed out that no one who speaks Irish calls it "Gaelic."

DA

I know this is the pettiest thing, but the fact that he has pretended to be fluent in Irish for YEARS and never bothered to learn that Irish people don't call it "Gaelic" just boils my blood. It's so lazy! Google exists! There's no excuse anymore!

Does anyone have a link to the post where explains he learned "Gaelic" from his grandfather who couldn't read or write in the language, and therefore he can't read it?

What a fucking pillock.

What is "Classical Greek"? Classical is a good descriptor for a particular type of Latin, but not Greek as far as I'm aware. Another point for "Andy can't be bothered with a cursory google search."

That's actually fairly reasonable: Attic Greek is often called Classical because it was the language of Athens in the fifth century BCE. It's probably not what someone *very* well-versed in philology would call it, but it's not totally ridiculous.

SA meant to add: and since his whole shtick is about being a rugged auto-didact, it kind of fits in with that. Which is not to say that he's not completely full of stercus tauri.

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