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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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.

AYRT Oh, definitely; I was just calling back to his claim that professors of Ancient Greek would come in and chat with him in it. Which, no.

+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?

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