Tiny mini-rant

[taimatsu]

A swift rant about something driving me nuts on and off at the moment.

Kittens. People. Two different things.

You are not a kitten. Your friends and social group are not kittens. Bisexuals are not kittens. Only kittens, young instances of the animal commonly called a cat, are, in fact, kittens. Please remember this. Thank you.

Comments

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

Oooh...me-ow...

[taimatsu]

Indeed, I may be being catty, but I am not, in fact, a cat.

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

Just out of interest, why do you have a problem with it? What is it that narks you about people doing this that you can't just brush aside, ignore, or accept?

[chrisvenus]

hey, its not as bad as 'ittens at least. :)

[taimatsu]

That's only very slightly worse.

[winterthing.livejournal.com]

The phrase ´kitten´ annoys me. The phrase ´"itten" makes me want to hunt, find, maim and finally destroy the person saying it.

[faerierhona.livejournal.com]

well.. not ACTUALLY true...

baby rats and other animals (Rabbits IIRC?) are also kittens...

but yes, I have had the furries/ otherkin/ whatever rant before!

[taimatsu]

Nono, if someone actually Really, Truly, Totally Believes that they are essentially a cat or whatever, then I can deal with that - however weird I think it.

What I'm getting at is people who are way too cutesy, all the time. They call their social group kittens, they speak of themselves in the third person as kittens. NO NO NO you are NOT a small fluffy animal with ickle-wickle ears and cutesy-wutesy whiskers. NO.

[faerierhona.livejournal.com]

that was what my rant was about.... not REAL otherkin, sad idiots

[diffrentcolours]

Wear the fork with pride!

[taimatsu]

Fork? Huh? Explain!

[davefish.livejournal.com]

grahamb's fault entirely.
But its appropriate here.

[stronae.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm sorry to hear it, really. My girlfriend and I have been trying to come up with pet names for each other that are slightly unusual (so, 'sweetie' and 'honey' and such are right out), and she seems to like being called a kitten. :)

[taimatsu]

If you do it in private, you can call her whatever you like :) As long as she doesn't refer to herself in the third person as 'the kitten' or anything like that, I suppose I can let you get away with it ;)

You are granted a Special Exemption by the Taimatsu Language Police. Have a nice day!

[stronae.livejournal.com]

Woohoo! The honour is mine. ::Smile::

[wednesday]

CONCUR.

[taimatsu]

I had a feeling you might ;)

[damerell.livejournal.com]

And, by god, the plural of "neko" is "neko".

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

I am a cat, look. A kitten is not a small feline animal, it's a generic term for anything which manifests good qualities in a similar way to an infant cat. Compare and contrast whether livejournal quizzes are smalll rodents indulging in periodic mass migration.

[taimatsu]

No, John, this is precisely my point. Infant cats are, in this usage, ascribed qualities of cuteness, sweetness, fluffiness, helplessness, smallness, etc. Infant cats in this usage lack attributes of maturity, adulthood, sexuality in the sense of having one, and are considered not to be responsible for their actions.

You are not small; you are not fluffy in any possible sense, either physically or metaphorically; you are not helpless or particularly sweet or overwhelmingly cute in the way a kitten is, though you are not unattractive - your attractiveness is, however, linked to your sexuality, which cutesy-wutesy kittens do not have.

Shall I compare thee to a kitten? Thou'rt basically completely different and the comparison is essentially pointless. You do not manifest good qualities in the same way as an infant cat. Very few people do.

My point is that if you refer to a person as a kitten, you are referring only to wishy-washy cutesy-wutesy aspects of their self, and leaving out anything which makes them an ADULT person, like their sexual drive, their responsibility for their actions, their ability to say no. It's dehumanising and objectifying, and I really dislike it.

You could refer to a baby in this way, perhaps, but not an adult.

In what way do the crowd who go to B-Movie often, and are referred to by some as the Kitten Collective, manifest good qualities in the same way as an infant cat? Go on, tell me.

[j4.livejournal.com]

My point is that if you refer to a person as a kitten, you are referring only to wishy-washy cutesy-wutesy aspects of their self, and leaving out anything which makes them an ADULT person, like their sexual drive

You keep mentioning sex drive as though it's some kind of prerequisite for being an adult. You might want to think about the implications of that.

And on the language front: you'll find it very hard to make a case for any particular aspect of the evolution of language being "wrong" unless you believe that language was handed to us in some kind of perfect form by some external authority/divinity/etc. (If that's the case then, well, you're entitled to your belief, and I suppose your crusade against "bad" language would follow on logically from that, but I'll reserve the right to disagree.)

Language is, to an extent, defined by its usage. Some words and constructions that you quite happily use "correctly" now would have been judged "wrong" 100 years ago -- but the language has evolved since then. Where do you draw the line? When does something stop being "wrong" and become accepted usage?

For example, I bet you call people "stupid" when you don't actually mean that they're dull, lifeless, acting as if in a stupor ... don't you? Jane Austen would have been horrified. English users turned "brid" into "bird" because it was easier to say -- was that wrong? Did everybody have bad spelling before the concept of standardised spelling existed? (And, more importantly, did the lack of standards make the language any less expressive or any less useful? Was Shakespeare a worse writer because of it? What about Spenser? -- Do not attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once.)

I agree with you about excessive fluffiness being irritating, but I don't think it's because they're using a word incorrectly. No, the people who use it are not Actually Really Real Live Juvenile Felines -- big deal. If somebody said that you were "really sweet", would you object on the grounds the word "sweet" refers to one of the different tastes the tongue can distinguish, and is therefore irrelevant to somebody's opinion of you as an adult human being? ... This crusade against metaphor is just tilting at windmills.

[uon.livejournal.com]

You are not a kitten..

No. I am my fucking khakis.

I still can't work out whether or not someone is yelling "I'M A KITTEN" in the Slimelight simulator (http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/10/) that daneel_olivaw posted a while ago.

[ali-in-london.livejournal.com]

I am perfectly aware that I am not a juvenile feline. I don't think anyone in our group actually thinks they are juvenile felines (and so what if they do? See elsewhere for rant).

However, I still will use "kitten" to describe people who are in a certain subsection of my social group.

Why? Because our language is one of the ways that people define groups. We use terms like "herding" and "kitten army", and each of us knows at some level (even though they may roll their eyes at it) that when these terms are being used, we're doing a kind of status check of our group cohesiveness.

Now before you argue that a group that is only held together by the use of the word "kitten" is a very sad group indeed, I'm not saying that it's the only thing that holds the group together. I'm just saying that it's one of the things that gives us a feeling of us-ness.

[taimatsu]

Oh, of course. I'm certainly not denying that a shared use of language holds groups together - what I'm suggesting here is that this particular use of language is an annoying and distasteful one. You could perfectly well have the same feeling of us-ness using a different and less cutesy form of words - it just so happens that you haven't developed it that way.

[karen2205]

I can understand why it annoys you - various things I read all over the place annoy me (poor grammar for one), but if it's really that grating then why do you read it?