Fun fact: Though being gay in the 40s sucked, being gay in the military was easier, and pretty common. There were apparently, at one point in time time so many lesbians in the military that when they tried to crack down on it, the girls wrote back and said âLook I can give you the names, but youâll lose some of your best officers, and half your nurses and secretaries.â And they pretty much shut up about it unless you were especially bad at subtlety. (Source: Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers. A good source for gay history from 1900s onwards.)
Sergeant Phelps worked for General Eisenhower. Four decades after Eisenhower had defeated the Axis powers, Phelps recalled an extraordinary event. One day the general told her, âIâm giving you an order to ferret those lesbians out.â Weâre going to get rid of them.â
âI looked at him and then I looked at his secretary. who was standing next to me, and I said, âWell, sir, if the general pleases, sir, Iâll be happy to do this investigation for you. But you have to know that the first name on the list will be mine.â
âAnd he kind of was taken aback a bit. And then this woman standing next to me said, âSir, if the general pleases, you must be aware that Sergeant Phelpsâs name may be second, but mine will be first.â
âThen I looked at him, and I said, âSir, youâre right. Theyâre lesbians in the WAC battalion. And if the general is prepared to replace all the file clerks, all the section commanders, all of the driversâevery woman in the WAC detachmentâand there were about nine hundred and eighty something of usâthen Iâll be happy to make the list. But I think the general should be aware that among those women are the most highly decorated women in the war. There have been no cases of illegal pregnancies. There have been no cases of AWOL. There have been no cases of misconduct. And as a matter of fact, every six months since weâve been here, sir, the general has awarded us a commendation for meritorious service.â
âAnd he said, âForget the order.â
– The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America
Iâve reblogged this before but it didnât have these comments and HOLY HOT DAMN DID IT NEED THEM.
I donât even know. Itâs from a book about languages my friendâs been reading. (itâs creepy that I can understand it âŠ)
It was actually invented with that purpose: anyone who spoke any European language should be able to understand esperanto. It was meant to be a lingua franca.
STOP WHAT YOUâRE DOING YâALL AND TELL ME IF YOU UNDERSTAND THIS
I,understand about a half of it, I speak some dutch
âWhat Happened? Did your computer catch a virus? Did you suddenly develop BSE [mad cow disease]?â
Between German, English, Latin, a bit of French, Dutch, Spanish and Italian that was actually pretty readable to me.
I speak English and a very little spanish, and I can read it.Â
i grokked everything but a couple words that i could gather from context.
Hi folks! This is actually not Esperanto. Itâs true that Esperanto draws words, syntax, etc. from other languages, but Esperanto would also be much less intelligible. Esperanto was constructed to be a consistent language that would be easy to learn. If you look at the description, this language is called Europanto.
(The way you can tell is that Esperanto has rules for how different parts of speech end: for instance, all the nouns end in -o. Also, Esperanto has a slightly different alphabet from English, and if you look at the alphabet for Europanto, it contains the same letters as the English alphabet.)
For instance, here is the first sentence of the first Harry Potter book in Esperanto:Â
Gesinjoroj Dursli Äe numero kvar, Ligustra Vojo, fieris diri, ke ili estas âperfekte normalaj, multan dankon.â
As you can see, it doesnât look like the passage in the original post, and itâs much more difficult to understand, unless you have the first sentence memorized, in which case itâs pretty simple. Some of the words, like âperfekteâ and ânormalajâ, are similar to English, while others like âestasâ and âdankonâ are ones that English speakers can generally figure out with a vague knowledge of words in foreign languages. However, there isnât nearly the same level of immediate comprehension in Esperanto that there is in Europanto.
That being said, both of these languages are super cool!
I had a dream last night that I discovered that Lin-Manuel Mirandaâs name is short for Benjamin FrankLin-Manuel Miranda, and realized that at some point in the future when he becomes old and time travel is invented, he would travel back in time and BE Benjamin Franklin and introduce people to various innovative ideas, and that all those years he was a diplomat, he would actually be traveling back and forward in time. In the dream, I thought, âThatâs why Benjamin Franklin isnât in Hamilton. He didnât want anyone to realize theyâre the same person.â
