It is Sunday evening and I am still woefully unprepared to teach Monday’s classes, so no word this week, sorry. I’ll be back next week!
Instead, for your perusal, here are links to lexicographer Jonathon Green’s slang timelines of words used for penis (that is to say, “nimble-wimble”) and vagina, excuse me, “crinkum-crankum.”
Now I’m thinking of a friend, not a native English speaker, who once told me that the cutest words in the language were “flip-flop” and “tick-tock” and anything else in that category: singsong, ding dong, flimflam, KitKat, hip hop, etc. You can gather a long list. This phenomenon is called ablaut reduplication and I bet there’s a lot more of it in those slang timelines than just “crinkum-crankum.”
Here’s what I read this week in small-r romance:
The Beast of Blackmoor (m/f, both cishet, fantasy, novella) by Milla Vane. I’ve written before about how Milla Vane often writes a seemingly impossible vow/bargain/contract into her books, and this novella has another beautiful iteration of this trope: Mala, a warrior sworn to the goddess Vela, is on a sacred quest to tame the beast of Blackmoor, who (naturally!) turns out to be the man she’s in love with, one who’s sworn he’ll never be tamed. These books continue to be over-the-top 80s barbarian-fantasy-movie fun, and this one has a completely bonkers sex scene in it, which I won’t describe because it’s way more fun if you don’t know what’s coming (ha), and it’s followed by an even more bonkers action scene. Vane has such skill at inventing and describing wild, comic-book-type fights, and I really admire it. Content warnings: rape, murder, violence, gore, slavery, sex.
The Lord I Left (m/f, both cishet, historical) by Scarlett Peckham. I picked this up because Close Reading Romance had such a delightful post about the use of parenthetical statements in this novel, and then it kept me up way past my bedtime. This book has a lot about faith, religion, and spirituality in it, which isn’t a particular draw for me, but damn I love a desperately repressed romance protagonist, and writing an eighteenth-century Methodist is one way to get there. And this book’s heroine has a filthy mouth and a sharp tongue, both of which she puts to excellent use. These two likable characters make an unlikely pair, and they undertake a cross-country trip by carriage in the winter, so you know how that goes. (Has a voyage in fiction ever gone to plan?) Content warnings from the author: “explicit sex; kink and hierophilia (look it up!); feelings of guilt and shame concerning sex; prostitution (both practitioners of and debates about the legality of); parental mortality; toxic families of origin; religious faith, including questioning of and alienation from; allusions to body image issues; and quite a lot of truly despicable cursing.”
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I cannot stop thinking or talking about The Town That Went Feral by Patrick Blanchfield in The New Republic, an article about a New Hampshire town run (dismantled) by libertarians, plus bears!
Pressed by bears from without and internecine conflicts from within, the Free Town Project began to come apart. Caught up in “pitched battles over who was living free, but free in the right way,” the libertarians descended into accusing one another of statism, leaving individuals and groups to do the best (or worst) they could. Some kept feeding the bears, some built traps, others holed up in their homes, and still others went everywhere toting increasingly larger-caliber handguns.
Watch out for bears and libertarians. See you next Sunday!
