Birthday!

Happiest of birthdays, attolia!

Now that was interesting.

Several years ago, I wrote an essay, The Slash Edge: Why "Queer as Folk" isn't Slashy. It got some mention at the time (whoa - six years ago!) and that was that.

I did an ljseek today, just out of curiousity and boredom, and I discovered that two people whom I have never met, shooting2kill (a Pros fan) and lemurgrrl (an ER fan) have both quoted this essay in the past couple of months - the second quoting from the first.

It's interesting reading what I wrote six years ago - the media landscape has changed, and certain definitions have changed - and I've also realized I wasn't defining "slash" so much as "slashiness", which has a sort of Colbertian shape to it.

I'm amused (although I do wish the first person had linked to the essay instead of quoting it whole.)

To the prom or to prom?

This is driving me nuts - when did this change?

When I was in high school (class of 1981), no one went "to prom" or took someone "to prom". It was always "the prom." You don't take someone to movies, or to restaurant, or to school dance, or even go to senior breakfast.

But in the last two or three years, that's what I'm hearing. Oh, people still say "the prom" as part of the prepositional phrase, but I'm hearing the phrase without the article a lot lately - I'm thinking about last night's Without a Trace, but also Grey's Anatomy last year. Or was it two years ago? Whatever - the one with the prom in the hospital.

When did people start dropping the "the" when it comes to the prom?

Okay. From what I've gathered, it's mostly a regionalism that may have been made more general by the movie Pretty in Pink.