What is like, the most lovingly gayest, most devotedly queer bouquet you can possibly think of? I ask for a friend…

It depends on the sort of queer message your going for, whether modern or more referential.  You accidentally (or maybe on purpose) stumbled onto an intense social connection between gay culture and flora.  When homosexuality was largely illegal there were a number of coded flowers used for identification.  They became their own code for identifying each other.  The British coded flowers tend to have a basis in Classical antiquity because of the focus of their education system while American coded flowers tended to be cutesy.

Flowers have a fascinating connection to queer history in the examination of the idea of bisexuality, the fact that many plants have male and female characteristics, the connections to the original drag queen scene, a lot of very complex social themes.  I would suggest reading this article on Flower Symbolism by Philip Knightly who explains it much better.  The matter is complex though as it is part of 19th and 20th century traditions of feminizing homosexual men. 

Green Carnations are associated male homosexuality all the way back to Roman times though is most famously associated with Oscar Wilde.  Violets are another ancient symbol that’s associated with lesbianism all the way back before Sappo.  Calamus is an American coded flower.  There’s also the Ladslove.  Lilies and Daffodils given together are a sign of homosexuality.  Other flowers are the Passion Flower, White Daisies, and Lavender.

For a while the Pansy had associations with homosexuality, but now it has negative connotations, so it may be best to avoid that one.  This may not have been what you were looking for, but the language of flowers has a complicated history for a lot of reasons.

Sorry to bother you but considering the post showing your vast flower language knowledge, i was wondering if you could tell me what flowers to use to say “you are a huge nerd”? know its victorian and stuff but the closest thing you can find will work

Floriography is full of nuance and so since it such a modern phrase I can just offer some suggestions.  You might want to have mossy saxifrage or pear blossoms which both symbolize affections, as a center for the bouquet.

Here are some options for the rest of the bouquet:

Walnut branches: intellect

Plane: genius

Cherry Tree: education

Scarlet Geranium: silliness

Fern: fascination

Shamrock: lightheartedness

smightymcsmighterton:

bigbutterandeggman:

teachingwithcoffee:

It’s time to bring an end to the Rape Anthem Masquerading As Christmas Carol

Hi there! Former English nerd/teacher here. Also a big fan of jazz of the 30s and 40s. 

So. Here’s the thing. Given a cursory glance and applying today’s worldview to the song, yes, you’re right, it absolutely *sounds* like a rape anthem. 

BUT! Let’s look closer! 

“Hey what’s in this drink” was a stock joke at the time, and the punchline was invariably that there’s actually pretty much nothing in the drink, not even a significant amount of alcohol.

See, this woman is staying late, unchaperoned, at a dude’s house. In the 1940’s, that’s the kind of thing Good Girls aren’t supposed to do — and she wants people to think she’s a good girl. The woman in the song says outright, multiple times, that what other people will think of her staying is what she’s really concerned about: “the neighbors might think,” “my maiden aunt’s mind is vicious,” “there’s bound to be talk tomorrow.” But she’s having a really good time, and she wants to stay, and so she is excusing her uncharacteristically bold behavior (either to the guy or to herself) by blaming it on the drink — unaware that the drink is actually really weak, maybe not even alcoholic at all. That’s the joke. That is the standard joke that’s going on when a woman in media from the early-to-mid 20th century says “hey, what’s in this drink?” It is not a joke about how she’s drunk and about to be raped. It’s a joke about how she’s perfectly sober and about to have awesome consensual sex and use the drink for plausible deniability because she’s living in a society where women aren’t supposed to have sexual agency.

Basically, the song only makes sense in the context of a society in which women are expected to reject men’s advances whether they actually want to or not, and therefore it’s normal and expected for a lady’s gentleman companion to pressure her despite her protests, because he knows she would have to say that whether or not she meant it, and if she really wants to stay she won’t be able to justify doing so unless he offers her an excuse other than “I’m staying because I want to.” (That’s the main theme of the man’s lines in the song, suggesting excuses she can use when people ask later why she spent the night at his house: it was so cold out, there were no cabs available, he simply insisted because he was concerned about my safety in such awful weather, it was perfectly innocent and definitely not about sex at all!) In this particular case, he’s pretty clearly right, because the woman has a voice, and she’s using it to give all the culturally-understood signals that she actually does want to stay but can’t say so. She states explicitly that she’s resisting because she’s supposed to, not because she wants to: “I ought to say no no no…” She states explicitly that she’s just putting up a token resistance so she’ll be able to claim later that she did what’s expected of a decent woman in this situation: “at least I’m gonna say that I tried.” And at the end of the song they’re singing together, in harmony, because they’re both on the same page and they have been all along.

So it’s not actually a song about rape – in fact it’s a song about a woman finding a way to exercise sexual agency in a patriarchal society designed to stop her from doing so. But it’s also, at the same time, one of the best illustrations of rape culture that pop culture has ever produced. It’s a song about a society where women aren’t allowed to say yes…which happens to mean it’s also a society where women don’t have a clear and unambiguous way to say no.

The Narrow Line, Chapter Nine

For this special rhyming chapter, Mycroft learns to fear the blade of truth.

Beta by Caroline, fretting by me.

Mycroft had heard
what Sherlock hadn’t said.   I ought to call David right now and let him
hear what the boy’s breathing sounds like.
Wait until Roost hears.

Mycroft looked at
the top of Roost’s head, the sunspot of his hair flaring up above the back of
the arm chair, threads of amber and ruby quills tangled into a puff ball.  The boy had been sitting in the dark all this
time, too upset to trust himself with the fireplace, or perhaps enjoying the
way the dark muted his senses.  He didn’t
bother with the drudging logic puzzle that was the slow addition of
observational data, he simply sieved it in and looked at the shape of the
conclusion.  The weight of Roost’s
stillness.

Roost hummed to himself, the long drawn out
sounds of a violin.

Setting down his
briefcase and coat, Mycroft went to pour a generous two fingers at the sideboard.  The usual machinery of his mind turned into a
fist, clenched solid.  Perhaps he’d been
waiting for something like this.  (He
had.)

He was surprised
there wasn’t a teapot, the Watsons produced an abundance of tea.

“Have you come to excise me from the family
then?” Mycroft asked the wallpaper.

It wouldn’t be
that easy though, not after all the time they’d spent together.  The way Mycroft had tried to make him a
pseudo-Sherlock.  The boy was slier than
that, and kinder.  Kindness, the subtle
sadist’s weapon of choice.  

There was silence
but for the hum of the lamp and the hum of Roost, heels up in the cushion of
the chair, shoes somewhere else.  Mycroft
watched him chew at a cuticle.  He
shouldn’t have said anything.  Wasted
words were a sign of a weak mind.

“If my dad faked
his death it would have been the worst thing in the world.”

Mycroft coughed
while drinking then choked.

Roost’s eyes
flicked to him.

Once Mycroft had
stopped, Roost set one foot on the carpeting.
“It would have been the worst thing in the world if he had faked his
death and left us alone and never came back.”

Breath stopped in
his lungs, Mycroft had the terrifying sensation that he was utterly
transparent.  Gauze thin, fluttering in
the wind and that his unfettered feebleness had been discovered.  That his failure was improbably loud and his
estimate of how bad this could get was woefully inaccurate.

“You were so
angry, so angry you had to hurt someone.”

“Are you going to
tell me what I wanted then?”  Mycroft
snarled, braced his hand on the flat of the sideboard and braced himself like a
barnacle.

Roost’s eyes went
big and soft.  He sniffed.  “Go on then.
If you won’t listen.  Hurt me
then, it’s easy.  I don’t fight back.”

“You don’t control
me.”  Mycroft pointed at him.  “You may have your hooks into everyone else
with those big injured eyes, but you don’t control me.”

Roost just sat
there with his hands curled around his knees.
He just sat there, with those wet eyes.

“Say it, I want
you to,” Mycroft snapped at him.  His
tumbler thumped back onto the board.

“You don’t control
me,” Roost just parroted back, pausing to sniff in the middle.  “You have your hooks into everyone else, but
you don’t control me.”

Mycroft–

Mycroft, he–

Mycroft–

“It’s okay to be
angry and not know what to do.”  Then
Roost stopped, swiped at the moisture coming out of his eyes.  Wiping away tears and saying the opposite of
what he expected.  “You’re just going to
be keep being angry and not knowing what to do until you stop.”

Every possible
outcome, every calculation…  Mycroft was
stuck, stuck, stuck.  Felt something in
his mind, a lever perhaps, or some piston, pushing and pushing but hitting
something first.  Jamming fast.  He was so helpless.  

Roost just sat
there watching him.

“You have to stop
Mycroft.  You have to do something
different.”

“There’s nothing
different to do!  If there was something
different I would have done it.”  He
wished he was Italian.  Italians were
excellent at this kind of thing.  “Can
you even conceive of how smart I am?  Are
you even smart enough to comprehend it?
What it’s like to be the smartest man in the city?  I have to talk to those filthy, abhorrent, slow pigs.  Goldfish!
Bottom feeders!  I have to be nice
to them, to bow and scrape to them.  And
I have you, with the emotional intelligence of a turnip, swanning in here, into
my house to preach to me about forgiveness?”

He stood, he
loomed, he watched the boy drip onto the upholstery.  

“You want to talk
about forgiveness?” he continued, disassociating, feeling himself pull back
from his skin.  “About moving on?  I have to forgive, I have to play nice; I’m
not nice, I’m not forgiving anyone.  The
only reason you want me to be forgiving it to make life more convenient for you
the way you always have.  If anyone
should have special treatment it’s me after having to deal with such imbeciles
every day without starting up a nuclear war and having to go along behind you
cleaning up your messes.”

He let himself
gesture, let his arms slice indignant paths through the air.  “I was the one who had to explain things to
Mummy every time you almost died.  Wading
through crack dens, because the world was too
loud and everyone was too mean.  If anyone should complain it’s me.  I’m the one who deserves the special
treatment.  I’m the one that’s been
suffering.  I’m the one who should have
been chosen.  He should have picked
me!  I don’t have to forgive him,
Sherlock, he ruined my life!”  He
realized what he said far too pull it back in his mouth.

He felt his eyes
widen, he had to stop himself from looking around the room.

There was nowhere
to hide, just what he said and Roost watching him.

“Dad didn’t ruin
your life, you did that by yourself.  You
don’t understand what smart means,” Roost told him.  Dismissed
him.  Held out a piece of paper between
two fingers.

Mycroft took it,
read over it, had to sit down.  The chair
was too stiff for him to slump into, too formal even after years of use.  It was in bullet points, in John’s squarish
handwriting with a few annotations by David.

“John didn’t get
your pissfit one hundred percent correct,” Roost told him.  “He said you’d call them cattle, not pigs
during your little rant.”

Mycroft breathed in
through his nose and then back out again.
“And what, you just read over what John said I’d say and decided to come
over and take the abuse to prove a point?”

“No,” Roost
said.  “I knew you’d be angry and say
dumb stuff you don’t really mean.”

“Don’t I?” Mycroft
asked him, a little dizzy.  “Don’t I mean
it?  I said it.”

“Don’t be
dense.  A wolf in a trap will chew off
his own leg.”

“What is that even
supposed to mean?”

(Mycroft knew
exactly what it was supposed to mean.)

His mind was still
clenched closed, perhaps Roost was here to crack it open.

Roost set his
other foot on the ground.  With his body
stretched out like a proper human being Mycroft could see the muscle he had
been piling on lately.  “If Dad had faked
his death that would be the worst thing in the world.  And you were scared that he had and you
didn’t know what to do.  Because not a
lot of people like you.  You’re mean and
the worst.  Except me.  I like you.
I think you can be a good friend.
And if my dad had hurt me like that.”
Roost stopped to take a deep breath and wipe at his face.  “If he did that then it would have broken my
heart.”

It would have.

“But I don’t need
you, there’s nothing you could do that I need except to be my friend.  So.  So
you called me Sherlock and yelled at me.”
His hands picked at the arm of Mycroft’s armchair.  “So you made Johnny look at a man that looked
like our dad.  I can be your friend and
not have to need you.”

“Can you?”

“Yes.”  Roost sat up, hands clenched until his nails
bit into his palms and his focus tightened.
“It makes me sad that you keep thinking about me like I don’t know what
I’m feeling or doing.  I’m not a child
any more than John is.  It makes me sad
that instead of just trying to be my friend and be good to me you try to make
me do what you want by doing all this complicated brain things to me.”

Mycroft clenched
his hands on his lap.  The boy struggled
enough to talk in a straight line.  He
didn’t want to say anything to disrupt him.

“You don’t have to
fool us to be in our family.  You just have
to want to be.”

“That’s it?”
Mycroft said, not really making an effort to hold back his sarcasm.

When Roost stood
up there was blood under his nails.
“When I was little I didn’t know Davey was my brother.  Genetically.
I didn’t know that.  Only that he
cared about me and wanted me to be safe.
That was all he wanted.  And when
I was older I didn’t know Johnny was my brother, only that he wanted me to not
be lonely.  When things were loud I would
touch his soft baby hair and when I got hurt he would fix me.  My dad wasn’t my real dad, but he picked me
up from school and let me text on his phone and he hugged me.  I told him octopus facts.  I’ve talked a lot.”

Mycroft waited.

He looked at the
crown molding and chewed on his cuticle again.

Mycroft’s internal
clock counted up to five minutes.

“He decided to be
our dad,” Roost finally said.  “He just
decided he loved us and he would take care of us so we could be brothers.  He loved us more than anyone else in the
whole world and he made us happy and safe and real.   Loved us
enough to live for us and to die for us.
You haven’t been that Mycroft.
You haven’t been a house for ghosts and fake people, you haven’t been
somewhere to live while your tenets tore up your floorboards and rattled their
chains.  We tore him up, we made him
chose, and he chose us over everything.”

The boy’s long
body was a bowstring with an arrow drawn back.
Where it would strike was still yet to be seen.

“Grendel hurt him
really bad.  He almost killed him.  He almost made him not exist anymore.”  Roost pressed his fingers over his lips,
whispered through them like the wind.
“But he still came back.  He came
back and gave me a hug and let me hold his hand.  He came back so Davey wouldn’t be alone
during the wedding.”

Mycroft pressed
his own fingers to his lips.

The two of them
stood in the shadow of some great and terrible fairy tale wood in which dwelled
a hulking monster shuffling its way forward.
Its name was truth and it had no mercy for men like Mycroft.  Roost though, Roost was a child of the air.

Roost had no mercy
because being innocent never had known a need for it.  The closest thing to it he knew was kindness,
but kindness was the twin sister of cruelty.
Often they swung the same knife.

(Mycroft could
feel that knife hovering as though through some fine sense.)

There in the
tremble of the air he felt the blade rise up, up, up over him.

Already the vision
of Roost’s set jaw, his bloody nails, his eyes tinged pink from crying pricked
against his chest.  Marked where the
knife would plunge true into his heart.

“I miss my daddy,
Mycroft.”

There was the
blade so guilelessly drawn, so guilelessly driven to the hilt.

“I know what it
means.  I know what I mean,” the boy told him.
When Roost looked at Mycroft again his eyes were very old.  “Don’t ever do something like that to us ever
again.  We won’t let you pretend it was
an accident a second time.  Even Bad
Davey has to follow the rules.  I suggest
you think about what it is you want and how much of a grown up you’re willing
to be to get it.”

The part of
Mycroft that was ruining his life wondered what right Roost had to tell him all
those things.  To make him responsible
for his own actions like this.  To take
an iron bar to the knees of Mycroft’s personal uber mensch.  

The rest of him
just kept playing those words over and over in his head.  That Roost missed his daddy.  The soft way Roost’s mouth dipped down at the
corners.

Mycroft had heard
Sherlock’s silent warning: wait until
Roost hears.

At least the boy
wouldn’t ask him if he wanted to be better.
Wouldn’t force him to take that kind of personal responsibility.  It was enough to make Mycroft accept his agency in his failure as a man or his happiness.  To slice him open and make him look at himself.

Roost nodded at
him, nodded at the bookcases, nodded at the chairs and walked out of the room.

Mycroft needed to
get to work.