Part IV: I'm affirming? What even does that mean?
Yard signs, slogans, and t-shirts are just words
Over the weekend I watched a WWII spy film. In it, a secretary took dictation from a war official, using a small pocket sized notebook and pencil. Her pencil barely lifted from the page and—despite the droning official’s belabored speech—she didn’t turn the page and start a new one. Of course it’s a movie, she’s probably just scribbling, but those in her position 80 years ago would have been using shorthand—a symbol based “language” used to take notes more quickly by journalists, scientists, and a legion of secretaries to self-important men.
My grandmother knew shorthand and was always writing notes to herself in green lined steno pads. I’m sure they said things like “Pick up milk” or “Don’t forget to drop off dry-cleaning,” but as a child, when my fingers traced the dots, dashes, lines, and squiggles, I was sure it was a secret language only she knew.
It’s a lost art in 2025, but there’s no need for it anymore. Not only can we dictate into our own phones or snap photos of pages we want to remember, we can also stream our messages out to the waiting world in seconds on Instagram or TikTok. No need for the middle-women anymore.
Recently a friend and I had a misunderstanding. I used a word that meant one thing to me and a completely different thing to them. It took them a few weeks to talk to me about it and once in the conversation, it took another thirty minutes before we realized we were using the word in completely different ways and, definitionally (and contextually!), neither one of us was in the wrong or the right, it was just a difference of usage. Tomato, tomato, language is hard, it’s no wonder most of us call the whole thing off.
You say affirming, I say affirming, they say affirming, we all say affirming, but what do any of us actually mean?
This is the fourth part of the series I’m doing on I Changed My Mind on Sexuality. You can read the introduction, Part I, Part II, and Part III.
This series is behind a paywall for many reasons. If you absolutely cannot afford a subscription right now, contact me and I’ll get you sorted. If you can afford a subscription, it’s most economical for you to do a year’s instead of a monthly one ($3.50 a month vs $7). This series may take six months, I’m not sure 😬