No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

Word of the Day: Chattel

chattel \CHAT-l\, noun:

1. Law. a movable article of personal property.
2. any article of tangible property other than land, buildings, and other things annexed to land.
3. a slave.

“Mr. Price has instructed me to visit with you and make arrangements for a transfer of chattel to the bank sufficient to cover the amount of "—he looked down at his clipboard— "one thousand dollars even.”
– Will Weaver, Red Earth White Earth, 1986

But now! Gervase himself had not seemed a very important part of that triumph a little while ago. He had been a chattel of hers, a piece of property as much her own as her parasol.
– Margaret Oliphant, The Cuckoo in the Nest, 1892

Chattel came to English in the 1400s and shares a root with the word cattle.

Anonymous asked:

I wasn't sure if you had posted this or not, but do you have a story behind how you started shipping G/B actively, like an episode that did it etc? I've notice for a lot of people it seems to be something along the lines of "I was just watching DS9 and then [insert this episode] slapped me in the face and it's name was Garak/Bashir". Then a lot of text yelling and angry tags follow while they reblog/draw/edit/gif them. all your art is awesome btw

Anon, I literally just told the essence of this story to Tinsnip on Saturday while we sat in my car outside a Starbucks, this is quite timely. I hadn’t posted it or said much about it because it happened in weird stages and a lot of them happened on Tumblr. It can feel kind of weird to narrate to people as shit is going down. But it has been a while, so I will tell you! This is Story Time With Lady.

I have, for some reason, a historical hesitation about entering into fandoms. It has become easier over the years, and it isn’t every fandom, but I remember being pretty paralyzed and anxious about posting anything related to Doctor Who back in the day. Some of this, I can attribute to being afraid of what I saw as the harsh judgement of my ex, but some of it was worry that I was not competent enough in general at the things I had to bring to the table - fanart of live action actors and (usually wacky alternate universe) fanfic. And this informs this story somewhat, I suppose.

Back in 2011, my ex-fiancee and I started watching DS9, which is kind of a cute story in and of itself, and we got to Past Prologue’s first scene and had to pause the thing afterward to ask each other if we’d been hallucinating or if that really was the gayest thing we’d ever seen. We were really excited about the gay watermelon Cardassian and thought it was a shame he seemed to be a one-off. We were the opposite of excited about Bashir’s interaction with women, and just as not excited that it was NOT a one-off. So when the episode ‘Cardassians’ rolled out, we both breathed a giant sigh of relief when Bashir had a man to interact with AND it was the gay Cardassian again.

I was pretty much on the good ship G/B from the outset, and it only intensified the more they interacted. Bashir was so, so, so bad at women, but he seemed like a different and totally comfortable man around this really fucking weird Cardassian that was always making eyes at him. But, I was trying to avoid looking like I loved something too much in front of my ex for reasons even I don’t really understand, so I sort of kept it restrained. Plus, even then, I knew that DS9 was not the Star Trek that was favored and well-loved, so I figured there would be no fandom to even look at what I might make. And I know it sounds sort of shitty, but I was really not looking to put a ton of effort into something that was not going to worth the time I’d put into writing or drawing.

Still, I fucking loved these people and I loved this show and I loved having someone to share it with.

And then my fiancee suddenly picked up and left and abandoned me and I had to move back in with my parents.

I think I can say safely that it took me a month to do anything, let alone watch Star Trek. My sketchbook for the time period this happened halts abruptly in November and doesn’t start again until January or February. But when I did pick up DS9 again, it was one of the few things that kept me afloat. I used to just marathon it for it hours while sitting in the bathtub and alternate it with fits of crying or playing Final Fantasy. Unfortunately, I only had a few episodes left from the bunch that I downloaded while still living with my ex and the internet I have with my parents is metered and limited and quota’d and all over terrible.

I blasted through several, I saw The Wire, and part of me was delighted and the other part of me thought the episode tried really hard to kill shipping things and I just didn’t know what to do with it.

I then tried to savor the last few episodes I had downloaded, but it didn’t work super well. One thing I did do, though, was skip the Mirror episodes, because my initial meeting with the mirror verse upset me so much. The characters were too important to me as they were since they’d essentially become my coping mechanism through some bad, bad shit, and seeing the Mirror verse both upset me because they weren’t the characters I loved and bored me because it wasn’t advancing the lives of the characters I loved.

And I skipped Klingon episodes, because ugh, they all feel the same to me.

And, about a year after bad shit had gone down, I almost skipped another episode that had things I didn’t like in it: holosuite-centric adventures, and James Bond.

And then Garak showed up, clapping. In a tux.

I’d certainly shipped it before then, and actually, this episode didn’t make me do it more (it felt like it hurt it in places, even, just like The Wire), but it sort of reminded me.

I found ways to sneak downloads for this show, and a friend sent me all the episodes on burned CDs. (This is still how I have them all. I’d love to buy them when I have a real job again!)

A friend who had gone through a similar trauma with a an ex leaving her stranded heard me waffling about drawing Garak and Bashir and encouraged me to just show her, because she dug them too and we’d watched episodes together and marveled at just how flirty and ridiculous they were.

So I did that.

And for a while, she was the only one who saw anything I made. I was really, really shy about making anything super shippy, I didn’t want anyone to think that was the only reason I was involved. But damn if their relationship didn’t bring me a ton of joy when almost nothing else was. I eventually got sort of brave and instead of just reblogging gifs here, I posted sketch doodles.

And those went over so well that over a few days I stopped being scared of making overtly shippy art and, with a mantra of ‘surprise motherfuckers!’, I was a bit encouraged.

It just kept going from those initial few days. It’ll be a year next month that I’ve been actively involved in G/B as a fandom, but it’s been ages since I’ve even seen the initial episodes that did it. I hardly remember them! I should rewatch them, damn.

Maybe this is not a super interesting story, maybe it is. But thank you for asking, and for the lovely words about my art!

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Word of the Day: Chattel