Hello, du…hmm. I nearly used the common English word for a member of the family anatidae. Which, it seems, would be wrong, at least according to Anonymous:
Here’s the deal: gay men call people ducks; women do not. Consider it part of the process to remove that word from your vocabulary. Please.
Now, I got defensive when I first read this, but then I thought: hey, maybe Anonymous has a point; I mean, I’ve gotten all sorts of good advice from anonymous folks before, from “Duck!” (oops) to “suck my…”–well maybe that last wasn’t such good advice. But you get the picture.
As I said in my response, I do all kinds of things on this blog I don’t do in regular life, from talking about my vagina to using complex analogies about the kyriarchy. (I do, however, bore folks with feminist analyses of French peri-impressionism.) I’ll confess to adopting Winged Water Fowl as a greeting as part of the quasi-folksy style I affect in the lighter posts hereabouts. At the very least, I figured I might be remembered as that “crazy lady who calls everyone Mallards.”
But I’d hate to slow my process; I’m not sure what that means, but it sure sounds bad! Seeing as it’s a slow day here at TSA (I spent most of it writing a proposal for a–I hope–largish client), I thought I would put it out there for you, du…er, wigeons: should I stop using That Word and call everybody something serious, like Fellow Denizens of the Feminist and Transfeminist blogospheres? I leave it to you!
Unless you consider it a wild goose chase.