My coworkers complain when we can’t assign homework over Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. As if somehow this interferes with their ability to teach their classes.
My coworkers complain that our Muslim students get to leave class to pray Salat at noon. Like, we have maybe one Muslim student every two or three years - thus far, all extraordinarily respectful and lovely kids! - and they slip quietly out of class to pray.
My coworkers find all this infuriating. “Imagine,” they cry, “If a Christian kid asked to do that.”
I calmly explain, every single time, that a Christian kid would never HAVE to do that, because every single Christian holy day is a day off school. Good Friday. Easter Sunday. Christmas day. Our entire country interrupts its financial and educational systems - schedules its WEEKS - around the Christian prayer customs and seasons.
God forbid we temporarily unclip the rope barrier and leave an opening for someone whose religious traditions vary from our own.
i hate writing historical fic because every five sentences you’re googling random shit like “when did billiards become popular in america” & i’ll have you know it was the 1820s
fun fact my pals the word ‘okay’ or ‘O.K.’ (the abbreviation for the old timey spelling of ‘all correct’) was popularized in 1840 by Van Buren’s US presidential election slogan and seeing it in historical fiction before then feels like a little glitch in the matrix, but seeing it in an Old Timey Fantasy setting sends me down the rabbit hole of how a fantasy world language would be brutal to translate, and language in general is a trip, and nothing means anything, probably
I just want to add a correction: O.K. was not an abbreviation for an “old-timey” spelling of “all correct”; it is in fact an abbreviation for an INTENTIONAL MISSPELLING of “all correct.” There was a short-lived period in the 1800s where it became amusing and trendy to flagrantly misspell conversational phrases and then abbreviate them, and “O.K.” is the only one to survive to the present day.
O.K. is an ancient MEME.
