I have always mostly used either context cues or defaulted off of things I already knew, like similar words or words from other languages.
Sometimes you can't though. Every pride I come across flags with identity labels I don't know because they are rare or new. I look them up because that is something I never want to screw up because I could hurt somebody.
Re: watching TV as a family. I was always asking what jokes meant if I didn't get them (We always waited for commercial to talk). It was the '70's so it was usually drugs, politics, or cultural references from before I was born. Or kink. Sometimes it was kink. (Picture my dad explaining foot fetishes to a ten year old). We also discussed things, like themes, symbolism, and biases a lot. Sometimes we analyzed commercials....
We were like that with books, movies, anything really in my house. I remember a long conversation with my mom as a tween about faux feminism in the Betty Davis movie we just watched, for example. Or that time I got Fountainhead out of the library at thirteen with no clue who Ayn rand was. I had a lot of stuff I wanted to discuss, because I saw problems I couldn't articulate and needed help processing.
It was all part of one thing for us, I think.
I also remember going to movies with my lovers in high school and doing what you were doing quietly in movies. It was so easy for me to predict stuff on context cues, narrative logic and the two of them would be like "How do you DO that." It was so obvious it was hard to explain. We'd been discex=ction media for fun my whole life.
no subject
Sometimes you can't though. Every pride I come across flags with identity labels I don't know because they are rare or new. I look them up because that is something I never want to screw up because I could hurt somebody.
Re: watching TV as a family. I was always asking what jokes meant if I didn't get them (We always waited for commercial to talk). It was the '70's so it was usually drugs, politics, or cultural references from before I was born. Or kink. Sometimes it was kink. (Picture my dad explaining foot fetishes to a ten year old). We also discussed things, like themes, symbolism, and biases a lot. Sometimes we analyzed commercials....
We were like that with books, movies, anything really in my house. I remember a long conversation with my mom as a tween about faux feminism in the Betty Davis movie we just watched, for example. Or that time I got Fountainhead out of the library at thirteen with no clue who Ayn rand was. I had a lot of stuff I wanted to discuss, because I saw problems I couldn't articulate and needed help processing.
It was all part of one thing for us, I think.
I also remember going to movies with my lovers in high school and doing what you were doing quietly in movies. It was so easy for me to predict stuff on context cues, narrative logic and the two of them would be like "How do you DO that." It was so obvious it was hard to explain. We'd been discex=ction media for fun my whole life.