what a wonderful way to start the year

[theyellowhobbit]

I feel sick. I'm all stuffed up and tired and icky. My mom is also sick, and she might have caught it from me, even though she got sick yesterday while I was in New York. It's only 10:14 and it feels like 12am.

That being said, levana_b's house was awesome. Her dog Shatzi is really cute, and acts like a giant cat. And it was a nice relaxing shabbat where I got to be anti-social, but yet still hang out with levana_b. No cooking involved. Which I guess could be said of my Shabbats in Providence as well, but there's no one my age there.

It's weird, I'm like maybe 2-4 years older than some of the kids, yet I feel closer to the parents, like Dr. Gottesman, and Mrs. Yavner and Mrs. Felder. And they're all in their 40s, so almost my parents age. Maybe because they're also BTs*, while the kids are b'nei BTs*** and thus FFBs**. And there are some things that someone born into that Ultra-Orthodox community wouldn't get. They're nto as worldly people, which is not a bad thing, but it makes them different from me.

Or maybe it's just that I'm in college, and the kids are still in high school. Maybe college really does make you mature. Though I don't feel mature. But at Penn I don't feel there's a huge difference between the people who grew up frum and the people who became frum at Penn. Maybe it's because Modern Orthodox Jews are more assimilated.

I tried a little experiment. levana_b's parents were asking me such things like where I was from, whether or not I went to seminary, etc. And although neither of them grew up frum, I still wanted to see if I could pass off as being an FFB. Though then I asked levana_b, and she said that her mom knew beforehand that I was a BT. Yet it didn't seem like she did. Maybe she didn't remember.

In any case by Saturday I decided I was being silly, after all Mrs. S is a convert and Mr. S. is a BT. And unless I want to lie or be evasive, there's no way for me to pass as an FFB. I don't think that makes me any less frum.


*BT= Baal[at] teshuva. Someone who was not born Orthodox, but became so later in life, or someone who started off religious, became unreligious, and then became religious again.
**FFB= frum from birth. Someone who was born into the orthodox world.
***B'nei BTs= children of BTs.
There is no apostraphe in BTs, or in FFBs. Technically it shouldn't even be written like that, because the plural of ba'al teshuva is ba'alei teshuva, bu I guess they need a way to abbreviate it. But an apostraphe is either possesive or contractive, and BTs is just plural. Kind of like the 1920s or something. People keep on doing that on Beyond BT and it annoys the heck out of me.[/rant]

Comments

[desh]

I'm pretty sure it's standard English, though falling into disuse, to use an apostrophe to pluralize numbers and acronyms/abbreviations. It looks weird, yeah, but it's not technically wrong. I don't think.

[sen-ichi-rei.livejournal.com]

standard as in people do it, but it is wrong. Trust me, I had a teacher senior year of high school who went on quite a rant about it, and made sure none of us ever made that mistake again. Now it bothers me whenever I see it.

[sen-ichi-rei.livejournal.com]

"35 Apostrophes
Apostrophes are mainly used in contractions and to show possession.

Possession by a singular noun: Penelope's suitors showed no sense of the rules of hospitality.

Possession by a plural noun: The suitors' lack of hospitality caused great annoyance.

Contractions: Generally, avoid contractions in formal papers.

Note: Its is the possessive form of it. It's is a contraction for it is. Whose is the possessive form of who. Who's is a contraction for who is.

See page 209 of your Brief English Handbook for other examples."

note nothing about "1920's" or "BT's" :-p

[nuqotw.livejournal.com]

Actually, you're both right.

The older style is as desh describes: for acronyms and numbers (this is the key!) 's is the plural. The modern practice is plain s for plural, 's for possessive. I'm reasonably sure that both are acceptable, but in the case of the high school English teacher, there is an obviously correct choice to make.

The rules for actual nouns however, are as sen_ichi_rei describes them.

[tobeginagain.livejournal.com]

I'm with Desh, as is the Chicago Manual of Style. Numbers can be pluralized with or without apostrophes.

Some more quick googling says that Samford Univerity (??) agress, but maintains that acronyms *should* have apostrophes in their plurals. (Johns Hopkins says acronyms *should not* use apostrophes unless they end in S.)

We've got us a machloket!

[sen-ichi-rei.livejournal.com]

I would trust John Hopkins over "Samford" because J.H. is a well-known school, and Samford is unknown, or it is "Stamford" spelled wrong, which poses its own problems.

[ilana-frombklyn.livejournal.com]

I love that footnote!

[sen-ichi-rei.livejournal.com]

thanks. :)

[yadfothgildloc.livejournal.com]

When your LJ posts are that footnoted, you need to reconsider your audience ;)

[sen-ichi-rei.livejournal.com]

meh. out of the 48 people who have me on their friends list, 45 are either frum, or in a Jewish enough environment to know what BT and FFB mean. I just figured that since I was using these terms endlessly in this post, I should footnote* it. Even though I've used the terms in my previous posts.

If there are things people don't know, they can always comment.

*I also just have a love of footnotes that I can't resally explain. They make papers so much more fun to write. And LJ entries for that matter.

[yadfothgildloc.livejournal.com]

Fair enough.

[prezzey.livejournal.com]

You could definitely pass for FFB! If worst comes to worst and you really can't believe you can, just go to a different country. With different customs, it can get all messed up. There was a girl here from the US last summer (Miou probably remembers her), and I was soooo sure she was BT - and she was FFB! LOL.

[sen-ichi-rei.livejournal.com]

I could if the conversation never went to my past. If we were just talking about Penn or halacha or life, I'd be fine, but the questions about my pre-frum days would result in obvious BT answers. Ex.

FFB: Where did you go to seminary?
Me: I didn't
FFB: Why not?

and then I would have to say that I didn't even know it existed back then. I suppose I could say "it wasn't an option for me," and they could assume my parents were afraid for me to go to Israel [except that I took so many trips] or that they couldn't afford it, or they wanted me to graduate Penn before I was 23, or people in my community don't go.

Or before I had the Anth major:

FFB: What's your major?
Me: Jewish Studies
FFB: Why didn't you go to Stern?

Ummmm... well I guess I could say I didn't like the all-girls environment, but growing up in a "nice Jewish community" I would have had to go to an all-girls school, right? I guess I could say that my parents wanted me to graduate from an Ivy-League school, which is definitely true. But really I didn't know of Stern's existence when I was applying. And I was planning on being a psych major and becoming a Reform rabbi. Though now, I would still stay at Penn, and with the Anthro major there isn't any question, since Stern doesn't have an Anthropology department. Even the Yeshivish community in RI thinks that me becoming an Archaeologist is a good thing. Since I'd be trying to prove that the Torah is true.

By the way, I love that kitty icon. Soooo cute!