YMMV / Sappho

• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Sweet mother, I cannot weave — slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl." is popular among the LGBT community, particularly sapphic women. This is itself a mutation, as the word Sappho uses is paidos, a gender-neutral, grammatically masculine word which definitely does not mean "girl" and is arguably better translated as "youth". Anne Carson makes the case for rendering it as 'boy' in her translation If Not, Winter.
  • "Sappho and her Friend" is often used as shorthand for historians and archeologists turning a blind eye to blatant homosexuality. The original is from a textbook with a painting of Sappho in the throes of passion with what the textbook describes as a "friend".
  • Referring to her husband according to the Suda^note a Byzantine-era encyclopedia, Kerkylas of Andros, as "Dick Allcock from Man Island". This is used among those who question whether Kerkylas even existed, and who believe that he was actually something between a Girlfriend in Canada and The Beard, a fictional male lover with an obviously made-up name, created either as a joke or to give some plausible deniability to her sexual orientation.
  • "Someone will remember us/I say/even in another time." Another of Sappho's surviving fragments; it's unknown what the complete poem said, but the fragment is famous in the LGBT community as a poignant reminder of the many historic queer people whose stories are only now being rediscovered, and the countless more whose stories will never be known.

---